Haven't worked out in 2 weeks. Finally, at a conference in Vegas, I got a second to hit the Gym (only at hotels in Sin City would you have to PAY additional to do something healthy). On my way back from the Gym, I bumped into Kris Jones of PepperJam who was recently voted an Inc 500 fastest growing company. I was on a panel with Kris a year or so ago and was very happy to see him in the lobby and congratulate him on this achievement. He briefly introduced me to shoemoney, who I never met but I read his blog all the time!
That got me thinking about something... new entrepreneurs are different. We actually congratulate our competitors from time to time (Kris - I hope to make it on the list too, buddy). Today, there is all this talk of web 2.0 (since when has making things valuable and easy to use been a REVOLUTION? But that is a different post).
Lets talk about the new entrepreneur and what they often look like. Now of course before this there are a slew of characteristics like focus on profitability, cash flows, etc.
But I want to focus on the other things. And may I say that the inspiration from this post comes from 2 events:
1) Meeting Rand Fishkin, the founder of SEOmoz, who I aspire to have SEER emulate in SO many ways, but he takes some of his openness to an extreme I just can't do yet but wholly respect!! His posts on hiring people, revenues, etc. are just amazing and well VERY open. Not to mention his answer to someone on Online Reputation Management showed his true ethics to everyone at a panel he was on at Pubcon. I wish there was a video of that snippet.
2) Craig Newmark of Craigslist (Missed the Stern event) who is totally fine with not making Craigslist more profitable by adding things to the site that could earn even more revenue. Wall Street's collective jaw dropped when their CEO told them "Nah, maximizing revenues isn't part of our equation!" That's a tough pill to swallow.
