So I stopped by tonight's Entrepreneur27 conference at Stanford. Nice job to Noah for setting it up.
The turn out was impressive -- must have been at least 100 people -- and the panel consisted of an intriguing crew of entrepreneurs under 27. Reps from Firefox, Plaxo, Meetro, PBWiki, and a few other social networking / mobile sites I wasn't familiar with. I am glad to see more products in the mobile social space, and I hope that someday a successful, popular product emerges from the chaos.
Anyway, the evening was mainly a Q&A for the entrepreneurs, and though I don't feel like I learned much, it was still fun to be around the enthusiasm. I had never before been to an event with so many young people, all dying to make it rich starting businesses.
Still, a number of the entrepreneurs on the panel didn't seem to have a clue how they're going to make money. I'm amazed at how people can build products without a revenue model in mind...I guess sometimes things just work out, but I don't think I'll ever start a business that way. I do wish that univerisities would start requiring economics or business courses for computer science majors, just on the off chance that those students would dream of starting businesses. It never ceases to amaze me that exceptionally talented programmers often fail to evaluate the real world circumstances of a business.
