He said in terms of investing, his emphasis was less on finding companies with huge potential and more on finding companies with the potential to achieve success in smaller, easier-to-capture markets. Focusing on smaller, specific communities allows companies to fine tune their products, and ultimately the internet is such a gigantic market that there’s plenty of money to be made even in going after a niche.
McClure also said he felt entrepreneurship has become “too sexy” and investors need to work to find people who are looking to solve problems and not just appear on the covers of magazines. He described real entrepreneurship as generally being “not sexy,” “painful,” “boring as shit,” and “full of failure.” If you’re just looking to make money or get famous, he said, “Fuck it, go do something else. Don’t be an entrepreneur.”
When asked about the copy-to-China phenomenon that has seen a number of tech copycats emerge in Asia when new services are invented in Silicon Valley, both McClure and Lei Jun agreed that this wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. It’s not innovation, McClure said, but there’s success to be found there, and anyone seeing such a huge, empty market would be stupid not to try to take advantage of it. Lei Jun also felt that copycatting wasn’t necessarily a bad idea, especially if you can be the first company to do it in a new market.
When asked what they look for in companies, Lei Jun spoke again about his belief in mobile e-commerce as a good direction. McClure was more guarded, saying that he preferred to keep his favorite things to himself but that he would not invest in social games or group buy platforms, and that currently he likes educational games for kids. Ultimately though, he says investors shouldn’t care about what’s trendy, and instead look for what has the potential to make money. “Money is sexy,” he said, “money will always be sexy.”
He also noted he looks for companies with hustler-hacker-hipster leadership, by which he meant teams that have a sales expert, a tech expert, and a design expert, because he believes all of those facets are important in the current market.
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