Entrepreneurship 2.0
03 Feb 2006Dave Hornik recently explained to his 8-year old son what his job entailed (Dave’s a VC) and the response was as follows:
A couple nights ago my son came to me with a handful of papers with various designs and announced that he was ready to start his skate brand. After an exhaustive process, he had decided to name his company Ollie King ™, and he was ready to go. I told him that he would have to wait because I was reading to his sister, at which point he stormed up stairs to his mother, ripped up his skate designs, threw them in the trash, and creamed to her “daddy won’t fund my company!” This did not sit well with my wife — apparently, as his father, I have an obligation to fund my son’s skate brand.
from ventureblog.com
The elegant solution to the situation was actually to give the boy a domain name, a blog and set up a Café Press shop with T-shirts, baseball caps and stickers. “User generated content is going to continue to proliferate as the eight year olds of the world create MySpace pages and blogs and skate stores. Who knows what they’ll create when they are nine.”
The “long tail” has made entrepreneurship so much more accessible. Maybe not if you want to start a bank or an airline company, but to set up a small venture for a rock group, youth’s organisation: all you need are (free) tools like these:
- set up a free blog on WordPress.com, Blogspot or .Mac
- host your pictures on Flickr, Pixagogo or 23hq
- print them on posters via Qoop
- host your videos on YouTube, Dailymotion or Google Video
- host your audio files on MySpace
- sell your CDs via CafePress
- create and sell DVD via ?
- create and sell ringtones via ?
- mashup your data with Google Maps
- set up a forum, wki, digg-clone fo your members/customers
- monetize your site with Adsense (if the traffic picks up, that is)
- create apparel like T-shirts and caps with CafePress or Spreadshirt
- if you want to make a steel/plastic prototype of an invention, print it in 3D
What I see is a lot of building blocks, the only tricky thing is to glue them together. So there will be work for people like me to puzzle them together. The future’s bright.
Technorati: vc – enterprise – entrepreneurship
