Hard on the heels of Tim O'Reilly's keynote came a conversation between O'Reilly and Yossi Vardi, tech entrepreneur and investor.
O'Reilly kicked off the session by asking Vardi what's the secret of his success? "Luck," came the reply.
He's a fan of the Pascal Wager idea from O'Reilly's talk: "If you do the right thing, it'll come back to you."
Two years ago he was approached by a guy with an idea for a collaborative tool. He asked if he did volunteering, and it turned out he did (at a local school). Yardi funded him. Eventually the entrepreneur asked Yardi why the volunteering makes the difference. Yardi thinks about it as a scholarship. If it fails, "I'm not an idiot, I gave them a scholarship." And you don't want to give scholarships to idiots...
Young people who know what they're doing, consumer-focused application on the web or mobile. Focused, nimble and nice guys. And he wants them to be very talented.
Apparently, Yossi's entrepreneurial skill comes from his home culture - a Jewish mother who always compared him and his brother unfavourably with his cousins.
O'Reilly asked him about the current breed of entrepreneur's attitude to funding, pointing out that he started his company with $500.
"We've lost the art of bootstrapping, which is unfortunate," said Vardi. far,s take money, but web start-ups not necessarily. He wouldn't go as far as to suggest that you ignore venture capital, but he strongly suggests that you examine their record before taking their money.
Following a question from the audience, O'Reilly suggested that it's easy to get too distracted by a mistaken idea of what you think your focus should be.
"A lot of the art is articulating a vision," he said, "and then other people come to belive it and that keeps everyone on track."
Vardi asked who had seem Around the World in 80 Days, to a mixed response. He used it as an example of how planning can go wrong.
"Business plans and sausages have one thing in common - only those who don't know how they are made are willing to eat them," he said.
A member of the audience asked about free versus paid models. "We will see more paid models, as not everyone will get the millions needed to make free pay," suggested O'Reilly.
Vardi seemed to disagree: "The user is both a particle and wave. Contributor and distributor - if he does your viral marketing, you will do better."
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