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What will be the future of IT in 10 years?

What will a business plan look like 10 years in the future?

  • In 10 years will people still write out a business plan to satisfy bankers, angel investors, and VCs?  Or will a website rank your chance of success by pulling the following data: 1. Your credit score 2. Your current sales, profit margins, etc via Quickbooks Online 3. Your website traffic from Google Analytics 4. Your influence score from Twitter and Klout 5. The funding environment for startups from VC databases like CB Insight 6. And maybe other data about your management team (experience, education, etc)

  • Answer:

    The first thing to understand is that business plans are NOT written "to satisfy bankers, angels and VCs".  Instead you write one for YOURSELF to use as your own touchstone, guidebook, and focus concentrator as you envision, build, pivot and expand your business. As such, a business plan is NOT a fundraising document, but IS a crucial element of a successful business. (Note, by the way, that a business plan does not need to be 35 pages of dense text: take a look at Aaron Patzer's funding slides for http://Mint.com (available at http://www.slideshare.net/hnshah/mintcom-prelaunch-pitch-deck) which is one of the most comprehensive, intelligent plans I've seen...even though they are in PowerPoint form.) However, you DO need a variety of *other* communications materials to help investors make a case (to themselves and their partners) that your venture is worthy of their investment. I've written before about the various things a smart entrepreneur will have to aid in investor communications (see my answer to ) but let's now go beyond my last point there (a special, investor-focused online web site) to answer this question. The Investor Attraction plan of the future (calling it what it is) will clearly be online, and it will clearly be a living site that is always current. It will also be carefully access-controlled, because while transparency is great, there will always be confidential things you don't want to share with the whole world. Because this is the world of Web 3.0, the plan will be completely integrated with all data that might possibly reflect on the company's investability. As the question suggests, it will have links to all the sources you listed, and a lot more (from your social graph profile to your competitors' Compete metrics to a live sentiment analysis of what your users are saying about you online.) It will combine information YOU provide (your strategy, target customers, etc.), information THIRD PARTIES provide (your public analytics, Klout score, sentiment, etc.) and information the INVESTOR brings to the table (people they know who know you, industry reports and analyses, comparable valuations from their internal databases, etc.) The plan will be truly interactive, allowing you AND your potential investor to play out what-if scenarios with live data, analyzing your pipeline, conversion rates and interactions with strategic partners, combining your SalesForce CRM system, your direct response channels and your marketing analytics. In this connected world of the future, while you are working on your Investor Attraction Plan, the smart investor is working on her Entrepreneur Attraction Plan, where similar tools will help her reach out to YOU and show why she would be the best partner to fund your venture. There, you would be able to check HER references, see her other portfolio companies, leverage her network in filling open positions on your team, and ensure that you can always get her [electronic] signature on the investment and governance documents you invariably need to have signed. Once your investor 'joins the family' by funding your vision, the Investor Attraction plan will expand into a full-featured Investor Relations plan, integrating your investor and board reporting functions, your cap table and option ledger, and coordinating your investors' collaboration in raising your next financing round and/or exit transaction. Best of all, the two worlds will be connected in real time, so that the entrepreneur and the investor can function as a team to support the company, and as individuals outside of that context. In an increasingly accelerating and fluid world, we will find that one entrepreneur's investor is another investor's entrepreneur, and we will each likely play multiple roles with multiple companies. Whether it's called a business plan, an entrepreneur attraction plan or an investor relations web site, the future of smart entrepreneurial funding, on both sides of the table, will rest on a foundation of real-time, transparent, web-facilitated, interactive communications.

David S. Rose at Quora Visit the source

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Although this is my question, after David wrote his great answer I decided to put together a picture of what the business plan of the future might look like.  I uploaded it to Slideshare at http://www.slideshare.net/ExecutivePlan/business-plan-of-the-future As you can see it is a web-based business plan that pulls data from the following sources: Youtube - Elevator Pitch Linkedin - Management Team Klout and Twitter - Your Influence Quickbooks Online - Revenue and Profit Margin Data I think the second page of the business plan which I did not create yet, would take all of the data and information from the first page and put together financial projections and maybe grade the company in terms of chance for success.  Any other ideas?

Adam Hoeksema

Adam I think the question  is why are we waiting to advance to a different form of business planning, collaborating , posting, and pitching when the everyone agree the status quo doesn't work. We have all seen that investors and lenders can’t efficiently process the demand for capital with old paper and template business plans, which reinforces their tendency to go with people they already know. Or more often with no one at all, crippling innovation and the entrepreneurial spirit necessary for an economic recovery. Just because we have the steepest drop in lending since 1942 doesn't’t mean we should be using business planning processes like we still live in 1942. How can we talk about being a leader in  innovation when the everywhere you turn all you see are   business plan products and templates. Its the limitations and arbitrariness of the generally accepted business planning format that is the problem. The generally excepted Business plan is an old out dated model, not only for the entrepreneurs who are trying to plan a business using it, but also the investors and lenders subjected to have to read them, as you stated above. Its not the amount of pages that matter, its giving investors the ability to get to the answers that they care about quickly, and to not have to waste time reading boiler plate information. Worse, many creative, passionate idea people don’t know enough about business to realistically structure their visions, and the people who invest in them don’t know how to properly evaluate the propositions. Business plans themselves are either over-simplified daydreams, or ponderous static tomes built upon dubious suppositions with know due diligence information and are hard to navigate.   David, I could'nt agree with you more, so we did'nt wait 10 years, we reinvented the business plan and built the first cloud based business plan reporting system so entrepreneurs, investors and lenders could have the best chance possible to find each other and work together to launch, fund and grow great companies now when our econmy really needs them to be succesful.

Ruth Hedges

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