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This is a good quote, although to play devil’s advocate, entrepreneurs also have to convince VCs to pay LOTS of money for their ideas as well. And they are generally not as concerned with the usefulness factor as the public-at-large. Especially for a young entrepreneur, if you can convince a VC to pour money into your company, it’s a huge win and, to them, it validates their idea in the same way small purchases would.

Unlike the federal government where a relative handful of people can impose their woolly thinking on the entire country.

This will, no doubt, engender a flurry of comments. I’m ducking out now.

@Amber – not that VCs always make the best decisions, but I wonder about the mysterious “usefulness factor for the public-at-large.” How exactly would this usefulness factor be determined, if not by a cascade of purchase-or-not decisions with individual consumers (the “public-at-large”) on one end and entrepreneurs/businesses on the other?

if you can convince a VC to pour money into your company, it’s a huge win

It’s not a win until you can pay them back. If you can’t pay them back it means you didn’t make enough money to stay in business.

What ever happened to the good old days of just starting from scratch, building a business form almost nothing? Sure, these are different times, but every once in a while you hear about someone that started on their own and made a successful business.

Different times, like I said. Lots of people out there with great ideas, and lots of people with money to drop on those ideas.

“What ever happened to the good old days” You know what, Luis? I don’t think those days have been gone. I think they’re now. You hear about the occasional success, but there are a LOT of successes you don’t hear about. How many articles are going to get written about a couple of folks who made a million-dollar company after five years of work, when there are billion dollar monsters taking all the focus? There are millions of businesses, we can’t possibly hear about them all.

“Unlike the federal government where a relative handful of people can impose their woolly thinking on the entire country.”

I disagree with the use of “unlike” here. This is also true in corporate America. There are plenty of very large corporations where a tiny number of individuals make terrible decisions and waste hundreds of millions of dollars, or more, that affect large swaths of the country, if not countries. The larger, and more vertical the organization, be it in government or in the “free market,” the easier it is for a small number of individuals to make very bad decisions for lousy, often self-serving, reasons.

Perhaps some examples would be helpful to your argument Greg.