When I showed Lisa what I'd written about People's Software and the new thing, she said this:
" I like the idea behind WhozAround. It's a product I want and one I would personally use. However, we found that creating it made us overly dependent on people who didn't have their skin in the game the way Susan and I did. We're not personally coders, but we needed coders to make the product and company work.
There are many, many tech startups that aren't code-focused and play to the strengths that Susan and I bring to the table: building and developing online communities. Most of the underlying technology of such sites is not rocket-science; many of them are based on software that is literally free for anyone to download.
The success of those sites, based on relatively simple and sometimes free software is proof that ideas matter in online community but execution matters much, much more.
From a personal perspective, Susan and I found ourselves in a business where we could not get up in the morning and improve what users got to play with by our own actions. It wasn't fun. It was also a signal that we weren't in the right business: we needed to be in a business where we could use what we knew how to do better than anyone in a direct, hands-on way day in and day out.
So now we're doing it."
More to come.
" I like the idea behind WhozAround. It's a product I want and one I would personally use. However, we found that creating it made us overly dependent on people who didn't have their skin in the game the way Susan and I did. We're not personally coders, but we needed coders to make the product and company work.
There are many, many tech startups that aren't code-focused and play to the strengths that Susan and I bring to the table: building and developing online communities. Most of the underlying technology of such sites is not rocket-science; many of them are based on software that is literally free for anyone to download.
The success of those sites, based on relatively simple and sometimes free software is proof that ideas matter in online community but execution matters much, much more.
From a personal perspective, Susan and I found ourselves in a business where we could not get up in the morning and improve what users got to play with by our own actions. It wasn't fun. It was also a signal that we weren't in the right business: we needed to be in a business where we could use what we knew how to do better than anyone in a direct, hands-on way day in and day out.
So now we're doing it."
More to come.
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