Network: How you, too, can fail to make your fortune
Given even a small opening to fail, I will find it and exploit it to its logical end
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Your support makes all the difference.LAST YEAR, I wrote about how you could get rich by failing 80 per cent of the time. Silicon Valley venture capitalists build an 80 per cent failure rate into their risk equations, and I have yet to meet one who's falling behind on his Lamborghini payments.
But the Valley has done it again. There's an even more outrageous business model taking shape. I love it.
The new model posits that you become a billionaire by giving your stuff away for free. Red Hat, the company that "sells" the free Linux operating system, recently attracted investments from Intel and Netscape. This is an even surer thing for the Chris Gulkers of this world than the get-rich- by-failing-80-per-cent-of the-time model. There was, after all, a one- in-five chance of failing to fail, and I'm perfectly capable of overcoming those odds, thank you very much.
But give it away? Every time? Even I can't miss with this one! And, Lord knows, I've missed 'em before.
You're talking about a guy who launched the world's fourth Web news site in 1994 (and the first one based in a "major" city) - two Stanford kids named Jerry Yang and David Filo listed my site on their school machine - yahoo.stanford.edu. They recently funded the Yahoo Chair of Computer Science at Stanford University to the tune of $400m. I have yet to fund the Gulker Chair, unless you count the $39.95 item I'm sitting on as I type this on my battered Macintosh.
My mentors in HTML were two other kids - Kim Polese and Patrick Naughton. Kim, now CEO and founder of Marimba, was on the cover of Time magazine last year. Patrick was V-P of a Web company called Starwave when Disney bought it for umpteen million. Patrick is probably worth more than the state he lives in.
You're talking about a guy who started a website with personalised news in 1995, and gave it up when only 75 people signed up for the service.
This year, Yahoo, Excite, Lycos and Infoseek are offering personalised Web news as a major feature to tens of millions of users.
In short, I understand failure. I'm extremely successful at failure. Given even a small opening to fail in the midst of overwhelming opportunity, I will find it and exploit it to its logical, disastrous end. Count on it.
So, here is my entire repertoire of intellectual property, offered virtually for free.
Idea 1: Idiots will try to co-opt the Net, or more precisely, the hype surrounding the Net, for personal gain. Everyone must resist these people. They are the logical descendants of the people who sold snake oil and shares in the South Sea Company to our forebears. You will know them by their Themes - they will seek to censor us and otherwise seize control. Remember that the Net sees censorship as damage, and routes around it.
Idea 2: My dog, Cassie, was a really good idea. I drove out to the vanishingly small central California community of Galt to buy her from a breeder. This flies completely in the face of modern e-commerce: I saw the ad in the newspaper, drove two hours down dusty roads, and paid cash. Good ideas can happen well away from the glare of current publicity. In fact, most, if not all, good ideas happen in this space.
Idea 3: Sovereignty - the ability of organisations such as our governments to do things behind closed doors - sucks. People who know they can do things without scrutiny will do awful things: there's no reason to take the time or make the effort to be a good citizen if you think no one will ever know what creepy things you're up to. Just ask Bill Clinton, if you doubt it.
Idea 4: Kitty, the gulker.com cat. I'm a dog person and never thought I'd go for cats until my stepson dropped off this animal when his living arrangement precluded pets. I'm not mush-headed about pets just because I have a website called "kitty cam". See "Idea 2", above.
Idea 5: Extend Net and computer access to every blessed soul we can. Not because computers and geeky stuff are cool but because information skills are the true currency of the emerging world. Kids who have no access to university and all the usual trappings that separate the fortunate from the less-so can do just fine if they get some basic skills and access to the machines and connections.
Idea 6: By far my best idea ever: marry well. My spouse is my best friend, my lover and hell on wheels when it comes to running start-up companies. I intend to retire on the fruits of her efforts, owing to my special talents for failure.
Idea 7: The world is lurching to a new place. We live in times that are going to be as disruptive, and as opportunity-full, as the Industrial Revolution, the end of the feudal system and other epochal events.
Idea 8: Governments that charge outrageous fees for things like the telephone and computing machinery need seriously to rethink things. High taxes may price a nation out of the information age. Politicians, likewise, should consider that a new and wired nation rising will benefit them more than pursuing narrow, negative agendas, no matter how popular those positions may briefly seem. The future is ahead, not behind.
There you go. Intel? Netscape? I'm waiting...
cg@gulker.com
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