dotPhoto: look to the future!
Glenn Paul, CTO and co-Founder of dotPhoto, was in class this past week. This is a guy with a lot of experience building businesses up from nearly nothing to much more than just something. The work of dotPhoto, which can be clearly figured out from their Web site, is much deeper and richer than that of competitors such as Webshots, even though Webshots, and sites of some camera manufacturers who also store user photographs, may have somewhat larger market shares. The dotPhoto share is plenty large enough to be going on with, and it is growing. Their secret is to have proprietary software installed on camera phones. Paul and his people recognize that camera phones are the future, if not the present, of photo-sharing.
As for what he had to say to my students, here we go. If you want to grow a business, people have to want the thing you sell, before you can sell it. This may seem like simple advice, but it calls for us to know something about the future. Maybe not the far future, and maybe not everything about the future, but we have to know a little bit about where the thing we care about most is going. We have to recognize what's going to be the big thing, and provide it. Paul's struck by the way people converse at parties: we'll talk about what's on TV (and even though I watch Doctor Who, pictured, a guy who knows a bit about the future, it's still TV), or we'll tell others, "here's what my car can do." His response? "Who cares?" The future is what matters. And we can tell who's going to do well in business: they're the ones interested in the future. I can say Criswell was right when he said at the opening of Plan 9 from Outer Space, "we are all interested in the future, for that is where you and I are going to spend the REST of our lives..."When you look to the future, it is perhaps only natural to wonder how you will look back at yourself during the last few moments of your life. Paul says he figures he will want to have (a) spent more time with people, (b) done more interesting things, and (c) made a difference. (Though listening to him, one would be hard-pressed to figure out how Glenn could ever have fallen short in these areas.) For my part, I tell myself every day that if I'm going to be saying the long goodbye, I'm going to save someone's ass on the way. :-)
Glenn would want me to mention the Doors of Trenton project as well. This is an example of local young people making an entrepreneurial difference.
Labels: young entrepreneurs
posted by Ron @ 4:31 PM
Site Feed
1 Comments:
sass
Post a Comment
<< Home