find a niche

just speculating here (actually spoke to a friend about this, and thought about blogging it) ...

there are probably two routes to success in a startup (many more probably, but two main routes) - either you get acquired by a giant or you defeat a giant. what about 'going IPO' you ask? well, that's not success really.

anyways, so either you get bought out or you run down the big guns. now the latter is possible (hello Google, bye-bye Yahoo) but rare. so rare, that we should assume it wont happen again soon.

so that leaves us with the only other option. find a niche. pick a giant. find out what they do best (that's the easy part - it's probably all over the news). find out what they suck at (this is the hard part). and go build a company in a niche they suck at, but need desperately. form a core team of 4 or 5 geeks you trust. build a kick ass product. get a few customers to use it for free. get written testimonials from them. then approach the giant with the product, the customer testimonials, and a lot of enthusiasm. that's it!

now isn't that easy :-)