Each step of conceiving, designing, prototyping, manufacturing, and selling are within reach of just about anyone with a surprisingly small amount of capital. Couple that with bringing in the crowd at any point to help fund or vet ideas and the current situation becomes that much more interesting.
For every hard, unwavering proclamation by a successful business person one can find an equal and opposite rule from an equally successful business person. Just as species evolve to thrive in a particular environment so too do businesses survive and thrive in their ow particular environment in pursuit of their own ends.
Going against sensible practice I am making the prediction that Twitter as a company will ultimately fail to live up to its current expectations — or at the very least, survive as a shell of its former self. Twitter as a concept, however, will succeed. To explain.
Many have listed their reasoning for Twitter’s [...]
If you have plans to start a Communist society, it would behoove you to cap your group at 150 and cut yourself off from the rest of the world, because after that point, it becomes nearly impossibly for everyone to know who everyone else is while also understanding their interrelationships.
When I first quit my job to see what I could do via an entrepreneurial project, I wrote down a set of general guiding principles to follow in running the project. As we have moved towards a knowledge/service based economy (and now connected/globalized/Internet economy) from an industrialized mind-set, work and businesses have been fundamentally [...]
Given that I will be attempting to run this little project while in school, keeping on-going costs as low as possible is key. I will have no physical inventory and will be working almost exclusively online or on the phone. So my goal was to pull together a powerful set of software tools for [...]
Well, I thought I would get an MBA from Duke starting this fall. In the mean time, I will be working on a smaller-scale project: an online design marketplace for laser etching of laptops and ipods. It is a tiny market, fits right in with the above interests, and is within reach of my technical [...]
For a long time I have had an intense interest in:
Social computing/Web 2.0
Crowdsourcing
Great design
Radically open business
The world is flat/outsourcing/the ability for tiny companies to outsource/freelance what in the past only large companies could
Entrepreneurship in general
One day, after following these topics over several years, I was struck by an idea about how I could bring all [...]
