An old quote but very much true. Necessity drives invention. I have often wondered what makes great products, and more than that - what drives great entrepreneurs to make great products. It's like the whole world is doing one thing and then suddenly something out of the blue comes and changes the whole world!
Is it an individual's own perception or is it a team effect or an ecosystem that leads to the development of great products. More then the market demand I think its an individual's own belief that leads to great products and most of the times its like an individual feels a need for something and he just creates it unknowingly without realizing that product or service would be useful to a lot others.
I haven't had the experience building a great product or haven't been in the company of such people but I have always been motivated by people who had been doing ground breaking innovations (mostly the ones that have a huge social impact on common people).
Every small step you take leads into this direction one way or the other.
Earlier I had a short experience where in my last job at Salzburg Research, just out of frusturation (unable to find any good tool for visualizing RDF) I started building a tool for visualizing RDF (RDF Gravity) on a nice Friday evening. And by sunday evening, within just two days I gave a small demo to my head, even though he liked it but I didn't heard the WOW effect. And that gave me enough food to keep on going. And then soon one of my brilliant colleagues Rupert joined in and we both kept on building it at nights and on the weekends. After a while the tool became atleast internally quite useful and then was later made available for general use. I hope it has been useful if not thousand but to atleast a few hundred people.
Looking into the past it seems quite fascinating how one small thing leads to another small thing.
Currently in my current venture, WIRKLE, we are trying to bring people and information together on the mobile world. Wirle has seen tremendous changes, from idea to implementation, life has been quite dynamic - but I guess that's a part of the startup. Even Wirkle grew out of dicussions where me and my friends got together and thought to pursue this startup. I have always been motivated by how a small digital device like mobile phone is used by people in lot different ways. I get fascinated when my father who is a PC novice, uses SMS to bid for auctions.
Right from our IIT times, we have been quite fascinated by people who have built great companies. Even during IIT we tried to do a starup that failed with the dot com burst, but that experience gave us our first entry into the real world. And this time we have been fully committed to keep moving on irrespective of any hurdles that come through.
Till now it has been a great experience and I look forward to the future with a much greater anticipation.
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