I could fill a pretty long book with all the stories of times I thought that an idea was stupid and could never work, only to discover that, in fact, it was pretty inspired. The two bad calls that I'm most proud of? That's easy: eBay (NYSE:EBAY) and Wikipedia.
I became aware of eBay in the mid-1990s, when a friend started using it to buy and sell comic books. I thought it was the stupidest concept ever. I absolutely could not comprehend why people would send money to complete strangers they had found on the Internet. It seemed that there was no protection against fraud and abuse, and the whole arrangement would become a hunting ground for scammers until it fell apart.
That turns out not to be what happened.
I had similar reservations about wikis, which I heard about long before Wikipedia was created..
Link Posted by Tim at February 28, 2008 10:03 PM | TrackBack