Comments on: Being anti-stealth

By: Keith

Keith — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 02:41:01 +0000

You have to change and change and change again to adjust to the environment, and if you don’t do that, you’ll fail.

Sadly, you may change and change and still fail or become irrelevant. But you have a much better chance of succeeding if you can change. No guarantees in this life.

By: Mathias Brandewinder

Mathias Brandewinder — Fri, 02 Nov 2007 19:50:27 +0000

You will be happy to learn (if you didn't know it yet) that Wired Magazine listed radical transparency as one of the 6 business trends for 07. And you could argue that "2-way talk" is really another manifestation of the same idea...

By: Aleks

Aleks — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 15:11:52 +0000

Awesome post! Now, as much as I respect those who practice anti-stealth, I prefer a more quiet route. But product/market fitting happens in spite of it: we are talking to potential customers early and often, we are thinking of the market needs, of competition. But unless I was writing a book or tried to be the leader of a movement, I’d rather not go public before I’d have a compelling product: too many people look at a new thing only once.

By: Eric

Eric — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 11:20:42 +0000

Part of the reason for articulating the value of anti-stealth is that stealth is the default right now. It would be one thing if a startup considered all of the different factors and said “We’re choosing to be stealth”, but instead they don’t even realize they’re making a choice because anti-stealth is never presented as an alternative. That’s why I think Charlie’s doing a good thing in raising the question of why companies think they have to be stealth.

By: Jopesche

Jopesche — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 05:08:52 +0000

Charlie’s a great guy.

But what makes him great, for his particular brand of great, is that I don’t think Charlie could do ‘stealth mode’ if he wanted to. Hell, this probably *is* him in stealth mode. His strengths are all about networking and connecting, and being in stealth mode doesn’t take advantage of his skills.

It’s like you taking advantage of your ‘compact height’ by putting things you use on the really low shelves around your apartment all the time. You can argue the relative merits of low shelves and high shelves as much as you want, but let’s face it, you’re kind of a high-shelf guy at heart.

I think there are situations and people and research and enterprises and markets where it makes sense to be in stealth mode, and similarly vice versa. Saying one is better than the other just doesn’t seem to have much value to me.