Yes. So, this is why you should never trashcan your projects. Keep them alive and keep iterating on them (track them with analytics). Also, keep trying new things. If over time the number of people using them is > 0 (and growing, albeit slowly), then they are probably assets.
If you are less aimless and want to get strategic, make sure all of the projects center around some addressable market for which you can eventually take a shot at building a genuine product.
While I agree that leveraging intangible assets can be extremely powerful in creating success for web startups, very few people have such an asset to leverage. Those that do are probably looking to enjoy life a little bit more and may turn into angel investors or are looking to get out of the bipolar startup lifestyle.
How does one build an asset like this? By creating a web startup from scratch.
So yes if you happen to be one of the lucky few that have a nice asset like that, do the obvious thing you would have done anyways and leverage it. Otherwise join the rest of the crowd building one of the assets from the ground up with solid execution and a decent idea.
Creating a web startup is a legitimate way of gaining assets but also one of the more risky ways of doing this. The point, which may not have been completely conveyed is that building assets is significantly easier & less risky than starting startups.
Go to school, learn something, work at interesting companies, take on responsibilities, be helpful to people, build up a network, have interesting conversations, be unique.
At some point, you'll have enough assets that a startup will just fall out of all of this diligent work.
I can certainly see the value of building up a following and leveraging that towards your startup. (plenty guilty of that myself)
It seems like all the extra time you would spend by going above and beyond to get a following/skills could be spent (with the same risk) doing a really cool startup on the side.
"a following" is just one type of asset. Ben Newhouse, who I didn't mention in my post leveraged his asset of building Yelp Monocle (as an intern!) into Bubbli (http://bubbli.co/intro/). It's undoubtably true that Bubbli could not have been built though, without leveraging Ben's asset. A different startup could have been built that might look vaguely similar from the outside but it wouldn't have been Bubbli.
Arriving in late via a google search, but yes, definitely. Name dropping Monocle accounts for instant credibility with nearly anyone - which is awesome, but at the same time kind of weird, because I'm the same person I was before I backed into doing Monocle.
Well said. I have found this to be true in my own life. My entire business education in college was a rehash of things I had already learned working on a pre-college startup.
Time is one thing in life you can't get back. From that perspective choosing to go the 'safe' route is as much a risk as taking a risk itself.
I always crack up when the extremely lucky few that were able to gain notoriety and turn it into success give out the advice that the secret to success is notoriety. "You should become a blogger and then gain 100s of thousands of followers then you can be successful just like me!".
Reminds me of the old get-rich quick schemes that were "start a get-rich quick scheme and sell this advice, just like me!"
"I'm talking about more intangible assets like skills, reputation, relationships, attention & fame."
When you separate reputation from attention & fame is there any real value there, at least in the context of startups? I get reputation as it relates to something like stackoverflow, but the attention & fame may not be as great an asset as the author seems to think. When I think of fame & attention without reputation I think of Lindsay Lohan and the cast of Jersey Shore. He could be talking about attention & fame like that that color.com received with their $41 million in funding but that is an extreme outlier and a lot of the community views it more as infamy.
I think you are getting lost in the details. He is not saying that anyone of these things is a silver bullet. He is saying increase your value in 2, 3 or more of these categories, and you will increase your chances for success.
He is not even saying this is a complete list of intangible assets. These are just some examples of ways to get you closer to the finish line.
Some are famous for bad reasons, but many are famous because they are great. Fame gives you the ability to direct many people's attention where you like, which seems pretty valuable to me, no matter what you do.
I disagree. I have plenty of great ideas all the time that would be perfect for somebody who is not me. Somebody who has the assets in place to truly execute on it.
If you find a truly great idea that you genuinely want to work on, work quietly to put all the assets in place that allows you to seriously pursue it.
If you are less aimless and want to get strategic, make sure all of the projects center around some addressable market for which you can eventually take a shot at building a genuine product.