Aehso’s Output

Stephen Wolfram on starting up a company.

Marc Andreessen recently pointed to a great talk by Stephen Wolfram, CEO of Mathematica at the Y Combinator Startup School back in 2005. There are almost too many gems in this talk so I’d recommend the full read. Here are two pieces that seem to really apply in the fast paced world of web application development though:

I’m not sure if writing a detailed business plan would ever once have been worthwhile. I’m as analytical as anyone. But somehow there are always variables one doesn’t know. That can just turn numbers and things upside down.
…
Get-rich-quick schemes almost never work. Even if they sound really clever. It takes actual hard work to build things. And usually at the core of anything successful is something difficult. It may not be what people talk about. It might be something technical. It might be a business structure. But there’ll be something there that’s sort of a hard idea.

The first is a feature of this business that can be pretty difficult to explain to some potential investors The second is probably more important but often overlooked in practice.

(Aside, there’s a link right at the end of Marc’s piece to WolframTones - the book behind the concept, A New Kind Of Science, looks interesting…)