You don’t get investment for just an idea. It’s extremely rare. If you want to be an entrepreneur, stop believing that ideas matter. That isn’t what entrepreneurship is about. Entrepreneurs aren’t idea people, everybody and their brother has ideas. Entrepreneurs are people that exploit ideas by matching them to market needs, executing them despite scarce resources and designing a business model that makes the idea profitable. … If you want to be an entrepreneur, stop waiting. Start doing something. That is how you learn.
[via Business Pundit]
I strongly agree with the notion that everyone can think of an idea and everyone can probably go about developing it as an application as well. But what’s left to chance most of the times is a robust and well planned business model. The economics play a very major role in the implementation of an “idea”.
Well, after some commercial projects and ventures that failed, never took off or were later withdrawn (like www-Bollywood.com 1998, TalentQuery 1999, FreelanceBot 2003 etc., except for eServicesHub 2002 which I later sold to a UK based consultant), I’m all the more excited about 1) thinking out of the box on a new concept, and 2) integrating a streamlined business process with the concept. It was inspiring to listen to Bill Gates recently and read Sabeer Bhatia’ mantra. The vibe is clear – the time for innovative technology hasn’t been better – its the advent of the age for some exciting next-generation solutions. I mean really, Google has been doing some great work, Microsoft has competition in their strategy and vision (which is healthy IMO), the web paradigm is becoming more predominant, fewer IT grads are enrolling but IMO that will change in the next 2-4 years and the job market is heating up (slowly but surely).
I would like to quote something rather interesting which still holds true in today’s time:
Radical new uses of the Internet that none of us can accurately predict today will shape the world as fundamentally in the twenty-first century as the unexpected uses of electricity did in the twentieth century – and even faster.
[Bill Gates (2000), Adopt the Web Lifestyle from Business @ The Speed of Thought]