At the Soul of Entreprenuers

I just posted the second half of my interview with Blake Ross, the extraordinary 19-year-old Firefox pioneer, over at the book site.  This follows closely a lunch with his partner Joe Hewitt and a talk on the formation of ICQ with Yossi Vardi. I've been high as a kite from these.  This happens to me when I get around people with entrepreneurial souls.  It has happened like that through a life of working with them.

It dawned on me tonight, that start ups I've known divide into tellers of two stories:

(1) We saw a sustainable economic opportunity, drew up a business plan and raised some capital;

(2) We developed this because we had to.  We wanted something that we could use ourselves and share with our friends and now that we've made it, we need to spread the word to others, so that they can see how cool it is.

The former isn't so bad, and lots of perfectly fine companies get created that way.  But the ones I love--have always loved for over 20 years, are the guts with an idea, a passion and a dream.

Four Israeli kids started ICQ because they wanted to chat online with their friends. Now there's 360 million downloads.  The Firefox guys didn't even think about Microsoft IE when they started.  They just wanted to use a browser that work right.  And now there's 30 nearly 30 million downloads in less than four months, and the world is already changed because of how they did it.

At the beginning of my career, I met a couple of Unixheads name Bill Joy and Andy Bechtlshime, who thought it would be cool to build workstations for engineering friends to use in labs. I've been fortunate in living a life in a place where I can just keep meeting people like that.

They keep me young. The preserve my optimism.

Comments

[Joe Ford]

I think the only viable way to get interest in your idea is to just do the idea. 'Open companies' like Firefox have set a precedent with investors that has raised the bar. You have to at least have a proof of concept, in technology at least, to even get an audience with investors. The worlds going to get tougher but a lot better for it!