Tag Archives: entrepreneur

It’s the “crazy” ideas that change everything

Imagine if I went to my economics teacher in 1987 and explained any one of these seemingly crazy ideas to them:

  • I’m going to ask a ton of brilliant authors and historians to donate their time, write factual articles, check each other’s work, and not pay them a penny. Afterwards, I’ll offer their work for free.
  • I’m going to have a horde of programmers develop all sorts of programs to make people’s lives easier. Their work will be gratis, and the users don’t have to pay.
  • I’m going to move to Memphis, Tennessee, buy 14 airplanes, and compete with the postal service and charge less to deliver faster.

The teacher would ask me when I hit my head and how hard.

If you haven’t already put it together, the aforementioned ideas lead to Wikipedia, Google, and FedEx. They say hindsight is 20/20, so it’s easy to look back and marvel at the successes of innovative pioneers, but do you think these ideas were so critically acclaimed when pitched at their humble beginnings? read more

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Everyone Is an Entrepreneur

We Are Born Entrepreneurs

Humans are amazing creatures. There is almost nothing that we can’t do, and if we can’t do it, we build ourselves a machine to help us do it, or do it for us (which, of course, is preferable). We couldn’t travel faster than 4 miles an hour, so we built machines to propel us thousands of miles an hour. We couldn’t fly, so we built machines to let us fly. We couldn’t get to the moon, so we built machines to take us there, and we went. read more

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Happy Crowds Are Happy Customers

How To Get Happy Crowds

You don’t need much more evidence than the last year’s numbers from Kickstarter to understand that crowdification is in full swing:

  • 3.3 million people from all over the world pledged on projects
  • There were $529 million in pledges
  • Funding over 22,000 projects

You can see: the crowd is fully engaged. We no longer want to sit back and be told what we get – we want to actively participate in the product creation process. We want to build too. read more

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