Inspiration and Truth

This is old in Internet terms, but I thought I’d chime in. David Heinemeier Hansson, a co-founder of 37signals and creator of the Ruby on Rails web framework, recently gave a talk at Y Combinator’s Startup School about “The Secret to Making Money Online.” You can watch the full presentation at David’s post on the 37signals blog.

This talk will run you about 30 minutes, but comes highly recommended.

David’s presentation has become really big inspiration for me. I’ve always been a fan of 37signals the company for a long time (see also their book, free to view on the web, called Getting Real). But David’s talk is something especially special, because it points out some of the really true problems with the web 2.0 startup community.

Someday I’m going to go back and count up the money wasted on non-sensical ’social media’ apps that have no revenue stream. Instead, I’m going to focus on making a great and useful app for the Fortune 5,000,000,000.