Speed is Life: Street Smart Lessons From the Front Lines of Business - Hardcover

Davis, Bob

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0385501366 ISBN 13: 9780385501361

Publisher: Doubleday Business, 2001

Synopsis

Bob Davis, the founder and former CEO of Lycos, is one of the most successful businessmen of recent times. In five short and exhilarating years, he turned a $2-million investment into a $5.4-billion company, built an audience of 91 million people, and established the Internet's largest global network with a presence in an industry-leading 41 countries.

Speed Is Life is his story from the front lines of business—and his lessons can be applied to every company. He discusses how quickly companies must act in order to seize new opportunities; explains why size is important in a global economy; and highlights the critical importance of creating and extending a company's brand. The lessons he reveals are not narrowly drawn from or intended for Internet managers alone. The fact is, business—whatever business you are in—is first and foremost about making a profit, something he was able to accomplish even in his earliest days at Lycos. The way to do that, from Davis's perspective, is to be great at what you do, to make every moment with a customer a moment of truth, and to build a leading organization by attracting and hiring a world-class team.

But Speed Is Life is much more than a handbook on how to win. Davis also understands the limits of the much-hyped New Economy. And he understands that the future lies in the synergy between traditional companies and their Web counterparts. It is a fascinating first-hand look at the big picture by a man who helped paint it and is this year's must-read business book. Told in the no-nonsense, straight-from-the-hip approach that helped Davis make Lycos an industry dynamo, and illustrated with stories of Lycos's and other companies' successes—and failures—Davis offers an invaluable insider's perspective on how business works and how to stay one step ahead in today's ever more competitive world.

Speed Is Life will grip you, guide you, and inspire you.

About this title

About the Author

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.

From the Back Cover

Advance Praise For Speed Is Life:

"Davis's advice on building customer loyalty in a competitive environment and creating a market-leading organization by hiring the best people is a road map for success in any industry."
—John Chambers, President and CEO of Cisco Systems, Inc.

"Bob Davis is a player in the fastest and most competitive game in commercial history. I am surprised he had time to write this book. You owe it to yourself to take the time to read it."
—Donald R. Keough, Chairman of Allen & Company, Inc.

"A masterwork from an Internet pioneer. This is a must-read for any twenty-first century entrepreneur."
—Thomas Stemberg, Chairman & CEO of Staples, Inc.

"Bob Davis knows how precious—and short—our time is. His depth of passion and conviction makes the ideas in Speed Is Life truly compelling."
—Timothy Forbes, Chief Operating Officer of Forbes magazine

"I wish I'd had Speed Is Life at the beginning of my career. Candid and hard-hitting, it's full of sound advice from one of the most successful generals of the digital economy. Buy it, read it, and most of all, use it."
—Richard J. Egan, Chairman of EMC Corporation

"Bob Davis understands the value of speed, timing, and decisive action in today's digital world. In Speed is Life, he shares his observations, insights and lessons learned based on personal experience. Bob doesn't merely theorize, he offers sound business principles based on results."
—Edgar Bronfman, Jr., Executive Vice Chairman, Vivendi Universal

"Davis is one of the very few who can keep up with the highest speeds of life and still be able to explain it all effectively for all those…[who are] slower."
—Barry Diller, Chairman and CEO, USA Networks, Inc.

"Speed is Life isn't just a playbook for other Internet companies—it's a bible on strategy and tactics for business leaders and managers whatever field they are in."
—Desh Deshpande, Chairman, Sycamore Networks

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

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 Terra Lycos wouldn't be the company it is today. I'll have more to say about the Tripod acquisition later in this book-my point here is that we were able to make the decision the moment it was presented to us.

Speed must be derived not from impulse or swagger but from being ever alert to opportunity and willing to seize it immediately. There is nothing haphazard about speed. A company must log many work hours, some slow and painstaking, in order to be ready to move instantly.

Caveat: We all know the warning "speed kills." It can and will-if not tempered by discipline, determination, and a balanced life. I obviously understand the need for speed in business, but is also important to balance speed with thought, study, research, discussion, or just sitting still. Ironically, sometimes slowing down will get you where you want to go more quickly.

Paul Tagliabue, commissioner of the National Football League, makes a useful distinction between the need to plan slowly and carefully-and execute rapidly. He stepped me through the League's Internet strategy as an example: "If you anticipate the future right and plan for it strategically, you can move quickly, nimbly, and flexibly, but it doesn't have to be off the seat of your pants. Speed to execute something that has been thought out and planned for strategically can be very importent. Our Internet network is an example. We spent about five years planning for it. We built a consensus in about six weeks, then we had to execute an entirely new concept in less than six months. But we succeeded. So speed was critical."

First-mover advantage is critical in every field, from art to science to politics. "Speed matters very much in the world of ideas," Richard Freeland, president of Northeastern University, told me: "Very often the scholar who produces an interesting new idea attracts publicity, comes to embody the idea, and gains tremendous advantages over his or her peers." In other words, even academia is a marketplace of ideas where first-movers win.

But if first-mover advantage is a universal truth, the Web gives it an entirely new business dimension. Companies can instantly spring a new product...

Edition details

• Publisher: Doubleday Business
• Publication date: 2001
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0385501366
• ISBN 13: 9780385501361
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 224