Built to Flip - Where Do You Come Down?

According to Jim Collins and other leading business thinkers, the instinct to create companies that are "flippable" represents a threat to the soul of the new economy. According to some of the most creative thinkers and doers in the world of startups, flippable companies represent an essential component of the innovation engine that drives the new economy.

To explore the arguments in the Built to Last-Built to Flip debate, Fast Company invited five commentators to share their views:

Steve Jurvetson, 32, a managing director of Draper Fisher Jurvetson, says that Built to Flip isn't rampant -- and that the more important game today involves creating companies that can take advantage of the corporate flux that marks the Information Age.

Christina L. Darwall, executive director of the Harvard Business School California Research Center, says that Built to Flip is a fundamental attribute of competition in the new economy -- and that successful business organizations need to be ephemeral.

Gary Sutton, the CEO of @Backup and a veteran of nine companies over a 20-year career, admits that he is a "serial flipper" -- but says that if "sustainability" means remaining static, then he favors Built to Flip as a means of ensuring company vitality.

Janina Pawlowski, cofounder and chairwoman of E-Loan Inc., and Joe Kennedy, president and COO of E-Loan, explain why their company is not built to flip -- and outline the steps that they are taking to turn their organization into an enduring, great company.

Read their comments, read and consider the "Call to Action" that follows -- and then join in the debate. Go to http://fcke.fastcompany.com/giveback/ to endorse the call to action and to share your thoughts.

Steve Jurvetson

Steve Jurvetson, 32, is a managing director of Draper Fisher Jurvetson, based in Redwood City, California. DFJ, one of Silicon Valley's top technology venture-capital firms, has invested in such promising Net startups as Hotmail, Kana Communications Inc., NetZero Inc., and Tumbleweed Communications Corp. Of the firm's new investments over the past five years, 15 have gone public, and 8 were sold pre-IPO.

Before joining the VC world, Jurvetson was an R&D engineer at Hewlett-Packard, a product marketer for both Apple Computer and NeXT Computer, and a management consultant at Bain & Co.

I have to suppress a smirk when I hear people questioning the sustainability of Silicon Valley companies. "Sustainability" has become a sort of code word. It represents a cluster of beliefs: that certain companies are indeed built to flip, that entrepreneurs and venture capitalists are just out to make a quick buck, and that everyone is trying to exploit an arbitrage opportunity.

Sure, flipping happens -- but it's not rampant, and it's not being instigated by venture capitalists. No venture firm that I know of subscribes to a flip strategy. Top-tier firms understand that selling out quickly isn't the way to make big returns. Yes, it's better than a kick in the teeth, but it won't deliver big profits -- at least not the kinds of profits that most top firms are looking for today.

Why? Because Built to Flip is an oxymoron. You can't orchestrate a sale, and savvy entrepreneurs realize that. In his essay, Jim Collins writes that a number of companies -- among them Lotus and Netscape -- were destined to flip. Yet he doesn't really explain why. It's easy, after the fact, to make history seem rational or inevitable. But Jim gives us no metrics that clarify what differentiates a built-to-flip company from a built-to-last company. And that's because most startups are very much alike.

Yes, lots of companies today are being acquired even before they generate any revenue. But if you're starting a company, you can't say, "Hey, I'll do that too." That would be foolish. When a company simply wants to sell itself, it rarely makes the best possible business decisions. For one thing, it doesn't bring on the best possible talent: Why hire a great vice president of engineering who's going to cost you equity, when you can get by with someone who's just adequate? Why dilute your stock if you're going to sell out in a few months?

And if you design a company whose only exit opportunity is acquisition, then you'll undermine your leverage with potential acquirers. The best acquisitions involve targets that have no intention of selling out. Hotmail, one of our big investments, spent five months saying no, no, no to Microsoft. The company's leaders turned down the initial offer -- $120 million in cash -- because it was ridiculously low. In the end, they got $400 million in Microsoft shares; today, those shares are worth $1.2 billion. That wouldn't have happened if Hotmail had been built to flip.