Tag: Business

The NewCo Five

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Each week NewCo Shift selects the top five stories you can’t miss.

1. Want your business to have an effect on public policy? Lobbying isn’t enough. (Ben W. Heineman, Jr., Harvard Business Review)

2. How Snapchat leveraged disappearing sexts to create the ultimate Trojan Horse. (Ben Thompson, Stratechery)

3. When outsourcing to maximize shareholder value makes no sense (Tim O’Reilly, WTF)

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Growing Up Is Hard To Do

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The business story of the decade is one of insurgency: Every sector of our economy has spawned a cohort of software-driven companies “moving fast and breaking things,” “asking for forgiveness, not permission,” and “blitzscaling” their way to “eating the world.” For years we’ve collectively marveled as new kinds of companies have stormed traditional markets, garnering winner-take-all valuations and delivering extraordinary growth in customers, top line revenue, and private valuations.

Image: Facebook

But what happens when the insurgents hit headwinds? In the past year or so, we’ve begun to find out. The unicorn class has had its collective mane shorn. A quick spin through the “unicorn leaderboard” finds a cohort strewn with cautionary tales: Uber’s under continual attack by regulators and increasingly well funded competitors. Square and Box, both of which managed tepid public debuts, have consistently traded below their private valuations. Turn, SnapChat, Dropbox, and many others have been marked down by their largest investors. And of course, there’s the cautionary tale of Zenefits.

While this news has evinced a whiff of schadenfreude throughout the tech press, I think the reckoning is more fundamental in nature. The hardest part of running a company, it turns out, is actually running a company. Put another way: Growth can be bought, but growing up has to be earned.

Take Uber, for example. Once a poster child for a culture of “ask for forgiveness, not permission,” Uber is now taking a more traditional approach to new markets, meeting (and working with) local regulators, hiring seasoned pros, and learning how to play politics just like any other big company. It even gave itself a new grownup “haircut.”

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