What is wrong with Digital?

Everyone from stock markets, venture capitalists, enterpreneurs,students are so enamored by Digital that it has almost become sacrilegious to say anything against it.

Taking inspiration from John Mayer’s song ‘Say’

“Knowing you’d be better off instead,
If you could only

Say what you need to say….

You’d better know that in the end
Its better to say too much
than never to say what you need to say !”

So here it goes.

1. Digital is not cheap : Inspite of media touting about crashing hardware costs, everything on cloud etc etc, Digital is not cheap. The skills are in short supply , grounded engineers who are multi dimensional and focused on solving business problems are fewer , marketing against the noise takes lot of money and the competition is from every nook and corner of the world.
2. Digital , for its own sake? : Its easy to get occupied with Digital and lose sight of the business impacts, ROI, cost vs return, opportunity costs, bandwidth, alternatives to digital etc. Are you doing Digital for the sake of digital / because of peers, fear of losing out OR do you really have a ‘well thought out strategy’ with fallback options/exit routes and Plan B/C/…. ?
3. Everyone is not FANG ( Facebook, Apple,Netflix,Google) : Temptation to imitate the unicorns of silicon valley is not small but everyone is not FANG. Blind imitation will only lead to disaster.
4. Funding Traps : Every round of funding comes with more dilution, more stringent terms, more loss of control and more unrealistic demands. If you feel like you are riding a tiger, you are probably right. As someone famously said “Venture Capitalists are like hitchhikers with credit cards. They get in your car, and as long as you take them where they want to go, they will help pay for the gas. But if you get lost or wander off the road you promised you were going down, they will hijack the car, throw you out and bring in a new driver.”
5. Timing : It is better to acknowledge that many technologies are in their infancy, not robust enough, do not have wider adoption and yet to make big impacts in the real world. Your play with them is likely to be longer term that needs dollops of patience and perseverance.

Go into Digital with your eyes wide open, being aware of both sides of the coin.