By far my favorite topic and he only slightly touched it, and not from the perspective of a founder. He's lucky (I think) that he can just drop money on something exciting and check in to see how it grows.
The growing part is so damn hard. It seems like it boils down to two options:
Do something that:
A) Is profitable but definitely not something you'd do for free.
B) Is something you'd do for free but much less likely to be profitable.
I always struggle with something PG said[1]: "where there's muck, there's brass."
I wonder if PG was wrong or not. It definitely seems like Viaweb was done purely for the money and that the experience was so excruciating that it almost scarred him. He talks about doing another startup like someone who doesn't want to do another tour in a war zone. Yet he seems to have found something (YCombinator) that may turn out to be more profitable than Viaweb and certainly seems much less painful. Mark Cuban doesn't seem to have found his businesses nearly as painful -- yet they don't seem so much more exciting than online stores.
Maybe you only get to do the fun+profitable stuff once you've made it? Or is it just as easy to find something you're deep down passionate about that's also just as likely to be profitable as anything else you can think of?
Most of what I think are my best ideas come from needs I see. I need to solve a problem, so I look around to see if I can pay someone who already solved it. On occasion I find that no one seems to have created a product to solve the problem. A lot of the time it's something I could create myself in weeks or months, which isn't very painful because as soon as my need is met my job is done. The painful part comes when I try to turn that solution into a business. Now I'm spending years solving a problem that was barely interesting for weeks.
Filling needs you see is probably the most commonly recommended way to start a business. But, is it really the best way considering that you have to expect to spend years in the trenches with it?
I actually emailed him my freshman year of college asking him about happiness and what he's going to do now that he has all the money anyone could ever want. He told me (and I'm paraphrasing) that he's just as happy now as he was living in a dumpy apartment living off of happy hour bar food.
I'll never forget it. God I wish I still had my .edu email :(.
Highlight from today's tc50 "Maybe I’m missing something, but that just sounded like the biggest bunch of bullshit I’ve ever heard in my life." Reference below to Imindi.
(http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/09/09/imindi-wants-to-get-ins...)
Just because Mark and Kevin Rose didn't quite follow the long-term vision, it doesn't mean it can't catch on or grow. Hopefully the imindi guys will figure out a better way to present/grow their technology such that people won't have that kind of reaction, but that kind of comment didn't give me any new respect for Mr. Cuban. (I did enjoy the transcript of his one-on-one interview, though.)
I guess I have a lot of dreams like the imindi guys and can empathize with them. I also think there's a lot of long-term value in gathering cross-related/semantic data.
He has a great post up on how the inside of wall street works. And he is qualified to speak - he is on the inside.
"When I die, I want to come back as me." --Mark Cuban
Ill tell you what I learned from Bobby Knight: everybody’s got the will to win but when it comes time to doing something, it’s always about someone else. Not many people have the will to prepare. You got to be willing to know your product and environment better than anybody. No matter what you do there is someone out there trying to kick your ass. You got to be the smartest guy in the room about your product.
