Kevin Bedell on Internet Tech » innovation http://www.kbedell.com Discussions on Ruby on Rails, Agile Development and the Boston Tech Scene. Mon, 09 Jan 2012 15:40:56 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.2.1 What’s the Little Idea? http://www.kbedell.com/2010/09/29/startup-vc-angel-debate-little-ideas/ http://www.kbedell.com/2010/09/29/startup-vc-angel-debate-little-ideas/#comments Wed, 29 Sep 2010 13:13:38 +0000 Kevin http://www.kbedell.com/?p=189 I was reading Max Levchin‘s insightful post On Ambition (along with Bijan Sabet‘s response Does a small amount of capital lead to small companies?) and I wanted to add to the conversation.

The central thesis I believe distills to this: “Given the low cost of deploying a new program on the web, does this mean investors are aiming lower in terms of overall innovation?” I think the answer is no. Hell No!

I’m a developer at heart and by trade. I take ideas and bring them to life. I’ve been doing so for years.

Fifteen or Twenty years ago I developed apps on PC’s in my spare time. Partly just to keep my skills current, and partly in the hope I could make something of great value and benefit from it.

The problem then was that distribution was a much tougher nut to crack. You literally had to package the application and sell it per piece to buyers that you had to track down and sell.

Today, I hack web-apps that I deploy in the cloud. It’s the same thing. Part of it is to keep my skills current, part of it is with the hopes of making it big.

The difference is that now my projects and ideas can come alive on the web in an instant. I code, test and commit changes, and less than a minute later my application can be available to anyone in the world. Distribution has been turned on its head.

Now anyone can take a simple idea and build it into a ‘product’. And ‘angels’ are being recruited to put funding behind these pet projects in the hope that the addition of a little capital will propel the ideas to the next step — becoming software assets with real value.

Today, an entirely new scope of business is economically viable: The Little Idea. And Little Ideas are getting mixed in with the bigger opportunities that have always been on the radar of the VC community.

Can Little Ideas become Big Businesses? Absolutely. Never forget that the operating system Linux was initially a pet project of a 22 year-old Finnish graduate student who wanted to run software at home that was the same as he had in the lab at school. Linux is the quintessential Little Idea that changed the world. Hotmail, Google, Twitter and many others are similar examples.

And as Walt Disney once said, “I hope we never lose sight of one fact… that this was all started by a Mouse.”

]]> http://www.kbedell.com/2010/09/29/startup-vc-angel-debate-little-ideas/feed/ 0 The future of programming? To provide the means for creating innovation. http://www.kbedell.com/2009/03/05/the-future-of-programming-to-provide-the-means-for-creating-innovation/ http://www.kbedell.com/2009/03/05/the-future-of-programming-to-provide-the-means-for-creating-innovation/#comments Thu, 05 Mar 2009 11:23:21 +0000 Kevin http://www.kbedell.com/?p=39

I recently ran across an Information Week article called The Future of Programming that forecasts a drop in the demand for programmers along with a drop in their stature withing companies. They described off-shoring and the fall-off of the Internet Boom as reasons for the decline.

I’ve been programming for a long time. Most recently I worked for a company that implemented a new platform for getting student leads to colleges and universities. The platform we built there worked so well that the company was sold after less than three years in existence for over $100 Million.

That doesn’t seem to me to be evidence of the decline in the value of custom-programmed business solutions.

In fact it seems evidence of the opposite — given the speed of business today, being able to implement a new business platform quickly has increasingly greater value. And creating new business platforms is the work of programmers.

Off-shoring can work, but it’s much more risky for a lot of reasons. And some things are much harder to off-shore. More importantly, however, off-shoring a project slows it development pace in almost all cases. To go fast and ‘do it right the first time’, the best bet is to have programmers local and embedded directly in the business.

In the end, there will always be competitive advantage to be had by companies ‘rolling their own’ applications — otherwise you can only get the same features that everyone else has.

And those who embed application developers in the business units so that they understand the business and are long-term members of the business will have an advantage over those who look at programming as a commodity.

For my part, I think that off-shoring in many ways has been a boon since there are many development projects that otherwise would be too expensive to develop.

A great programmer/programming team embedded in a business unit that has the vision to lead an industry will continue to be the source of real innovation for the foreseeable future.

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