Imagine getting 500 e-mail messages per day, receiving 3 lengthy business plans per day, or monitoring five or six companies in an investment portfolio at once. And imagine being concerned about all four of these intense things at once. The scenario is typical for any Silicon Valley VC investor and illustrates why VCs are driven to assess most business opportunities within 30 seconds of their being described. An Executive Summary of two to three pages fits the attention span the venture industry allows potential opportunities. Surely, wider cultural dynamics are also a reason why a business can receive assessment in seconds rather than with due consideration.
Business operates at a pace unlike the pace reading a novel takes.
Business operates at a market pace. An efficient market is brisk and our culture invests a lot in having it that way. Liquidity, the rate at which transactions occur, or the ease at which one can enter and exit a market, is enhanced in good markets. Market pacing has consequences for the dynamics of new business creation. Since it is at the forefront of new business creation, venture funding is especially shaped by market pace, more so than other business funding mechanisms.