128 days ago
A month or so after Paul Graham and company started Y Combinator, that visionary mix of venture capital and summer camp, they took the motto “Make Something People Want.”
Graham talks about this in his April essay, Be Good —
Another thing we tell founders is not to worry too much about the business model, at least at first. Not because making money is unimportant, but because it’s so much easier than building something great.
He goes on to argue that the combination of these ideas — making something people want and not worrying too much about making money — is a working description of a charity. And that the intersection of charity and business is a really interesting one for our times. He sees startups acting like charities and wonders, Would charities work as startups?
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173 days ago
Last spring I attended the NetSquared conference, a competition for nonprofits using the net. The projects were fabulous, with MapLight winning first prize. As part of each project’s pitch, we heard what these organizations, some fledgling, some established, needed.
One item that came up again and again among the projects was “we need a website.”
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200 days ago
A friend’s client wanted to help Ghana. Microlending seemed to be a good way to do it. The client would collect money in the US, and fund small loans to farmers and entrepreneurs in Ghana. The web might even make the first half of this — collecting money and telling the stories of who was helped — easy.
My friend was all set to start writing code. That’s his business, after all.
But did code needed writing? I could think of lots of options for helping Ghana — and finding like-minded people — with sites already on the web.
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