Some may recall or have read that during the dot-com bubble, companies greatly increased their market value by simply adding ".com" to their name. Fear of missing out on the opportunity among inexperienced investors was so great that every founder probably felt an irresistible urge to rebrand.It was like an investment banker buying a Harley and getting tattooed - a little effort to make it look like he was one of the Hell's Angels.
Then, of course, the bubble burst and most pseudo-businesses collapsed. Only a few survived the investment winter, those who had iron discipline in their finances and whose business model offered real value to users, not in the distant future, but there and then. It is hard to imagine life without the internet today, but only those who focused on function rather than form made a fortune.
Every few years a new hot trend emerges - Mobile, Social Web, Cloud Computing, Blockchain, Big Data, etc. There is currently, for example, a rush among investors on AI. So over the next two years, we can expect to see a wave of rebranding and Artificial Intelligence tattooed on corporate bodies in all verticals. Then history will repeat itself as investors flock to the next popular trend. Only a few start-ups will make a breakthrough in AI, and for most large companies, AI will prove not to be a competitive advantage, but only a hygiene norm.
The social pressure in the form of temptations and threats is strong at any given moment. So each founder must decide what is more important to him or her — to appear or to be.
Yours sincerely,
-Alexander
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