Market Conditions

It's easy to blame your present frustrations on "Market Conditions." By all appearances, times are tough, especially when compared to those good old days of bubble economics. It's gotten so that you don't want to turn on the TV. By now we've all seen Sequoia's October PowerPoint of Doom telling their portfolio companies that the GOOD TIMES were over and to get real (cut down expenses) or go home. It's times like this that you can't help but recall Charles Kettering's famous quote from a speech he gave in the 1930s during the depression to a group of advertising executives, "I believe business will come back when we get some products that people want to buy." Kettering, the inventor of the electric car-starter, founder of Delco and head of GM's research labs to 1947 after he sold Delco to GM in 1916, was one of the leading technologists in the early half of the twentieth century. In the same speech, Keetering also said, "Research is simply to find out what you are going to do when you can't keep on doing what you are doing now." A lot of companies are caught up in the same dilemma. In the past few months, the world has changed --products that made perfect sense 24 months ago may have little relevance today. Other ideas which maybe didn't previously get traction might potentially be big hits. It's time to sort this out and figure out "what people want to buy."