Seth Godin makes some pretty good observations, including:
…the more I think about it, the more it seems that pioneers are almost never in it for the money. The smart ones figure out how to take a remarkable innovation and turn it into a living (or a bigger than big payout) but not the other way around. I think the reason is pretty obvious: when you try to make a profit from your innovation, you stop innovating too soon. You take the short payout because it’s too hard to stick around for the later one.
It’s funny, because we’re also not really in it for the money. Or, at least, in our experience, the things that interest us most or are the most interesting often don’t have much at all to do with money. Indeed, money can lead to distraction, to unbalanced priorities and to short-sighted behavior. It’s always nice to have money to support yourself and the people you care about; and it’s of course necessary to feed yourself (since that whole hunter-gathering thing has kind of become illegal) but really, when it comes down to it, we work for creativity, to feed our intellectual curiosities, to connect with other people and to make a difference in the community that we live.
This is the example that we choose to set for ourselves and somehow, yes, as Seth points out, we’ll figure out some way to sustain ourselves doing it.
2 Comments
I totally agree with this observation. My original business plan for O’Reilly was just “interesting work for interesting people,” and even after we figured out a business that was interesting and scalable, we never made money a priority (at least not till the dot com bust, which hit our customers, and thus our business, hard). I’ve always said that money is like gas in the tank — you need it to get where you’re going, but no one thinks that a road trip is a tour of gas stations. We’ve always had as a company goal to create more value than we capture.
So good luck to you in the wonderful goals you set for yourselves here.
Tim, It was very nice to read your words.
The phrase “Web 2.0″ is somewhat disturbing, as we are really in “Web 0.2″, as Tim Berners-Lee originally designed the Web. All the features of user interaction/generated content (and much more) has been planned since the beginning, so while a “paradigm shift” may have occured in usage of/on the Web, we are still far from WEB 1.0.
This “versioning” of The Web must stop! , as it distorts the Semantic Web Roadmap.
I had the false assumption the “Web 2.0″ meme was built around an expensive conference.
After reading your post, I now realize that were it not for O’Reilly being the largest source of documentation for technical information on the Web, it may not have grown to the point it is today. Kudorank points to you.
Now please make Foo camp open.
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