(empo-tuulwey) Why Fred Wilson is wiser than I am

In case you've missed it, I've spent months trying to hammer the phrase "a tool is not a way of life" down everyone's throat...with about as much success as my last attempt to hammer a phrase into the minds of the populace, "Rita Moreno of Arte."

But people are more apt to listen to Fred Wilson than they are to listen to me. And when Fred says events often overtake companies, people listen.

I think less than 20% of the companies we back end up doing what they started out planning on doing. They build something, get it into the market, and then things happen. Often it turns out the market wants something a bit different than they are offering. Or that the users adopt one part of the product and don't use another part very much at all. Or developers start building things on top of the API that opens their eyes to a much bigger opportunity. Or it could simply be that the market loves what they built and they have to spend all their time on scaling and infrastructure and all the things they planned on building go to the back burner.

All you have to do is look at one of Fred's investments, Twitter. They've certainly had to adjust their vision a time or two to respond to user wishes.