Its very easy to find out a dying company, and you don’t even have to look at the companies balance sheet for that. The product / service speaks out well before it gets reflected on the financial sheet.
One such company that is ageing (with its founder) is Rediff.com. Few signs of ageing shown by it/them are:
1. Senility:
Rediff.com was the first website I visited when I got introduced to the www. The emailing solution has been good and still is, but something that I really loved about the site was the information/news on its homepage.
However, now it’s growing old and the signs are quite apparent. Senility is shown through the pornographic images and snippets displayed each day on its homepage. A company with an experience of over 15 years in internet business could certainly come with a better product to generate more traffic/page views.
2. Tottering:
Is it a portal or a social networking website or a music sharing site or an ecommerce site or….god only knows!
This happens when you don’t know where you want to go and start tottering towards any pasture that looks greener to your blury eyes.
3. Those were the days:
When one believes that the past was more wonderful than present and thus still stick his/her beliefs from the yesteryears.
When was the last time you visited a website (a well known one) and a pop up advertisement is thrown right on your face.
Rediff still does it.
Why can’t they stop that! Aren’t they aware of something called a pop-up blocker. Don’t they know how irritating it gets for users to see a – non-targeted (can live with that) ad thrown to them and that too each time the user visits their homepage; this also means they do not have a cap set on the number of times they would want to frustrate their users.
This happens when the young blood is following the orders of the old mind.
This also brings me to the latest article posted by Alok (https://www.therodinhoods.com/forum/topics/when-founders-take-a-nap).
I believe that founders need to believe in their team and once a while take a good nap. The going will be tough for the new breed, they will commit mistakes, and they will falter and fall. But founders need to stop parenting them. They need to give enough breathing space to them. Their new roles should be to mentor and guide. They have to take a backseat and let the driver make his/her own decisions.
Do let me know your thoughts on this.
