One of the better pieces I’ve read competing paths to success. Worth a read, particularly if you’re like me, and come up with a couple of fabulous, worthless ideas a day.
[quote=“Success, and Farming vs. Mining”]
Let’s come up with an analogy and then torture it like we’re the Cheney administration: imagine you’ve just purchased a plot of land. What are you going to do, mine or farm?
If you farm, you’ll have to purchase seed up-front, and work on it for a season before you see any profits. And every season you’ll plow most the profits (literally) back into the land and salaries and your mortgage. You husband the soil to ensure that it’ll keep providing for you for years and years. If you’re lucky, and if you do a good job, you’ll gather a following, sales will increase, and eventually you may make a tidy living. But every season, no matter how rich you get, you’re going to be back out there, breaking your back and working with the soil. When you finally retire, if you’ve done a good job, the soil is as good as when you first got it, and your farm will live on.
Or, you could mine; you’ll need some initial money to lease mining equipment, and to hire some people to work the mine. Then, bam: profit. You’re making money. You tear a giant hole in the ground and eke every last bit of metal out as quickly as possible; there’s nothing to preserve, there’s no soil to keep in condition. You’ll make a big score, then the land will be spent, and you move on, leaving an unusable crater.
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Now, you’ve probably figured out I’m not actually talking about mining or farming: this is a metaphor for running a software company. You can either see founding a company as something you’re doing because you want to produce good software, or you can see it as something you do so you can sell your stock and make a killing and move on.
Maybe it’s obvious that I respect one approach more than the other. In fact, I would say that a big problem with our field is that mining is so glamorized: Not only are we inundated with tales of “Look, Bob Smith made a fortune selling his company after two years, and he’s a bazillionaire!” but if you seek outside investment you are usually required to be a miner: few investors are interested in partnering with someone who is going to retain ownership of his company and just make good products and sell them for a fair price. The very first thing an investor is usually going to ask is, “What’s your exit strategy?”
[…]
The most amazing thing about getting to go to TED was discovering that all the people I admire are farmers. The doctors and DNA-researchers and dancers and chocolate-makers and oceanographers and cosmologists and investors all have one thing in common: they are total nerds. They work on the thing they love literally all the time. You can’t talk to them without talking about their passion.
The secret of success turns out to be so incredibly simple: Work your ass off. Really care about what you’re creating, not the fame or fortune you’ll get. You’ll succeed.[/quote]It goes on (and on) like that. Good read.