• Skip to content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer

Foliovision

Main navigation

  • Weblog
    • FV Player
    • WordPress
    • Video of the Week
    • Case Studies
    • Business
  • About
    • Testimonials
    • Meet the Team
    • We Support
    • Careers
    • Contact
    • Pricing
  • Products
  • Support
    • FV Player Docs
    • Pro Support
  • Login
  • Basket is empty
Affordable VAST/VPAID for Wordpress has arrived. Serve ads with your videos starting today!

What is an idea worth?

24 June 2007 / Alec Kinnear / Leave a Comment

What is an idea worth?

What is the value of consulting services?

If you say nothing and everything – you’d be exactly right.

One of Paul Graham’s startup essays explains the difference:

Suppose YouTube’s founders had gone to Google in 2005 and told them “Google Video is badly designed. Give us $10 million and we’ll tell you all the mistakes you made.” They would have gotten the royal raspberry. Eighteen months later Google paid $1.6 billion for the same lesson, partly because they could then tell themselves that they were buying a phenomenon, or a community, or some vague thing like that.

The significance here is that they went and created and shipped and evangelised the idea.

On the other hand, had Google had their finger close enough on the pulse, they could have made that acquisition many months earlier for a tiny fraction of the valuation.

Or had Google put the right people on their project – Google Video – they could have stolen YouTube’s fire before it lit.

Unfortunately normally we don’t know the failures, only the success stories. Kiko, the eBay auctioned calendar software, lost to Google Calendar (a fine invention and one you should try if you haven’t used it before – we run our entire office schedule on it, and it’s a huge improvement over maintaining phpCalendar ourselves or trying to WebDav sync iCal).

So does one aim to be the ones advising Google for a few hundred k/per year – the dilemma with consulting services, is that it’s still your life against the clock, whatever the payoff. Effectually, you are a mercenary. When you tire of fighting the Punic wars, you go home and all you take is what you can carry away on your back and your armour.

Obviously startups are the way to go. But it’s damn hard work.

Creating a startup is the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life and it’s cost me dearly.

Am I ready to give up?

No.


When trying to pick what idea to go after, Paul Graham writes:

It seems like the best problems to solve are ones that affect you personally. Apple happened because Steve Wozniak wanted a computer, Google because Larry and Sergey couldn’t find stuff online, Hotmail because Sabeer Bhatia and Jack Smith couldn’t exchange email at work.

I agree wholeheartedly with that. The issue which I am trying to solve is one which causes me stress everyday.

Alec Kinnear

Alec Kinnear

Alec has been helping businesses succeed online since 2000. Alec is an SEM expert with a background in advertising, as a former Head of Television for Grey Moscow and Senior Television Producer for Bates, Saatchi and Saatchi Russia.

Categories: Business Tags: consulting, google, Google calendar, iCal, Punic wars, startups, YouTube

Related Posts

  1. How much is a good logo worth? Case study: Agile Pain Relief

    How much is a good logo worth? Case study: Agile Pain Relief

  2. 37signals suite review: Is it worth upgrading? First fix the suite integration and syncing guys…

    37signals suite review: Is it worth upgrading? First fix the suite integration and syncing guys…

  3. Calendar Plugins for WordPress for Cultural Site

    Calendar Plugins for WordPress for Cultural Site

Reader Interactions

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

You can click here to Subscribe without commenting

Primary Sidebar

Categories

  • Business
  • Camera Reviews
  • Case Studies
  • Design
  • FV Player
  • Internet Marketing
  • IT
  • Life
  • SEO
  • Slovak
  • Video of the Week
  • WordPress

Footer

Our Plugins

  • FV WordPress Flowplayer
  • FV Thoughtful Comments
  • FV Simpler SEO
  • FV Antispam
  • FV Gravatar Cache
  • FV Testimonials

Free Tools

  • Pandoc Online
  • Article spinner
  • WordPress Password Finder
  • Delete LinkedIn Account
  • Responsive Design Calculator
Foliovision logo
All materials © 2025 Foliovision s.r.o. | Panská 12 - 81101 Bratislava - Slovakia | info@foliovision.com
  • This Site Uses Cookies
  • Privacy Policy
  • Terms of Service
  • Site Map
  • Contact
  • Tel. ‭+421 2/5292 0086‬

We are using cookies to give you the best experience on our website.

You can find out more about which cookies we are using or switch them off in .

Powered by  GDPR Cookie Compliance
Privacy Overview

This website uses cookies so that we can provide you with the best user experience possible. Cookie information is stored in your browser and performs functions such as recognising you when you return to our website and helping our team to understand which sections of the website you find most interesting and useful.

Necessary Cookies

Strictly Necessary Cookie allow you to log in and download your software or post to forums.

We use the WordPress login cookie and the session cookie.

If you disable this cookie, we will not be able to save your preferences. This means that every time you visit this website you will need to enable or disable cookies again.

Support Cookies

Foliovision.com uses self-hosted Rocket.chat and self-hosted Freescout support desk to provide support for FV Player users. These cookies allow our visitors to chat with us and/or submit support tickets.

We are delighted to recommend self-hosted Rocket.chat and especially Freescout to other privacy-conscious independent publishers who would prefer to self-host support.

Please enable Strictly Necessary Cookies first so that we can save your preferences!

3rd Party Cookies

This website uses Google Analytics and Statcounter to collect anonymous information such as the number of visitors to the site, and the most popular pages.

Keeping this cookie enabled helps us to improve our website.

We reluctantly use Google Analytics as it helps us to test FV Player against popular Google Analytics features. Feel free to turn off these cookies if they make you feel uncomfortable.

Statcounter is an independent Irish stats service which we have been using since the beginning of recorded time, sixteen years ago.

Please enable Strictly Necessary Cookies first so that we can save your preferences!