Dave McClure's post today reminded me of Reid Hoffman's talk at Stanford where he mentioned their failure while building SocialNet was trying to do a subscription model and undercapitalizing while their competitors raised 8-10 times as much money as they did and focused on free offerings and growth.

Reid Hoffman's theory of "your strategy has to reflect what your financeability is" explains at least some of the "lazy, ad-happy, Web-Tards with crappy ROI" that happened when the capital markets got frothy and revenue became a bolt-on afterthought secondary to growth. With VC investments the lowest in 12 years its not surprising that the majority of companies are trying to get to profitability earlier than they might have five or six years ago.