Entrepreneurialism in the New Millennium

I never ran into this problem personally.. now I've had a few very cool ideas that I thought were clever, and a couple of years later they popped up in the marketplace, usually by a big player proclaiming a breakthrough. Two examples off the top of my head are real time help desk analytics, and "BI as a service," something I have been reading about in BI circles. It stings a little bit that I shopped an idea around to the biggest companies in Birmingham, got an audience with the right people, and never was able to get them to get commit money to pay for the service.

In the meantime I told everyone that would listen, including VCs, about it, but at the end of the day I had to make money some other way. Now there are several products of the sort out there, and it is a growing market. I don't chalk it up to stealing, but to that I should have known how to sell the damn thing better... that's something I'm much better at nowadays.

I'm a believer that to idea people, you never have just one good idea, so I think another will come along, and I'll be able to apply some of the lessons I learned that didn't let that idea pan out the last time.

Entrepreneurialism in the New Millennium: "Enter a new player in the entrepreneurial team: the lawyer. That’s right, the lawyer. The lawyer is not a technician. The lawyer doesn’t bring any new ideas. The lawyer doesn’t bring any money. In fact, the lawyer costs money. The lawyer doesn’t speed things up. In fact, the lawyer slows things down greatly. So how did the lawyer get involved in the entrepreneurial team?

The lawyer is there to protect intellectual property. To create patents and trademarks. And adding the burden of protecting intellectual property to the already heavy burden of creating and marketing new technology is like adding a 50 pound anchor to a rowboat and then trying to race across a lake. It simply is a huge imposition to the entrepreneurial process. "