dshen

First, thanks to all who responded to my blog post!

As far as intrinsic motivation goes, I did think about this, but in the end I declined to comment on generalizing about the motivations of a group of people. I chose to stay with non-motivational factors in my discussion because those could be analyzed more objectively. I did not feel right saying that one group of individuals thinks this way more than any other group, and certainly without a serious survey to really see what people want to do.

I do believe, like many other disciplines, that designers haven't been exposed to, or even given the opportunity to enter the investor business until recent years. Now that the discipline has been exposed to a new potential career path, I think we'll see that perhaps peoples' motivations could change simply because they have the exposure to a new possibility.

I'll comment on this as I wrote the post...

Coming outside the box is a great thing. If you're in a startup versus a big corporation, you're already enabled to work outside the box versus typically being stifled. My issue is that I've met entire teams who had, upon further conversation, skewed or incorrect impressions on how an industry worked. I think this is dangerous and will cause extra "bobbing and weaving" in their strategy, which costs them in time and money: money that an early stage startup doesn't have much of.

So I look at this as a probability game: you don't want to lower the odds of success by not really knowing how an industry works but raise it. Some possible solutions are having advisors and being open to research, but I've also seen teams who didn't have resident founders not really act on advice or research. It's much better to have a founder who has direct experience with that industry to be a daily, trusted member of the team pushing in the right direction constantly BUT you have to not be discouraged by the way an industry currently operates; you must have belief, focus, and drive to push disruption to change the rules of the industry you're attacking. What often happens with resident industry experts is that the team gets discouraged by all the barriers - to me this is the killer of an idea, not the knowledge.

Can you be a success without having a founder from the industry? Sure - look at Paypal who defied normal conventions of banking, amongst other really big examples of disruption. Let's just say there are many factors that drive success and that being disruptive is only one. Again, it's a probability game and you want to load the odds in your favor for success, not lower them...