Ajax Girl

I believe that there are really only two questions: Where have we been and where are we going? Lamentably we all know where we have been, as the events of this week have made themselves self-evident to everyone save except those who are willfully ignorant. And I will be the first to admit that I have no clue where we are going and that is possibly the scariest aspect of the times we live in. Anyone who proclaims to know where we are headed, save for perhaps a belief that there are dark times ahead, might as well be proclaiming that he or she knows what the the new new thing of Web 3.0 will be.

So, what can start-ups do right now? Well Ron Conway, Benchmark Capital, and Sequoia have pretty clear ideas, as do any number of bloggers and pundits. But honestly the two most compelling answers to the question, besides staying informed (and for that I highly recommend the Planet Money Podcast), have come from entrepreneurs who I really respect: Tim O’Reilly and Dave McClure. O’Reilly is right to say to would-be and current entrepreneurs to build stuff that people care about. The reason for doing so is because building things that people care about is one and the same with building stuff that people will pay for. While he never says this explicitly, it sounds like O’Reilly wants to see more start-ups like 37Signals, which has hosted solutions for the enterprise space that are freemium, viral, stable, secure, and most importantly, useful. That makes people want to take out their credit cards and pay every month to use the service. Yammer, for all its faults, has this going for it. This is great advice, as too many people drank too much of the advertising supported model punch and started to believe their own hype that they could build platforms and products with no thought of an offering’s use value and value proposition to the consumer.

Dave McClure, of 500Hats fame and an all around stand-up guy, also wrote a great answer to the question of what start-ups can do in the current situation. His answer is to stare all the collective fear, uncertainty, and anxiousness down, while figuring out a real business model and getting back to work. In a way that only Dave can, he debunks the get rich quick myth that many people who live and work in Silicon Valley take as a given. He reminds all of us who are in this business of why we are in it - for a love of technology, for the hard work, and for doing something new, original, and outside of the corporate world. Now that the air is out of the balloon, Dave’s message of hard work is more appropriate than ever. Building the next new horizontal social network is not enough to justify a 10X exit, nor should it have ever been. Too many people believed that Web 2.0 was just a land grab. But, by the time this became clear the first movers already had staked their claims. Now that the hot air has cleared, lets follow Dave’s advise and let necessity be the mother of invention.

So, to all those who are trying to spend the weekend recoiling from the unmitigated disaster that was Wall Street this week, listen to Tim and Dave, and do not be scared to work hard on business plans that actually turn into products and services that companies and individuals will want to pay for. If the offering is good, even in bad times you will find buyers. Perhaps that is where the tech community needs to go.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/Uh26rBAv_3w/