What'll It Take to Get Investor Confidence Back? A CIO on the Board of Every Fortune 500 Company.
Tue, October 01, 2002
CIO — Get a few bucks in the bank and your name in a magazine or two, and solicitations for "angel" investors come at you faster than you can pretend to read them. Another prospectus arrived today, and there’s a lot more wrong with this one than the fact that its covers are too far apart. The gold rush is never over, I guess. It’s kept alive and kicking by rich/bored entrepreneurs who were smart enough to cash out of the dotcom rush early, poor/determined ones who weren’t and the ever-hopefuls who missed the last wave completely.
A few good ideas and lots of bad ones. The worst ideas feature all the untested assumptions (and promise to repeat all the mistakes) that made the dotcom crash so inevitable. The big difference now, of course, is that it’s OK for investors to ask the hard questions without being accused of not "getting it."
My current favorite for fastest way to lose a fortune involves a startup in New England that wants computer-repair technicians to get their parts from unmanned depots, dispensed from what amounts to a vending machine (a very big vending machine). No cost-benefit analysis, no customers, a few hundred loose ends around the logistics?but the hook, the killer app here worth throwing money at, is that the vending machines will call home via the Internet to report inventory. Jeez!
Listening to nonsense like that and watching my investments being ground to a fine powder got me wondering about whether things might have turned out better for the economy and investors had CIOs been more integral in the spending and development decisions made during the past 10 years. And I’m not just talking about technology decisions. I wonder how many bad ideas might never have been funded or how many good ideas might have been rescued from incompetent management or bad execution. Oh sure, CIOs are members of senior management, and a few are even showing up on the boards of high-tech companies, but how many CIOs or ex-CIOs are there on the boards of the Fortune 500? Are there many CIOs among the partners at venture capital firms, or is it always just about the IPO? The answers are: not many, no and yes!
Hang around long enough and it hits you that the notion of progress and innovation as a continuum is nonsense. Time doesn’t flow, it ticks, and between the punctuations of life and process-changing inventions, recycled ideas and gadgets rush in to fill the gap and keep us occupied. For example, Microsoft and the companies that will eventually manufacture the product have set Nov. 7 for the introduction of a device you won’t want to miss?the Tablet PC, billed as a powerful, pen-based computer unfettered by a keyboard. This caps a two-year effort by Microsoft and others to generate excitement about handwriting recognition and digital ink.
