Where are the Big Ideas?

It is dramatically apropos to start this post with a quote:

Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking the form of a readiness to die. "He that will lose his life, the same shall save it", is not a piece of mysticism for saints and heroes. It is a piece of everyday advice for sailors or mountaineers. It might be printed in an Alpine guide or a drill book. The paradox is the whole principle of courage, even of quite earthly or quite brutal courage. A man cut off by the sea may save his life if he will risk it on the precipice. He can only get away from death by continually stepping within an inch of it. A soldier surrounded by enemies, if he is to cut his way out, needs to combine a strong desire for living with a strange carelessness about dying. He must not merely cling to live, for then he will be a coward, and will not escape. He must not merely wait for death, for then he will be a suicide, and will not escape. He must seek his life in a spirit of furious indifference to it; he must desire life like water and drink death like wine.

There's something about founding a company; there's some espirit de corps, some fight for your right to party, a little bit of brotherhood, and a few cases of empty used cans of Whoop Ass. There's some inexplicable ecstasy in the trials you go through to make it. Now maybe I've consistently been on the wrong side of this battle; the side where the mountain seems perpetually larger than our ability to climb it, but there is something about making payroll while you're trying to turn the corner with your product/company and your sales cycle is4x longer than your next month's burn.

Now, in my own humble opinion - this factor is completely dependent on the size of your idea. There's a huge difference between building the next telephone and another issue tracking system. Nowadays, we got folks out there doing all kinds of things and many times it seems easy. There's something major lost in the easy that is only built by the difficult. Companies with no product get major VC funding; companies with no profit get sold and have massive IPOs - and many times, we watch this and think we would like to be a part of it.

And I'll be the first to say, heck yeah, I want me some of THAT! But in more thoughtful times, I remember that there is immense value in the journey. We've got enough books and blogs from happy, successful people - who, by the way, are now mostly successful at selling books or getting traffic on their blogs. Now there's a stat I'd like to see on Amazon/Google Analytics - ratio of actual business successes (let's make it trailing 12 month revenues) against books sold/blog ad traffic by author. That would give us a a clear view of who is full of poop. If it's a VC/entrepreneur blog, let's see their ROI for every investment. Outperforming the S&P 500? Uh...

At any rate, everyone is out to get rich off someone else's money. Where are the people who are out there driving to something real? Something significant, something worth building? Here goes... that whole "project that has meaning" thing. I can smell Open Source/University all over this - just because something is shared and free doesn't mean that it's what is needed. Thank goodness we have 7,452 free issue tracking systems - they are steadily making the world a better place! (sarcasm)

Not that I'm against OSS - the point isn't about the open source part, but the software - where is open/shared actually creating software that is having a massive impact? Okay, there are a handful of projects that fit in this category - but as a percentage, what is the noise-to-value ratio of OSS projects that are differentiated in their category and bringing major value? They're looking to be the next big thing, not changing the world.

And we've got more than enough people who are working the cushy dev jobs while their mISV struggles to convert more than .02% of trial users, trying to find a niche where they can get $9.95/month for an advanced issue tracking system specifically for manufacturing applications.

There seems to me to be some shortage of people out there really trying to change the world. There's like some cosmic ethos to "having your own company" which makes everyone all giddy - but if the time to market is greater than 6 months or exceeds the amount of credit card debt I can carry, or burn exceeds the shortest sales cycle, we duck and cover. What's with that? Big ideas take big nads and that's that. Go to the mattresses with Microsoft, Cisco, Oracle, and the other big dawgs and crush 'em. Isn't that what America and capitalism is about? Changing the world for the better...

But alas, we are spent building another social networking engine, this time with VOIP, or podcasts, or mashed up stuff, or feeds from the Weather Channel. And another real estate site or another enterprise BI package... was it Web 2.0 or the iPod or Netflix or something else, and I missed it? Drats! Stupid day job.