BetFair chairman Ed Wray: “-Too many hurdles in the way of enterprise”-.
Wray refers to a tax incentive that he and Black used to launch Betfair after they were forced to go to friends and family for funds, having failed to raise capital from institutional investors.
“-That was very useful in terms of getting the business off the ground. Everything I see now is about cutting back on those opportunities.”-
MicroSoft’-s Steve Ballmer:
My parents thought I’-d lost my mind to drop out of Stanford Business School to go to a company that makes software. My dad said “-what the heck is software?”- and my mother said “-why the heck would a person need a computer?”-.
[…] What I think PirateMyFilm will bring to the copyright reform party is the idea that films and music can be collectively financed, i.e., crowd financed, with both the artistic creator and the art consumer participating in the revenue streams.
To me, economics, markets and finance are an artistic medium in their own right and, as such, can be modeled, molded, manufactured and modified in artistic ways reflecting self expression as easily as paint, words, clay or plastic.
All of the projects I’ve been involved with for the past 15 years: [Hollywood Stock Exchange], KarmaBanque, GulagWealthFund, PirateMyFilm and my yet-to-be-publish novel, “Buy Love, Sell Fear,” all share this common characteristic of seeing price discovery and market making as a form of self expression and artistic freedom.
One simple word:
U-S-A-B-I-L-I-T-Y
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When I first tried Pikum, last year, I spent 10 minutes looking around, trying to figure out how to use their betting website. At the 11th minute, I gave up. For good.
Sean Glass is an amazing serial entrepreneur and he’-ll hatch many successful ventures in the future. I am sure many angel investors will back him up, again. However, the takeaway from the Pikum failure is that your user interface should not be too original. Users are spending most of their time on other websites —-so, do have a user interface that resembles what is found outside.
Let’-s hope Jason Trost got that one right.
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Michael Arrington:
[T]he tremendous opportunities that arise in down markets. Engineers are much easier to hire. The press have fewer startups and stories to divide their attention. The pond certainly gets smaller, but there are far fewer people fishing, too. For most startups, this is a time to blossom.
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