Kevin Bedell

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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.” If you enjoyed this post, feel free to subscribes to our rss feeds Agile Development and Sprints: Feature-boxed or Time-boxed?

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