What survives in 2009

The world seems to be coming apart at the seams as the financial frameworks which underpin our markets and the gushing liquidity that those massively scalable frameworks generated is drying up. The big problem with the liquidity gusher drying up is that a lot of businesses are being revealed to be lousy, over leveraged, low value creation enterprises.

As a startup value creation is an acute concern as you're only as good as the value that you generate. When markets are great, the perception of value can be all it takes to garner customers, funding and hopefully significant revenue. With liquidity drying up conceptual  or "long term" value creation lose their import as your clients may not last for the long term.

So as I think about who survives in 2009-2010, I think it's those businesses whose barometer for success is ROI (Gratuitous Link).Bound up in that equation are concepts like accountability, transparency and real asset value. For the next few years businesses engaged in clear value creation will be the ones that survive, whether they are a startup or a multi-billion dollar international corporation. It's time to slog.