Moe and Kevin Maney catch up to discuss how we succeed by anticipating the future and what that means for our understanding of what makes a company successful.
The Two-Second Advantage
Great entrepreneurs thrive on adversity – they see opportunity where others see challenges; they prefer to live on the edges when their rivals compete in the same arena, and they tend to swing for the fences where most opt to play it safe. In 2009, Tibco founder and CEO Vivek Ranadive knew very little about the game of basketball, let alone the NBA when he decided to study just enough to coach his 12-year daughter’s youth team. They stumbled early, but ended up winning the league championship. His formula – convert the game into a math equation.
In 2010, Ranadive joined Joe Lacob and Peter Guber to buy the Golden State Warriors and immediately started applying his analytical wizardly to develop a social networking app that would bring fans closer to the game and give the Warriors real time data about their every move. His inspiration for Tibco was the simple premise that “a little bit of the right information, just a little bit beforehand – whether it is a couple of seconds, minutes or hours – is more valuable than all the information in the world six month later… This is the two-second advantage.”
Today, Ranadive is the majority owner of the Sacramento Kings and he’s as confident as ever that one of the NBA’s least productive teams will reignite an entire city. Again, it starts with the two-second advantage.