I once said at work that we should automate our boring experiments and one of my superiors said we didn't have the budget to do that. Hah! Little did they know what I could do on a shoe-string budget, spare computers and parts.
I still have the blood of a scrappy university student in me, but it bugs me that despite being surrounded by researchers and engineers, no one here really knows how to build their own stuff. And then it dawned upon me, the limiting factor to my success isn't funding, but time because eventually I'll just be able to find the resources I need to put whatever I need together. After that, many things about what makes a successful business, a booming economy or knowing how to become rich started to make sense.
Creating Value (and knowing where to find it)
It sounds obvious, but it's a subtle problem. Hell, I work for a megacorp and despite being surrounded with smart engineers, the company has been posting losses for years. If it were an easy problem to tackle, then every business out there would be profitable. But if you do investing, then you'd learn fairly quickly that many companies do lose money. Being able to create value and knowing how to find it is hard enough, then there is also the funding, timing and competition challenges too.
Creating a successful business requires many successful factors; should any one component be deficient, the business will either be impossible to start or will eventually fail. A successful business requires the logical "and" of all important factors, meaning that running a successful business is an exponentially hard problem.
When exponentially hard problems work in your favor
Suppose every business requires a set of factors to pass. A business will need a market, a product, a talented team, the financial resources, a supply chain and more to pull things off. I've already listed 5 different factors that all must pass before succeeding. But dealing with a hard business problem is a good thing because competitors have to have to deal with similar issues, meaning that it is just as likely for them to fail. The difference is that the more pieces of the business puzzle that you're able to understand and solve, it's one less step to getting a successful business online and creating value for your customers and yourself.
My limiting factor isn't funding
I've got a scrappy side as a result of being a born optimizer and generally frugal. I never had an allowance until after my younger brother started getting one before I did. I used to save up money through money packets at Chinese new years and visits with relatives. With a very uneven lump sum cash flows as a kid, I've been able to stretch those funds far enough that I'd be able to save money from year to year. Despite being adverse to spending money, I still was able to have a good time and learned a lot of about doing thing without the need for spending exuberant amounts of money.
That trait would carry me through university; looking for parts through dumpster diving and building parts through scrap metal at the machine shop turned out to be great skills. I've also seen small businesses put together by students that weren't capital intensive and produced significant returns. It just became apparent to me that huge amounts of capital isn't necessary to create successful businesses or to get things done. I would eventually do the same as well and I once had the Engineering Physics Student Society president come at me a little worried that "we were supposed to be a non-profit organization." I made good money for those guys :)
I remember a time after graduating where my main laptop broke down and the cost to repair one was about 70% of a new one and would take over a month to get back. After being fed up with high repair prices and the risk of being without a computer for a long period of time, I would eventually buy a cheap EEE pc and put together a 1 GHz computer from salvaged parts from the university junk yard. I started learning how to code in Python because it was 1) free and 2) the computer didn't have enough memory to handle a full out install of Windows XP and Matlab running on top of it.
After starting work, I didn't need to ask for permission to buy expensive software like Matlab or Labview to do number crunching and managed to run under the radar, getting things done for nearly nothing. 4 years later, I managed to automate 2 of their machines and slashed a 7 day process down to 2 with my programming experience. The guys at work were floored and started ramping up prototype production thanks to the work I did. It became easy for me to talk my supervisors into buying me a new laptop and nice monitors to work on.
My limiting factor isn't funding; given time, I'll pretty much make it work. And then it hit me-- once you're not cash bound, you're just time bound.
The Time Constraint Problem
Time constraint problem is under appreciated because time as a resource is often taken for granted. Unfortunately time isn't plentiful and opportunities are moving targets-- what might have been a business chance today, may have been filled/saturated by the time you've made preparations to do something about it and then the process repeats. Time over time lost is a terrible situation to be in. Time constraints for smart people is poorly understood and I've found that I don't tackle this problem well because 1) Given time, I am smart enough to learn new things on my own and 2) finding people with the exact knowledge I need is sometimes hard.
The knowledge surface area to solving problems is broad and requires expertise in different areas which is hard for an individual to do alone. The process of discovering important things to know in each field of knowledge is also time expensive. In short, it's hard to be very successful as a lone wolf because you can do only so much within finite time. With smart people however, the price of learning and creating a function immediately drops and a team can get more done in less time making it easier to strike time sensitive opportunities. The challenge is to then bring together smart people, build quickly and leverage knowledge to create profitable business units.
This is exactly what I feel is happening in places like Silicon Valley, where serendipitous meetings of smart people and resources are bumping and reacting to create all sorts of interesting and profitable startups. There aren't a lot of places in the world that has the environment that makes silicon valley unique.
The first part of the question to first solve is to create a critical mass of smart, scrappy people together, where the exchange of skills and knowledge can occur to allow startups to be created. I think there needs to be tool for people to meet and exchange skills or share resources and form partnerships into great business ventures.
All I want right now is a bunch of scrappy but brilliant people to work with to churn out crazy projects lightening fast.
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