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ciency,” he says. “You want to raise as much capital as you can, but
you have to be extremely careful in how you utilize those resources.”

Keep in mind that committing resources wisely is not the same
thing as minimizing all costs. Once you have chosen the right start-
ing point, you will enable your venture’s growth by making targeted
investments, not by completely avoiding them. Bob Tucker remem-
bers that J.C. Faulkner’s approach to spending money during D1’s
launch was well planned, focused, and confident. “Something that
J.C. did that I believe is an earmark of success: Focus more on what
you want to spend and what you want to spend it for, than on trying
to curb the expense,” he said. “In other words, make the expenditures
well thought-out, prudent, and necessary in support of the business
plan, as opposed to thinking ‘let’s save everything we can.’ That’s
not your objective. Your objective is to enable and support the busi-
ness plan.”

A key factor determining where and how you commit your early-
stage resources will be the pace with which you intend to launch and
grow your venture. The right pace for your particular business will,
in turn, be driven by many factors, including your purpose as an en-
trepreneur (What pace will best align with your personal goals?), the nature
of your market opportunity (How robust is market demand for your offer-
ing?), related competitive forces (Is your window of opportunity narrow
or wide?), and your business model and strategy (What rate of growth will
best position you to create value in proportion to the opportunity? ).

By mid-2010, Mark Williams and his team faced a set of divergent
opportunities for growth. Their research and development efforts con-
tinued to generate potentially game-changing innovations for Apple’s
iPhone and iPad products, as well as enterprise-wide learning solu-
tions for educational institutions, healthcare systems, and large cor-
porations. Focusing on innovation would call for a deep investment
of time and capital with uncertain returns. At the same time, Modal-
ity’s steady investment in its catalog of licensed educational and ref-
erence products for mobile devices had led to a library of nearly 150
products and a reliable revenue stream. The company had also begun
to generate fees for providing digital publishing services for major
publishers. Each of these areas of opportunity brought a unique set

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