Omar King's Key Ideas from Without Their Permission
by Alexis Ohanian

• The open Internet has levelled the playing field. If you have a connection and a laptop, you can build your ideas exponentially and share your work with the world.
• The open Internet is not a magic wand, but as a technology, it has the potential to do tremendous things – to allow awesome people to reach their full potential.

Most people starting a business (and engineers are especially prone to this, hence the term Engineer's Disease) do it in the following order:

• Build a product you think people will like.
• Go out the door, wave it around and ask: “Who wants this?”

And then they get sad when no one wants to buy this awesome thing they’ve spent months building. Here’s what people like Noah and Alexis say you should do instead: Talk to potential customers first, figure out what problems they already have and then build something that helps them solve those problems!

A father and son duo from Australia invented a way to get honey from their beehives without having to open it and tranquillize the bees. Thanks to their simple system the honey just flows out, literally on tap.

Not a pretty common problem – yet it managed to gather over $13 million on IndieGoGo, a crowdfunding platform.

Forget about billion-dollar markets or reaching 1 in 7 people on the planet, like Facebook (even they started with just college campuses).

Focus on a problem that’s personal, close to you, and is unique to a small group of people, and you’ll do just fine.

The internet can amplify anything overnight so be careful what you put out.

In 2007, Greenpeace started a campaign to track a whale via satellite, to bring awareness to Japanese fishers still hunting these creatures and protest against an expedition set out to hunt down 50 whales. To engage their activists, Greenpeace held a poll to name the whale.

When the poll ended up on Reddit somehow, the community ended up voting for a name 20,000 times – and it won by a landslide. Mr. Splashy Pants ended up generating so much media coverage, that the Japanese government ended up cancelling the hunt.

• We all carry ideas we are passionate about, voices that need to be heard and projects that need to spread. And since we have access to the Internet, we have no excuse not to take action.
• This can be incredibly empowering to some and absolutely frightening to others.
• In an online world that doesn’t require permission, why are some of us still waiting for it?

Whether you’re a solopreneur or you lead a growing team, if you want to make the world suck less, you need a kickass support team. Sure, they need to be competent and driven and quasi-entertaining (that’s a plus). But more importantly, they need to take pride in their work.

Even if you end up never starting something of your own, the skills you learn in development are highly sought after these days.

The Language = Programming.  

If you want to become The Maker, you might want to follow these 3 steps:

1.) No more excuses, like… Programmers are kids, not 35+. I’m too old. And I’m not geeky enough to be a hacker. Do I need a snippet of JavaScript tattooed to my back first? 

2.) Develop your arsenal of tools. If you truly want to operate without their permission, then you need to empower yourself. If you’re ready for a challenge, take advantage of the growing number of free tools and resources available to you:

• Codecademy
• Code.org
• Rails for Zombies.org
• Dash

The digital revolution is forcing all of us to step up our game, BIG time. It forces us to develop skills that fall outside of our comfort zones. It forces us to stop apologizing for high standards and expectations. And it forces us to push ourselves, stop making excuses, and start making the world suck less.

After all, the open Internet is a gift and an opportunity.