Buy, Lie, and Sell High: How Investors Lost Out on Enron and the Internet Bubble

A Strategy's Limitations

For a start-up, the get-big-fast strategy has its place; there are circumstances in which it makes sense. They have recently been defined with admirable clarity by Thomas Eisenmann of the Harvard Business School in two books.^[35] The appropriate setting for such a strategy is one in which large up-front investments are required, there is the likelihood of network economics (meaning that the customer prefers one provider to several, usually because when all customers are using the same provider, they can communicate with one another—the most dramatic current example is the preference for a Microsoft operating system by most personal computer users—perhaps some people would say today that customers now have little choice), ...