Slow Earnings: Ben Littauer

Welcome back to Slow Earnings.

It takes time, repeated errors, and skin in the game to internalize lessons. This is a place to highlight those learnings and discuss missed opportunities, botched deals, and outcomes investors can now see clearly.

This week we’re with Ben Littauer. He’s a veteran angel investor, currently an active member of Walnut Associates and Boston Harbor Angels. He has 40+ investments. You can find him on his website, @littweb on Twitter, and LinkedIn.

This is Ben’s story…

The Deal: GoNow developed a cool technology allowing customers to instantly re-program the magnetic stripe on their credit cards by selecting a stored card from a "wallet" on their phone. This would allow the use of these phone wallets to be used with older, non-NFC point-of-sale systems, allowing more rapid adoption of electronic payments.

The Miss: We all recognized this was an interim opportunity since NFC readers would eventually be pervasive. Although, we all believed we had a ten year window before this would come to fruition. Needless to say, adoption of touchless terminals was far faster than we predicted, so the need for the product vanished.

The Learning: As investors, we often see opportunities to fill a gap in a market and we hope said gap is both wide enough and open long enough to extract real value. In this case the gap was time, but in other cases it's been performance, or company size. The fact remains: if there's value, the gap will close. If the gap is based on the notion that technology adoption will be slow, this and other experiences have taught me that one should not bet on that proposition. Tech always seems to move faster than anyone imagines.

Tune in next time for Mike Volpe’s story…