Gyaan Sutra On entrepreneurship and technology

Two of RIAA’s top bosses, Mitch Bainwol and Cary Sherman, have posted an open letter on insidehighered.com, explaining why it is essential to crackdown on kids in college. And then tell them to pay money, or else RIAA will file a lawsuit. It should have been called Spread The Lie , but it’s more like a sermon to the masses by the church in 15-century england. Four hunderd years down the line, RIAA would go down in history as one of the dictators of the 21st century.

The letter intends to inform the educators to take measures to make sure that songs are not shared between people in dorms. And the reasons are

1. Downloading songs you haven’t bought, is Illegal.
2. There is broad understanding of the impact from this activity, including billions of dollars in lost revenue, millions of dollars in lost taxes, thousands of lost jobs, and entire industries struggling to grow viable legitimate online market places that benefit consumers against a backdrop of massive theft.

Now this is a long story and has been covered at least 10 times on each of the 55 million blogs on Technorati. And when something has been discussed 550 million times, it’s really hard to add something new to the conversation. So I’ll pick my sides and get over with it.

I think RIAA is a bigger monster than the monster they are trying to put an end to. But the world is changing, and it wouldn’t be long before they realize that it would be practically impossible to do so. You can’t say TV’s are idiot boxes and ban them, can you.

Anyways, now that we’re done, we come back to the more central topic of this blog - Entrepreneurship. What does this have to do with entrepreneurship you might ask. Well there is. Each one of us is looking for the perfect idea to start our business. And most of the times, we pick up whatever we can get, and try to make a living out of it.

But what we do not think about, is that big ideas can be dangerous. The example I’m talking about is P2P. Whoever made P2P must have never thought that the cool thing he was building was going to bring a behemoth to it’s knees or that it would be bad news to everybody who was associated with it.

Another example is YouTube. How would like having the ViaCom lawsuit slapped on you?

Technology in today’s world can improve faster than we humans can adapt to it. The bigger your idea, the bigger the impact it would have on the society. If the impact is for the good, a lot of people who were better off without your idea, try to make sure, in all possible ways that you get crushed. Financially, Morally, Philosophically. The one thing that we need to keep in mind is that no matter huge your ideas are, if it is going to have a huge impact, you have to make sure that you know who is going to be pissed and how are you going to fight them.

So then, if you don’t want unwanted trouble, you need to find ideas that are big enough yet small enough that people will be able to accept it. Forward thinkers have a history of being hanged. The trick is to feed your idea bit by bit. Make a ten year plan, don’t dish it all out in three months. Learn from those who have paid the price.