| The
other day I was watching an episode of Dr. Phil, helping families
with money problems. Although Dr. Phil is hardly a source of
business insights, he caught my attention with a simple phrase: "You
don't solve money problems with money". Again, he didn't mean
that in a business sense (although some companies on the verge of
Chapter 11 would oppose that sentence), but I would like to make to
a point out of it.
Since we started the goto-Silicon-Valley.com site a month ago,
we talked to several business people in Silicon Valley and everyone
asked the same questions: "How do you make money with the web
site? What's the business case?" Agreed, these questions are
legitimate.
But, most people forget to ask some of the following questions:
What do you envision with this kind of project? Isn't it great to
give people free access to resources?
In January 1999 I was approached by an investment bank to merge
a company that I had founded with three other companies. The idea
was to prepare this conglomerate for an IPO and make us all filthy
rich (so far, so good). After some talks with these investment guys
it became clear that they had no concept at all: the respective
companies were spread all around the country, one company didn't
even know if they had secured the intellectual property of what
they were doing, and so on. Needless to say, the IPO never took
place.
While this experience was driven by a fatal mixture of greed, naivete
and stupidity, I'm glad to have experienced better times: When I
started my first company in 1996, we developed one of the (at that
time) best and finest search engines. We didn't care much about
a business case, simply called UUNET, took our Linux machine and
hooked it up to their network - no questions asked (actually, when
they started asking questions, we moved our computer to Cable &Wireless,
but that's another story). This generosity allowed our company to
get off the ground and succeed.
There is a spiritual principle: create an idea, and the money will
follow. Agreed, this might be a tough principle for someone with
three kids and two mortgages. However, if precedent is any guide,
we have to keep in mind that even hundreds of millions of venture
capital funds cannot buy success.
Think about it: What would have happened, if the World Wide Web
had been invented by a company backed by millions of VC funds? Investors
want an ROI, so they would have protected their invention with patents
and trademarks and let us pay royalties until hell froze over. Wasn't
it better to have the WWW invented without primarily thinking about
big bucks?
I take it the investor's dream is to hold the patent for the Web,
yet this way a spiritual dream came true: hundreds of millions of
people open their browsers every day and use the Web to send emails,
read news, communicate - and do business.
Thus, if you take a look at Goto-Silicon-Valley.com, try to see
the idea behind it. It's about bringing people together. It's about
enabling business. It's about the power of networking.
Markus Hoevener (markus@bloofusion.com) is Chief Visionary of the
Bloofusion Group (www.bloofusion.com),
a company providing search engine visibility and online marketing
services, with offices in Silicon Valley and Santa Cruz.
| 
