True story: My father works in real estate. He’s spent the last fifty years constructing houses, condos, and office buildings. Now in his eighties, with several projects under way, he apparently plans to die in his boots. I tell people he has a building complex.
Ba-dum-bump.
That used to just be a joke about my dad. But then I came to Silicon Valley, and I saw building complexes everywhere. The bad kind!
Everybody is building. They have been told they should by prominent investors. They talk about their new business idea, their product, their team, their startup, their pricing model, and go-to-market strategy. But a very large number of them have no idea whether they are building something people want. Which means they are building too soon.
Dispatches From The Front 