Advice From The Mediocre

A little advice from someone who has tried and often failed.  My favorite piece:

Be unoriginal. I’ve never come up with an original idea in my life. My first successful business was making web software, strategies, and websites for Fortune 500 companies. Not an original idea, but at the time, in the ’90s, people were paying exorbitant multiples for such businesses. My successful investments all involved situations in which I made sure the CEOs and other investors were smarter than me. I wrote a TechCrunch article on this titled ”My Angel Investor Checklist.” One hundred percent of my zeros as an angel investor were situations where I thought I was smart. I wasn’t. I’m mediocre.
The best ideas are when you take two older ideas that have nothing to do with each other, make them have sex with each other, and then build a business around the ugly bastard child that results. The child that was so ugly nobody else wanted to touch it. Look at Facebook: combine the internet with stalking. Amazing! Twitter: combine internet with antiquated SMS protocols. Ugly! But it works. eBay: combine e-commerce with auctions. The song “I’ll Be There”: combine Mariah Carey with Michael Jackson. If Justin Bieber sang John Lennon’s “Imagine,” it would be a huge hit. I might even listen to it.

Combine the internet with stalking.  It is just a little too true.