

Don't be a Lonely Planet Entrepreneur- startup mythology's death of capitalism - colinplamondon
http://spreadsong.com/dont_be_a_lonely_planet_entrepreneur_startup_mythology_and_the_death_of_capitalism

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timr
Let's torture the metaphor a bit: learning about a city from the other people
in your hostel will probably teach you a lot about nightlife, but it might not
let you discover that the local museum has an amazing permanent collection of
wood-block prints, or that there's an incredible local tour guide who does an
english-language walking tour of historical points starting once a day at 9AM.
Your dorm-mates probably won't get you to the top of Mount Fuji, lost in the
English countryside, or working for board in a private farm in the south of
France.

When you're traveling, the experiences accessible from the Lonely Planet
strategy have the potential to go much deeper than what you can learn from the
guy in the next bunk. That doesn't mean that you want to bury your nose in the
guidebook, but it's probably not a bad idea to use it once in a while, either.

I'm as pessimistic about the Magical Internet Business Model (tm) as the next
guy, but I still recognize that there are businesses that cannot be founded
via bootstrap methods. Thanks to the magic of the cloud, you can now very
quickly and cheaply build social-media-whatzits, sheep-throwing widgets, and
99-cent digital hoo-hahs for the iPhone. But you are not likely to build the
next Amazon or Amgen or PayPal in your bedroom, using Heroku. Your method of
travel strongly influences the places you can go.

~~~
colinplamondon
Great comment. On the metaphor end, while traveling I usually wind up moving
around based on meeting people who live in the country, it usually leads to
some really memorable but non-flashy memories... no Mount Fuji's, but lots of
hole in the wall spots hanging out with great people, off the wall drum
concerts, and more of the day to day experiences of being in another country.

I think the cool part of your comment is the implicit point of timeframe- if
you have less time, your best bet is to make sure you have a great experience
by going the big bang route- making sure you hit the top of Mount Fuji and
making sure you hit the major parts of the country. If you have more time, or
are sure you'll return, you can just kind of fall forward through the travel
experience and see what happens.

Relating it back to business, if you look at Starbucks or Walmart, they
expanded aggressively, but there was a 20 year time-frame there for building
out the business. They had time, they used it to the full for sure, but they
also were able to execute on their long-term plan. I think the whole raise
funding -> one year runway -> sink or swim flow is just an odd way to build a
long-term business.

We started off approaching things from that perspective, it didn't work, and
we fell into our current approach- my viewpoint is completely dictated by my
very limited experience. Our long-term plans are massive in scale, but our
short-term plans are two week ship periods to grow revenue and give us a more
solid base to operate off of.

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jim_klee
the premise seems a stretch.

