Paul Graham, from high profile Silicon Valley investor Y-Combinator, extols the virtue of “doing good” in this clip as he speaks to an audience of young entrepreneurs at the Start-Up School ’08 conference held recently at Stanford.

Graham is the kind of guy you sit up and pay attention to. His company currently funds and mentors over 50 start-ups, many of which are Web 2.0 ventures. He believes projects that do good gain a lot more traction when it comes to attracting customers and winning funding.

He cites Google which launched in 1999 as a hacker response to the lack of search functionality on the Internet. When Google began it had neither revenue nor customers, but it was those early years that saw the fastest appreciation in its share value.

By the way there is a whole bunch of stimulating material from the conference featured on Omnisio a very cool video presentation sharing site that is being backed by Y-Combinator and was co-founded by Ryan Junee. Seriously, I could happily spend hours surfing Omnisio which, unlike YouTube, actually hosts informative material worth watching.

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X|Media|Lab Event – Commercialising Ideas – Fri 30th May – Wellington

Don’t forget that the XMediaLab event hits town on Friday. If you are involved in anything remotely connected to mobile content, virtual worlds, Web 2.0 or digital media innovation in general, then you really need to be at this event. At $99 a head it has to be the best value outing of the year. Attracting global leaders in innovation to engage with NZ firms is one way we can overcome our remoteness. GeniusNet supports this event because we strongly believe that a lot of creativity and opportunity arises when you cross fertilise between different disciplines such as film, animation and software. See you there!

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Entrepreneur’s Epilogue

We hit our first speed bump this week. It was bound to happen. Our office server fell over for several days meaning we had no internal email and we lost our virtual whiteboard facility. With our people currently spread around Munich, Melbourne and Wellington, these tools are essential. So everything simply stopped happening. Very frustrating.

Then on Thursday night I made the mistake of venturing into the central city at 5pm. It was gridlock. As an organisational researcher I’m always interested in analogies between business theory and real life and it didn’t take me long to make the connection. In project management terms it’s called event chain methodology.

So I quickly realised I needed to find a sub-critical pathway to get my damn car out of the middle of the Willis Street / Manners Street intersection! The point is that we had encountered the exact same problem within the business. A critical feature had failed, leaving us with flow-on effects and time delays. Back to the drawing board to find a way around the problem. All good learning.