Craziness

So, if you’re going to start a company, you better have an idea so radical that most people think it’s crazy. Dell sounded crazy — a personal computer company started in the teeth of an enormous recession in the industry. People thought the idea behind Netscape was nuts — everybody told us we’d never amount to anything. Google sounded like a crazy idea — another search engine, started in 1998, growing right through the dot-com meltdown. It seemed like complete lunacy. Of course, the problem is that a lot of ideas that sound crazy are crazy. So for every Dell, Netscape, and Google, you get 300 companies with crazy ideas that fail.

– Marc Andressen, founder of Netscape