Speed Is Life: Street Smart Lessons from the Front Lines of Business - Hardcover

Davis, Bob

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0385501366 ISBN 13: 9780385501361

Verlag: Doubleday, 2001

Inhaltsangabe

The CEO of Lycos shares stories from the front lines of Internet competition while demonstrating how to create a business model that can meet the high-speed demands of today's online economy. 35,000 first printing.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Bob Davis was the founder and CEO of Lycos from its inception in June of 1995, when he completed the fastest IPO in NASDAQ history, through its merger into Terra Lycos in 2001 for over $5.4 billion. He continues to serve as the company's vice chairman while now working as a partner at the venture capital firm of Highland Capital Partners. He appears regularly on CNN, CNBC, BBC, and Bloomberg and has been prominently featured in the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, the Boston Globe, the Washington Post, Financial Times, Forbes, Fortune, Business Week, and other major publications.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Speed has always been my life. As founder and chief executive officer of the first truly global Internet media company, Lycos (now Terra Lycos), I was lucky enough to have been on the front lines of the Internet revolution-a revolution that was powered by technology but driven by speed.

In fact, the story of the Internet has been one that defies conventional business time lines. It took radio 38 years and television 13 years to build audiences of 50 million in the United States. The Internet attracted this critical mass in a mere three and a half years. And the Internet has hardly been operating in a vacuum. Its impact has been felt on virtually every company in the world; it has accelerated the way business is conducted in every industry.

In the five-plus years I ran Lycos, I saw the company move from concept to founding-for a while I was the first and only employee-through its initial public offering, acquisitions, and mergers, and finally through its own purchase by Terra Networks.

We launched the company in April 1995. Just 9 months later, Lycos completed a public offering to become the fastest IPO (initial public offering) in NASDAQ history. Lycos evolved from a Web search engine-a gateway for users on their way to other destinations-into a hub, and from there, a comprehensive network of sites. We moved into Europe in 1996 via an alliance with the German media giant, Bertelsmann, and into Asia the next year. A series of acquisitions broadened our reach into homepage design and construction (Tripod), financial services (Quote.com), and online content (Wired Digital). We expanded into streaming media, music and videos, online shopping, investment information, and interactive entertainment. We broadened our role in Asia, Canada, and Latin America, and spun off our joint venture with Bertelsmann as Lycos Europe, a separate publicly traded business.

The Lycos Network has been described as the world's largest community. In any given month, nearly half of all Internet users-some 91 million people-visit Lycos to conduct searches, construct homepages, chat, look at news, check stocks, download files, or listen to the radio. Worldwide, its 61 million registered users view more than 350 million pages every day.

How did it all happen so quickly? The answer is that technology has taken us into a whole new dimension of time, what some call Internet time. It comes in three speeds: fast, faster, and instant, which means right now. With instant information and transactions, the Internet breaks all time barriers.

Brevity rules. On the Internet very little lasts, whether good or bad, and the wheel is being continually reinvented. Look at human communication. The Internet has quickly developed its own slang, symbols, and shorthand. Does anyone remember what writing a thank-you note with a fountain pen was like? Now imagine that same note sent as an instant message. Not only the form, but the content will be different. Less thoughtful? Perhaps. More direct and immediate? absolutely.

In this rapid new world, almost instant innovation is essential. For CEOs and managers leading the charge, this can be trying stuff. Like her counterparts at other big companies, Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina is probably more exhilarated than exhausted, but it's a close call. At a recent work force gathering, one H-P employee asked her, "What keeps you up at night?" Her answer: "Time. Because time, I believe, is not on any of our sides. In today's economy, faster is always better than slower, and sooner is always better than later. Always. Always. Always. That's tough discipline. It also happens to be necessary for survival. In this technology-driven world, the future is now. Seconds tick by and it is too late."

Fiorina is hardly the only chief executive feeling the burn. AOL's Steve Case put it this way in a recent speech: "You know the song, 'What a Difference a Day Makes7' Well, in our business, the song we sing is more like, 'What a Difference a Nanosecond Makes.' "

Is there a limit to all this acceleration? A point where the laws of nature will force things to slow down? Dick Sabot-who was the chairman of Tripod, a homepage-building service, when Lycos bought his company, and who now runs eZiba, a handicrafts e-tailer-doesn't think so. "When we joined Lycos, Internet time was dog years, seven for one human year. That's no longer true. We now speed through our goals at a pace that's double dog years. But a friend of mine thinks we're moving to fruit-fly years-50 generations in one year."

It's not surprising, then, that "speed is life" became a Lycos credo, one of its guiding principles, and a cornerstone of its success.

In 1995, many companies were striving to become search destinations on the Web. Magellan, Point, Open Text, Infoseek and others clamored for market share. Then, in addition to our selves, Excite, Yahoo!, and Infoseek completed successful IPOs within weeks of each other. We became known in the industry as the "Four Horsemen." While the four of us grew, the others, unable to capture funding or the public confidence it brings, simply faded away.

Venture capitalist Dan Nova saw business cycles compressed by years. "When I first started in venture capital," he told me not long ago, "you typically built a new business over a period of three to five years and took it public after five years of growth, development, and investment. But, suddenly, companies were going public almost overnight. In many cases, the old three-year cycle was reduced to a mere three months."

For managers, this new model changes everything. Years ago, Evelyn Wood devised "speed reading," a clever method that enabled managers to soak up long reports in what seemed like minutes. With a tip of the hat to Wood, I've written this chapter to be a "speed leading" course. It isn't intended for inveterate slowpokes who have no interest in what real speed is, except perhaps as a wake up call. It's aimed at high energy, or potential high-energy, employees and managers who appreciate speed and want to know how to exploit it for themselves and their organizations.

My "course" has six basic principles:

1. Be the first mover or very close to it

Amazon.com was the first mover in the e-tailing world of books, and has reaped enormous attention, and market share, as a result. Barnes and Noble was second and became a force by quickly adapting to the Internet demands of speed, ease, and reach. I'm not sure that it matters who was third because the game on that ballfield is over.

Success belongs to those who act first and pay close attention to detail. First movers beat the competition by setting a standard that anyone who follows has to not only match, but surpass.

In the early days, for instance, when Lycos was a search engine, the top contender in the browser market was Netscape. We attracted traffic to our site because we were accessible through a search button on Netscape's Web page. Many of our competitors had relationships with Netscape, but through hard work, perseverance, and a bit of luck, we won that coveted search button on their page. Suddenly, we leapt to the head of the pack.

A year later, we never would have nabbed that spot-too many companies were competing for it. We strengthened our brand by being first, which made Netscape want to renew our contract, and the process became cyclical. We were good because we were first, and we were first because we were good.

On December 30, 1997-the day before New Year's Eve-we were offered the chance to buy the Internet company Tripod. We only had a few minutes to decide and we immediately made an offer. If we hadn't acted quickly, Tripod would probably now be owned by America Online, and...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Doubleday
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2001
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0385501366
• ISBN 13: 9780385501361
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Auflage: 1
• Anzahl der Seiten: 203
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Doubleday; https://knopfdoubleday.com/imprint/doubleday/; ; Attn: Andrea T Sheridan 1745 BROADWAY, 14-1; NEW YORK; NY; 10019; USA
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar