Does anyone still bother to run a business case these days? I genuinely wonder. I have written more business plans than I care to remember, and with the benefit of hindsight I can identify my most egregious mistake in every single one of them: I insisted on realism instead of hype.
I did the boring things. I looked at market positioning instead of vibes. I tried to assess development potential rather than extrapolating straight lines into the heavens. I broke down cost stacks, compared them to real alternatives already in the market, and — heresy of heresies — I ran an honest risk analysis. No unicorns. No miracles. Just arithmetic.
A Wall Street VP once told me, after reading one of my plans, that it was the most detailed, most annotated business plan he had ever seen — and he had seen many. He meant it as a compliment. In retrospect, it may as well have been an obituary.
When I look at many of these ventures today, I cannot escape the impression that siphoning off the funds was the only objective that ever mattered. Research appears optional. Cost discipline nonexistent. Market reality treated as an inconvenience to be waved away by narrative. Did anyone actually run the numbers? Did anyone put the cost stack against what customers already have and what they are willing — or able — to pay? Or was the implicit assumption that people will buy it regardless of price because we are all sheep, happily detached from our own financial constraints?But I don’t blame the project promoters. They are doing exactly what the system rewards. I blame the people throwing money at hot air and calling it vision. They deserve what happens next. They lose their shirts. Good.