Ejovi Nuwere

Some people have made rational points for why start pages as a business might be worthwhile. I personally don’t like creating a business where I don’t make money. But I was lucky enough to have been first introduced to big business as a teenager at a company that was profitable from day one. The company I worked for at the time helped build most of the dot com companies in Silicon Valley, all of which I watched fail. My intuition tells me that start pages as a business might suffer the same fate given what little information I know about them.

My rational? The one obvious weakness in the companies I helped build (as an engineer) and watched fail was in spending lots of money to build something that didn’t actually make money (usually with the hopes of being bought or IPO). Entrepreneurs are smarter now; they spend time and resources but not money. Yet the fallacy that building a business that doesn’t make money is a good idea, still remains. This could be the beginning of a new internet bubble.

But that is my intuition and the thing about intuition is that it is only limited to our past experiences. Allowing our past experiences to unconsciously influence our thinking. But I’m not a VC. I’ve never funded a company I didn’t start, my experiences are limited. So I could really be off point.

Intuition seems fascinating to me. I haven’t met anyone who has natural business instinct. Every talented business person I met developed their success around either previous experiences or experiences of someone close to them. What this means is that business like anything else can be learned and mastered. A hit producer only knows an artist will be a hit because that artist either sounds like someone else that was a hit, or he understands from experience what the market is looking for. There is no magic to it. It’s learned.

I’ve had some bad experiences that have lead me to more easily identify people I can’t trust. Now when I’m building a relationship, if I see a warning sign I can protect myself. And that’s good right? I’ve had a few failed businesses that have shaped my thinking on what a good company should look like. And that’s good too. But getting to this point of improved intuition in personal relationships and business matters was a very painful process and I’m sure I’m not alone in having been through it. Ask any successful person how many times they have failed? If they say never, that’s not someone you want to model. But that’s just my intuition speaking again, I could be wrong.

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 1st, 2006 at 8:24 pm and is filed under . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.