Geoffrey Moore – Don’t Mix Complex and Simple Business Systems

BIO: Geoffrey Moore is an author, speaker, and advisor who splits his consulting time between start-up companies in the Wildcat Venture Partners portfolio and established high-tech enterprises. STORY: Geoffrey was a venture partner in an investment firm that decided to delve into computer storage. The company, against Geoffrey's advice, decided to expand the project but didn't have enough capacity to get the product to market. LEARNING: Think about a venture portfolio as an exercise in 10-year liquidity. Some things are better suited to incremental change.   “Think realistically about time to liquidity instead of just thinking about dominating the market.”Geoffrey Moore  Guest profilehttps://www.linkedin.com/in/geoffreyamoore/ (Geoffrey Moore) is an author, speaker, and advisor who splits his consulting time between start-up companies in the Wildcat Venture Partners portfolio and established high-tech enterprises. Moore’s life’s work has focused on the market dynamics surrounding disruptive innovations. His first book, https://amzn.to/35H8IyI (Crossing the Chasm), focuses on the challenges start-up companies face transitioning from early adoption to mainstream customers. Worst investment everIn 1998, an investment firm asked Geoffrey to join as a venture partner. To which he agrees. The venture then brought in an excellent professor from a prestigious technical university who had an idea about computer storage. Geoffrey and everyone else thought this was a brilliant idea. It turns out implementing the concept was a lot harder than anybody thought. There were just too many variables making it hard to turn the concept into an actual realizable product. But the team believed in the idea, and they pushed on and had early market success. Investors wanted to go big, but Geoffrey thought they should take it slow. They ignored his advice and even changed management and brought in a leading personal computer firm guy. Huge market risks marred the project expansion from the start. The company spent a lot