Tuesday, October 27, 2009

Foresight and Hindsight

There is a investor who has $1 million to invest in a startup and there are two teams who are looking for this investment.

Leaders of the two teams come to pitch their ideas to this investor.

Now one leader is 23 years old but has a brilliant idea which has never been done earlier and has a lot of potential but risk is there as he doesn't have any market experience.
Another one is a 45 years old with 23 years of industry experience,returns might not be that high but he has a mature head and success of his venture is almost sure.

Who would get the investment?
If answer is first one you live in an economy where talent and foresight is given preference over experience and hindsight.You will find people in there early twenties as CEOs running FaceBooks, Twitters or youtubes.

If answer is second one then you are living in an economy where experience and hindsight is given preference over talent and foresight and you won't find people in there early twenties as CEOs running FaceBooks, Twitters or youtubes.

Talent and foresight tell us what can be done to have a better world? How the future should be? They envision something which just doesn't exist.

Experience and hindsight tell us What should not be done? They tell us about what went wrong when they took that particular step.They prevent us from getting stuck in that trap hole once again.

I suppose its better to prioritize talent and foresight and then when the vision/dream/goal is set in place we should rope in Experience and hindsight so that we don't mess up our vision.

Its better to fund Larry and Sergey first and when they sort of know where they are going, get in Eric Schmidt.

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