Via Daniel Horowitz

Marc Andreessen:

What is Awesome?

Awesomeness is often overlooked by mainstream culture, which tends to rehash the same broadly appealing but mediocre creations. Thankfully, there is the web.

Awesomeness is more the product of a creator’s passion than the prospect of audience or profit. Awesome creations are novel and non-obvious, evoking surprise and delight. Invariably, something about them perfectly reflects the essence of the medium, moment, or method of creation. Awesomeness challenges and inspires.

How We Support Awesome

Submit an awesome idea. If we pick it, we’ll give you $1,000 in cash. Yup, $1,000. Cash. Maybe even in a brown paper bag. You’ll also get access to coworking space at BetaHouse for the month of your grant. The only condition is that you be willing to tell us (and some of our friends) about what you did a month later. If we don’t pick it, don’t stress. We’ll pick a new awesome idea next month.

We think lots of things are awesome. Surprise us. Besides your idea, tell us who you are, why your idea is awesome, and how you plan to follow through on it. If you’ve done other awesome things in the past, that wouldn’t hurt either. But don’t make it too long (500 words at most), as we have short attention spans and are sometimes distracted by shiny objects. Be pithy.

We’ll need some super short contact info (name, email, phone number) to get in touch with you in case we choose your idea. Giving us this information is for your own benefit.

We reserve the right to share this information with the public (though we probably won’t share anyone’s phone numbers). Please let us know if you really want us not to share your project, but we can’t promise anything. We want people who come here in the future to be able to see what other awesome ideas people have had.

Deadline

The deadline for this month’s submissions has passed. Submissions will resume next month.

Who is the Awesome Foundation?

No, not an international cabal of malcontents. Just a small group of individuals making personal contributions in the name of awesomeness. For more information, see the about page. We’re currently in Boston but are open to awesome ideas elsewhere. We’d also be happy to help others start an awesome foundation in their location.

If you’re interested, follow us on Twitter or FaceBook.

Via our good doctor David Pennock.

Taking his propos and applying them to Adam Siegel and Nate Kontny, you’d get that:

• The key is Adam Siegel and Nate Kontny’s determination. They refuse to fail.
• The key for Nate Kontny was to find out a good co-founder —that was Adam Siegel.
• [M]arket is the biggest determinant in the outcome of successful startups. [...] Smart people [like Adam Siegel and Nate Kontny] will find big markets.

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Same things could be said of David Perry and Ken Kittlitz, or Emile Servan-Schreiber and Maurice Balick.

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