Some of the smartest peo­ple we’ve met work in the infra­struc­ture busi­ness. It’s one of the things that makes work­ing in this space inter­est­ing. But some­times smart peo­ple can act really dumb. For a year we’ve been knock­ing on the door (through e-mail) of the CEO of an infra­struc­ture startup that’s work­ing in an area that we’re very famil­iar with. As you could imag­ine, we’re big advo­cates of research as a key part of build­ing a suc­cess­ful high tech com­pany — we’ve been doing this for nearly 20 years, we’ve writ­ten a book about the role research plays in strate­gic plan­ning — we really believe this. But each time we have reached out to this CEO to pro­vide a lit­tle free advice based on some of the work we’ve been doing he tells us words to the effect — don’t bother me now, come back when we’re suc­cess­ful and we’ll talk then. That’s totally back­wards. Research is some­thing you do to help a busi­ness to suc­ceed. It’s not a veneer that you put on after the fact. We’ve found that there’s no sub­sti­tute for lis­ten­ing to the mar­ket — in today’s world there are few “green­fields” — you’ve got to first fit in and then stand out. And only the mar­ket can tell you what that means.