Founders At Work – A Great Business Read For Tech Heads

June 28th, 2009 businessTags: book review, founders at work, jessica livingston

I finally made time to read Founders at Work: Stories of Startups’ Early Days by Jessica Livingston

Founders At Work Book

Wow! What an interesting and insightful book! It’s just one of those books that you wish you had read when they hit the shelves, and it leaves you with strange but exciting feeling that you could not possibly have gained the knowledge within from any other source.

From The Horses’ Mouth

The book contains candid one-on-one interviews between the author and 32 entrepreneurs, most of whom have built the most successful tech businesses in the world today.

Lessons On Relevance

What struck me is the fact that most of these success stories originally started out with a different business idea from what eventually made them successful. The challenges they faced and their accidental discoveries make you realise that the tech business world could easily have been a different place than what we know and take for granted today.

My favourite stories are from the early days of computing (Lotus, Apple Computer, Adobe Systems, Software Arts, WAIS, and RIM). There isn’t a single interview that I did not find interesting.

The Rocky Road

I was bowled over by the humorous escapades of Paul Graham (Y-Combinator) and Evan Williams* (Blogger.com) – Things went horribly wrong yet these folks kept going even with little or no money.
*Evan Williams sold Blogger.com to Google and went on to co-found twitter.com with Biz Stone

Not many people can claim to have inspired new University programs. These folks can and I recommend this book to anyone in the tech business and everyone who isn’t.

Be warned, once you start reading itll be hard to put this book down

Have you read it yet? What are your thoughts?

Selling Digital Goods Online: Still Worth The Effort?

March 14th, 2009 businessTags: digital retail, free, online software, open-source

With all the free and open-source products circling the web, why should you pay for a product that has a free equivalent for download?

If you put in a little more effort you can even get retail goods without paying a single red cent!

So what’s all this buzz about businesses continuing to sell goods (software, graphics, photos, etc.) online when there is so much free stuff floating around; when their own retail products can be pirated through the thousands of warez sites and p2p file-sharing applications? Why don’t these online businesses just give up already!??

I’ll tell you why. For starters, business people are a strange bunch. They will pursue opportunities that justify profits, and it turns out that a healthy business can result from selling digital goods online.

But how? When I can download an open-source software equivalent or download royalty-free photographs and graphics? Not to mention pirate commercial versions of all of the above?

Let me answer this by using a parallel, real-world example: Premium art. Better still, let’s look at The 500 year-old Mona Lisa. Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you know what it is.

There are thousands of Mona-Lisa replicas floating around (in digital and in printed form). Someone, somewhere even has a full-sized replica with a gold-plated frame hanging on his / her living-room wall.

You can have your own copy too, by simply googling “Mona Lisa” and saving one of the many painting graphics that pop-up in your google search results.

So why won’t you feel content by doing just that?

For starters, it’s because you know that – although it looks exactly like the real thing – it can never give you as much joy as owning the genuine article. Why not break into the Musée du Louvre in Paris and steal it? Are you kidding me?!! ( I fear some numskull somewhere will probably entertain the idea… what would the world be without them, anyway?)

Granted; electronic goods are not as highly valued or as closely guarded as The Mona Lisa but the point I want to make is that human nature will always stay more-or-less the same. It will always measure value in a way that will drive lab technicians to the insane asylum.

Human-nature is the reason we make the choices we do make and it is no different online. It is the reason some people prefer to buy from pharmacies instead of  eying government-issue condoms from public toilets; the  reason some don’t line-up at food shelters simply because the food is free; the reason some prefer a 5-star chef to cooking dinner themselves.

Self-perception, quality, service

These are some of the same real-world reasons that make selling digital goods online still viable. Some people will chase after anything as long as they can get it for free. Some would rather spend money on a good product and save on bargain-hunting time and effort. Some value the service that comes with commercial purchases.

Online and off-line: the buyer of your products is a human-being  with their own peculiar reasons for prowling the market for their item of desire.

And since aliens and dogs are not yet sufficiently trained to operate a web-browser, you can rest assured that human nature has more than enough need for premium online electronic goods. That strange bunch of business people certainly thinks so, and they haven’t been proven wrong yet.