Talk About Moon Cheese

With the heckles about Google's acquisition of YouTube still echoing in the media, like the NYT today ( "If you believe it’s the future of television, it’s clearly worth $1.6 billion,” Steven A. Ballmer,  Microsoft’s chief executive, said of YouTube. “If you believe something else, you could write down maybe it’s not worth much at all.”), it made me think of all the other alleged famous similar quotes bashing new potential opportunities.   Maybe he's right, maybe he's wrong.

But it also made me think of something else that I've been ruminating for quite some time.

The trickiest, most counter-intuitive concept I think in entrepreneurship as well as venture investing is this: that the biggest returns and the biggest companies are going to be created by concepts that are totally obvious. Yet totally *unobvious* to anyone else, including the vast majority of investors and your competitors, and a good portion of people you are going to try to recruit to your cause.   It's what I call "unobvious obvious" investments; they are exactly the type of opportunity I look for and make for the biggest returns.   

Man, do I recall the early chuckles not just of YouTube and MySpace but also of eBay, Yahoo, Amazon, and Skype and all the other companies, including even non-tech companies like Starbucks and BestBuy, that broke the mode.  The one thing they all had in common was that nobody thought anyone could build a real business (unpaid user generated videos? teen blogs? trinkets online? free phone calls? cyberstores? c'mon!) doing what they were doing, they were totally unobvious to everyone that looked at them, yet in retrospect they were totally obvious.  The more unobvious, yet the more obvious, in hindsight, the opportunity is, the bigger the blowout for those entrepreneurs and their backers.  I don't just mean being contrarian, as many times, contrarians are, well, contrary for it's own sake, and just wrong (i.e. the theory that the moon is made of Swiss cheese in contrarian, but still wrong... as far a I know).  But it's the first sign that I look for, that something is "unobviously obvious".  When I hear someone talking about moon cheese, I listen up, at least for a little bit, as they might be that mold breaker.  I want them to explain why they are the only bug eyed crazy person on the planet that "gets its", not because they just do, but why, and why everyone else won't and never will...  until they are wildly successful of course.

So if you have an unobvious obvious opportunity, particularly in the Northeast, or one that should at least have a major presence in the region, in the tech-enabled or information services sectors I focus on, do let me know! ; )