ExtraEagle

Johan Norberg my favorite Swede has a great article Entrepreneurs are the Heroes of this World in the latest Cato Institute news letter.

Go read the whole thing but in particular check out the story in it about Malcom McLean. Malcom was a definite Extra Eagle. Wikipedia says:

In 1937, McLean was delivering lumber from North Carolina to New Jersey. While sitting on a dock waiting for his truck to be unloaded onto a ship, he was watching other trucks being unloaded. Every crate on every truck had to be unloaded, put in a sling and hoisted up and then down into the hold of the ship. There, more stevedores took it off the sling and made sure it was properly stowed. This method is called”break-bulk shipping”. It was slow and labour intensive, and there was lots of pilferage and accidents. McLean first conceived the idea of using the entire truck trailer itself to load onto and off of a ship. McLean could not develop the idea further because the Interstate Commerce Commission did not, at the time, allow truckers to own shipping companies.

So let’s see. Malcom saw a really stupid way of doing something that was protected by special interests. He immediately saw what for him was an obvious solution, but had to fight to get it through.

This reminds me an awful lot of enterprise software development vs small agile teams using for example Ruby on Rails. As a matter of fact there is a direct parallel between Malcom’s story and many other heroic entrepreneurs.

An example that most of os web entrepreneurs know well is the David and Rails story. He saw the stupidity of the world of enterprise development and new there was a better way. I could find a lot more parallels between Malcom and David’s story, but I’ll leave that as a creative exercise for the readers.

Just look around your house or office. Very little of what you see would have been there if it wasn’t for Malcom deciding it was idiotic to wait for people unloading trucks and loading individual items one by one onto a ship.

In the same way many of the newer services you use today and in the future would probably not have existed if it wasn’t for David’s annoyance of repetitive J2EE (Java Enterprise Environment) configuration and coding.

Moral of the story, get annoyed and change the world.

Tonight we will be giving our first public preview of our service at Copenhagen.rb the Danish Ruby on Rails user group.

If you are in town please come by and introduce yourself to Lau or me.

In 1995 Douglas Jackson an oncologist from Florida thought that there was something wrong with the way money works. In particular in the way it works online.

In 1996 he launched E-Gold and introduced the world to one of the first real tangible electronic currencies. Unlike all the others that were launched around that time Doug focused on the basic economics and contracts that form the basis of successful national currencies.

E-Gold was based on a simple and very old idea, the gold standard. For each gram of E-Gold in circulation, there was a physical gram of gold in secure storage. As no national currencies are 100% gold backed anymore, Doug figured there was a real opportunity for someone to take on and compete directly with the US dollar which he felt was a fraud.

E-Gold grew - albeit slowly. E-Gold was and is a hard sell. Most people don’t understand something that isn’t in their national currency. Secondly it was never quite as easy to get started in the system. E-Gold is fundamentally incompatible with the banking system due to their fundamental rule, that all transfers are final. This makes it very difficult for people to fund their E-Gold accounts.

E-Gold has implemented a fair amount of innovation in both it’s user agreement, corporate structure and realtime transparency. Check out the Examiner and user statistics which are all done in realtime. The e-gold mailing list and user created tools such as Craig Spencer’s Fee calculator has done a lot to keep the system solid.

They have stuck to their basic principles of gold standard, separation of control and transparency. This even though Doug and the management have done more than their fair share of things that might cause people to lose trust in the system.

So however unpopular Doug might be at times, Doug is definitely an Extra Eagle.

Definitely an Extra Eagle, John started compiling a list of deals from his regular desk in Jonathan’s Coffee House (or his office as he called it). He thought that there really should be somewhere central where people could keep an eye on what was going on. His idea really took off, now some time later there are many copy cats.

What was this JohnsList? A competitor to Craigs List ? Who was John? Does Jonathan’s Coffee house have free Wifi? Are their barrista’s any good?

I’m afraid it wasn’t a cool coffee shop in San Francisco’s SOMA district. There was no WIFI, not even T-Mobile. John was John Castaing and the year was 1698. “Jonathan’s Coffee-house” was in London. It’s still there today, but changed it’s name in 1773 to the London Stock Exchange. Yes John’s list really took off. There was a real need for a central source of information of deals.

As an Extra Eagle John wasn’t there waiting for some king to form a special committee of Lords to work out that this should be done. He saw a need and he went for it. As a matter of fact when his pals the stock brokers were kicked out of the Royal Exchange (which did have royal blessing) for roudy behaviour they all congregated at Jonathan’s so they could keep an eye on Johns list. Remember this was before Apple introduced Dashboard Widgets.

Do you ...

• make your own rules?
• want to change the world?
• hate legalese?
• hate red tape?
• have clients abroad?
• live in a country without a small claims court?
• know your clients by their domain name and not their real name?

Then you might be an Extra Eagle.