Sunday with : Techmeme and Silicon Valley
Sundays are usually “put your hands up time” where I come from. In other words, a time to fess up to your faults. #
So here goes. I have an addiction. A serious addiction. It causes me no end of problems and sweaty-palmed angst. I am addicted to …
Techmeme! #
Like many a tech-oriented internet user, I find Gabe Rivera’s almost-perfect creation irresistible. There are times when it seems to be the centre of the universe, with huge galaxies and bright stars spinning off in vast numbers from this fiery firmament of knowledge and innovation. Heck, Syntagma is quite often in there too.
Okay, I’m exaggerating a bit to get your attention. Because there are also times — increasingly so — when a blanket of gloom settles over me as I trundle through the familiar stories on shiny new applications and hardware which deliver to the user the tiniest smidgeon of improvement over their current expensively-procured setup. And the orgasmic excitement over the tweeniest fall from grace, or the most overblown prediction, has to be experienced to be believed.
I was glad, therefore, to wake up this Sunday morning to a cool blast of common sense by Dave Winer. Spinning off a New York Times article about Silicon Valley, he pens the following :
“The truth is that the people of Silicon Valley toil to find security in money, never getting there, while avoiding the pleasures of life, including the mythological creativity, spinning on a treadmill, doing nothing but striving to make money, but it’s never enough. … You can’t find security through money, because security is impossible. We die. Deal with it.”
The reason that hit home to me is that it’s what I’ve been doing all this year. Pulling back from the mesmeric allure of the “blog network industry” dream which promises that the creation of mediocre content online can produce an eight-figure fortune in a couple of years or so.
I’ve written about my disillusionment on that score many times here, and also on the alternative of simply running a relaxed, quality content business for fun and a decent, regular income. In turn, this creates time to operate in the real world as a hedge play and a grounding exercise.
Either way, Silicon Valley is for obsessives who continue to believe the Faustian deal with venture capital is the path to enduring happiness.
To paraphrase that old IRA man, Gerry Adams : Mephistopheles hasn’t gone away, you know.
Ahh John, so you’re the quintessential “lifestyle entrepreneur” – isn’t it an eye-opener when it finally clicks, you get this new perspective on everything you’re doing and where you’re headed.
And somehow as soon as you come to this realisation you are better at sorting out the mediocre from the quality.
Money is good, but chasing quality is so much more rewarding.
By Martin Neumann on August 5th, 2007 at 11:15 am
The truth is even more nuanced than that, Martin. Before you can operate as a lifestyle entrepreneur, you have to be making good money from your business. So it’s not an either/or. What I’m saying, and I think Dave Winer is saying, is that you reach a point when you settle for what you’ve got.
The idea that you have to be pioneering in order to make progress, begs the question : what if you don’t want to “make progress”, but just want to provide good, quality content that also makes money as a side effect?
Everyone will have a different answer to that, of course. I agree with Dave.
By John Evans on August 5th, 2007 at 11:36 am
I see the lifestyle entrepreneur like this – you can still be driven, you do need to make money but it’s a balance thing. If the “lifestyle” part of you is in alignment then running a business becomes more fun than hard work.
My answer to not wanting to “make progress” but go for quality, where money will/should eventually follow is where I’m at right now. And guess what! It’s working.
I see too many businesses being driven by the endless need to constantly keep growing. This need to turn say, a $50K business into a $100K , then into a $500k then a $1m … $10m, $100m $1000m…
Those are the real (and very few) entrepreneurs. It’s in their nature. I believe the vast majority just want to settle.
I’ve settled on a figure …not telling
Now it’s back to some “lifestyle” where I’m reading the Hemingway Serial opus over a few coffee and nibbles letting my sub-conscious work on my business.
By Martin Neumann on August 11th, 2007 at 4:55 am
I agree, Martin. There has to be a point, even in business, when the effort is balanced by the reward. Of course, conditions change over time, but there’s a big difference between tweaking and updating a business and constantly craving a near-exponential growth curve.
The difference, in my view, is beween a public company, or VC funded one, which needs to grow fast to satisfy the investors, and a private one where you can make your own rules and decide on how success is defined. Then you really are in control.
By John Evans on August 11th, 2007 at 7:07 am