My friend Kelly Smith over at Curious Office has blogged about a Financial Times article about the need for flexibility in any endeavor, but certainly any Internet related business. It really is a great article and the FT has some great content, so head on over (free subscription required).
From the FT article:
The quest to develop the internet’s next big thing can be full of unexpected twists and turns. PayPal, the online payments service, started as a way of transmitting payments securely between Palm Pilots. Its founders realised that there was an even bigger opportunity in online payments - and went on to sell the company to Ebay for $1.5bn (£767m).
Flickr, the photo website, grew out of a multiplayer online game being developed by its founders. Game Neverending never saw the light of day, but Flickr went on to be acquired by Yahoo, sparking a wave of interest in “Web 2.0″ sites.
“None of the big internet successes were like that,” he says. “If you want to build a great consumer internet company you have to be willing to try as much as you can, as fast as you can.”
We learned this at Myrio where our business plan changed several times during our early days. The core idea was video delivery using IP and we knew we had to be disruptive.
We originally wanted to deliver video to enterprise customers, but that appeared to be a crowded market and getting more so each day. Companies such as Cisco, RealNetworks, Microsoft, Apple and others were all vying to deliver CEO speeches and enterprise training videos over corporate networks. Dead end for us. So our model changed.
So we endeavored to stream real-time broadcast TV and VOD over IP (IPTV), and we made it work. Much to the surprise of some very big companies (we even used their gear which they believed wouldn’t work).
Once we had it working, we knew we couldn’t waltz into a cable company and say, “Hey, we have a better way to do what you are already doing.” A cable company wouldn’t simply switch to IPTV. We needed to disrupt what cable companies were doing and we needed allies with networks and subscribers. So we took our idea to PacBell. Nada. Sure they had networks and subscribers, but they lacked a key element.
So our business model changed again, and we found allies with subscribers, capital, and an entrepreneurial spirit in the independent telecommunications companies in rural America.
During all of this, our core remained, but our business plan was flexible and we hired excellent people (see earlier post: When Good Isn’t Good Enough) that could execute against a new idea. We also utilized small teams of developers which allowed us to pivot quickly to meet the requirements of each market segment. Again from the article:
[sic] Ooga Labs, a self-funded start-up whose 15 designers and engineers work in two-man teams to develop ideas in parallel. The goal is to churn out as many promising ideas in as short a time as possible.
[sic] “You can shrink the teams down to two people - a designer and an engineer. The smaller you go, the faster it goes.”
Please share your thoughts and ideas.
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