Discuss: Exploiting Silicon Valley For Profit (and Maybe Fun)

[Geoff Langdale]

(any resemblance to persons living or dead strictly coincidental, etc. etc.)

http://diegobasch.com/exploiting-silicon-valley

The purpose of this post is to analyze the folowing problem:

Joe Founder comes to Silicon Valley with a laptop full of dreams, but no money. Joe wants to maximize his chances of making a few million dollars in five years. What should Joe do?

First off, let's acknowledge once again that Silicon Valley is a sea of conflicts of interest. You have the Sand Hill Strip, where "reputable" firms like "Palo Alto Grand Investments" or "Burlingamio Ventures" want Joe to invest his body and soul, swing for the fences, hit the ball into the San Francisco Bay and become the next Sergei Zuckerberg. It sounds awesome; the problem is that the chances of this are slim. Joe does not like. 1/100000 odds of making billions of dollars is unappealing.

Still, Joe needs money to make money. He has to pretend to want what VCs want. He learns to spew lines such as "I want to change the world by helping people connect faster. My company is to GooBook what the telegraph was to horses. A quantum leap in virality technology."

...

Entertaining stuff.

Geoff.
 

[drllau]

http://www.crashdev.com/2012/02/traders-vs-makers.html

there was a CrashDev blog a while ago pointing out the difference between builders v traders (what mentality your article refers to).

Lawrence
http://www.linkedin.com/in/drllau