It may be a good idea to have a weekly/monthly contest for the best startup pitches, and get some judges to evaluate the ideas/bus plans, and give some sort of award - maybe mentorship, or access to an angel investor or VC or even a seed investment. Something like TC Disrupt but done online.
While this is incredibly embarrassing for Sony, as it exposes gross incompetence, can someone explain why the FBI/law enforcement is not able to shutdown the hackers by filing criminal charges against the owners/operators of lulzsecurity.com, since they are openly admitting that they are behind all of the attacks.
The success of Airbnb and many others like it raises the interesting question - How many other billion dollar ideas, never got off the ground because investors thought they were awful ideas? We may never know. But it should give every entrepreneur something to think about and not be discouraged by rejections. Your idea does not need to be accepted by investors - only by the market! So if you really believe in your idea launch it and see if the market accepts it. If not tweak the parameters till it does. Build a minimum viable product and try to fail cheaply. If it works, investors will come running to you. A good way to look at it is that your startup is like an experiment and your product/service is the hypothesis you are testing. If it fails, your hypotheis is wrong - so change it and try again.
Airbnb joins a long line of startups that became big in spite of initial rejection. In fact, it almost seems that a necessary - though not sufficient condition that your idea maybe the next big thing, is that it is initially rejected by everyone you pitch it to!
Totally agree. Ultimately the only test for your startup idea is market acceptance and resonance - and experience repeatedly shows that no amount of prior experience and knowledge helps in predicting correctly what the next big thing will be. After the fact, it is easy to look back and rationalize and attribute certain factors for all the big successes - but no matter how many times this happens, we always miss the next big thing. Market resonance is very hard to predict - since there are so many parameters for success.
In a startup, most of the time you do not even know what the variables are that can affect the outcome; so you have to guess and hope for the best. The learning comes from examining the outcome and then discovering all the variables you never even knew existed - so you go back and change your hypothesis or product to deal with the new variables. And so it goes...
A startup is like a science experiment because its product design is a hypothesis about its market and its product is the experiment to test that hypothesis. And you the entrepreneur are the scientist conducting an experiment.
I really do not buy the oft repeated maxim that ideas are cheap. I think one reason for this thinking is because unless an idea is converted to an actual product there is no way to tell if it is good. But just because we can't judge whether an idea is good - does not mean ideas are cheap and worthless either. I think this notion was made popular by investors and VCs, and it makes sense in their cases - as they make nothing from mere ideas - only from products that sell. Outside the domain of startups and VCs, ideas are very precious indeed - just ask scientists who work on ideas that can create brand new industries. Quantum physics was just an idea with equations - but we would not have any of modern electronics, lasers, computers or mobile phones. Which brings us to tbe second part of your question - why can't we think of better ones. My theory is that the human brain is wired to perceive what exists and act on it, whereas innovation requires perceving what does not exist and seeing the gaps. It is much harder for the human brain to focus on this. Which is why it is easier to improve upon what already exists than it is to create a brand new product.
While one specific benchmark may not sway your decision on which programming language to use for your own projects, it should certainly be a factor when designing a large web application for hundreds of thousands of users. Unless of course you say that benchmarks are irrelevant and do not measure anything that corresponds to real world performance. But that would be like saying it does not matter whether you use a bicycle, a car, or a jet engine to travel from Point A to Point B, since intrinsic speed of your choice mode of transportation is difficult to measure, and is irrelevant.
Would you be interested in working with me on a couple of Twitter related projects? Currently outsourcing on ODesk, but can definitely consider using you. Let me know!
Elance is a bit harder - since they charge for premium placements to appear in search. Have you tried Odesk, Rentacoder (and a few more sites). Or even Fiverr seriously. The key is not to give up - getting the first job is the hardest, after which you end up usually getting a client, and establishing a profile/trackrecord. I know, we have been on both sides of this (as a contractor/hiring people on our own projects).
There are literally hundreds of ways for someone with programming skills to earn money online - and make more money than hourly wages. Here are just a few to get you started:
1) Setup a profile on Odesk / Elance. Showcase your programming skills and start bidding on projects. There are thousands of eager buyers there. Sure you will be competing with programmers from India/Russia/Phillipines - but you can underbid them all and buyers in the US will hire you - as being in the US and cheaper than offshore programmers will be a huge plus for you.
2) Buy a domain name and build websites using Wordpress/Joomla/Drupal (pick any one), get a domain name for $8.00, use one of thousands of free themes, add some content, RSS feeds, add Google Adsense (all free), drive some traffic using SEO techniques. Then list the site for sale on Flippa, Ebay, Craigslist or any of the other sites to sell stuff. You can easily sell a site for anywhere from $50 to $500. Sell one site for $250 per week = $1000 per month.
3) Setup a site, Sign up for affiliate programs (Commission Juntcion, Linkshare, Amazon ...), Drive traffic and earn affiliate commissions.
4) Market complete websites to small business for under $500 using the technique in (2) above.
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