Highly recommended presentation. The more I read and hear about Bill Gross and his Idealab, the more respect I have for him. In case you don’t know who Bill Gross is: He is the one who has invented/popularized the Pay-Per-Click business model for search engines by creating GoTo.com/Overture which was bought by Yahoo for $1.63 billion. In the past 18 years, Idealab has created more than 100 companies.
- I’ve learned how he comes up with new business ideas
- How he evaluates new business ideas
- That (of course) he is using Lean Startup principles within Idealab, by for example creating landingpages/mockups where he drives AdWords traffic to learn about Cost per Acquisition and Conversion Rates. He even did that with letting people buy cars online to test whether they would do that in 1996 (and yes, they did)
- He offered 10 business ideas to the public for free. Some of them are really interesting things. I loved all of them, especially “Dashboard.biz” (this can be a very cool SaaS business) and also “Luv.it” (very simple solution to the recommendation problem).
I also liked the “Deliver.it” idea. This could be a re-incarnation of the original Migros idea of decentralized truck-sales type of business, powered by Smartphones. Quite interesting to think about.
Thank you Bill Gross.
Update:
Bill Gross reached out to me on Twitter. How cool is that :)
