Robot Loves Kitten

I’ve been noodling to that: “It’s a bad time to start a company”. It hasn’t been sitting right with me — but then, I have the luxury of not being in the Bay Area, so a boomlet won’t affect me much. Plus, it’s not fair for me to color her argument on the basis that she sold Flickr to Yahoo!

So, I decided this morning that I agree with her, but for very different reasons. It’s a bad time to start a [VC-funded] [Internet] company.

Despite everything you read, definitions have changed. The words “company” and “start” don’t mean what they used to.

An Internet company, especially a Web company, should be a group of friends/colleagues who complement each other. A team that shares some enthusiasm for a particular subject, a goal, and has fun building toward it. Anything and anyone else is dead weight at this point. You can’t make money until you have a great product.

If you’re going to tack on a corporate structure, make it as light as possible, cause it’s not really the point, and won’t be for a while. (You can always change it later. That’s what lawyers are for, after all.)

Taking VC funding is about the same as going public: it’s a big fricking deal and will radically change your little company’s focus. It’s not something to be taken lightly, and if you really need it, you’re in bigger trouble than you probably think.

Putting “VC” in the equation pretty much kills whatever shot you had at building something great. It makes you focus on creating returns for investors, and not on creating a great product.

On the Internet, No One Knows You’re A Dog

My good friend Ted started Dogster by himself. The idea of web pages for dogs is hilarious, and a 100% stupid idea for a business. It doesn’t make any sense, and no sane business person would even consider it.

But he built it anyway, played with it, tweaked it, and steadily attracted users. Soon, he had a community on his hands. He started asking it questions, he learned about it, and he realized that he might actually have a business here.

There’s a lot of advertising in Dogster’s business model right now, but there’s also a lot of other interesting opportunities that the Dogster team is beginning to discover with the help of its community.

What this all means to me is that I think it’s a great time to start an Internet “project”, if you’ve got the skills to pull it off between you and your friends. It doesn’t have to be industrial strength, just get it up and running. You will learn a lot along the way. If you lack skills, get to learning.

Screw the VCs, screw the corporate structures. Screw getting rich. If you can’t get obsessively excited about your product, then what chance do you really have of creating something worthwhile?