Best And Worst Decisions - Marc Canter

A few years ago, for Startupping, I asked several entrepreneurs about their best and worst decisions. With the shuttering of that site, their answers vanished from the web. I’ll be reposting them here. This was originally posted on February 22, 2007:_

Marc Canter founded MacroMind, which became Macromedia, and was influential in helping to start the nascent ‘multimedia industry’ in the late 80’s and early 90’s. From there, Marc did scalable content, Interactive TV and what we now call ‘Ajax’ work - all during the dot com era. Since 2001 Marc has been blogging, developing the notion of “digital lifestyle aggregation” and helping to create open standards around open social networking and blogging. Marc is the CEO of Broadband Mechanics, and he blogs at Marc’s Voice.

Best decision I made: I have to say that ever day I’m reassured as an entrepreneur that my gut level decisions are the right ones. When it comes to timing, projecting out ahead what’s gonna happen and where the money will be - I’ve been consistently about 10 years ahead of the curve. So the trick has been to slow myself down, and be ready when the rest of the world shows up. That’s what’s going on right now with open source social networking. My worst mistake: Was to rely upon the contributory efforts of others - and let that impede mycore milestones. This created a barrier of success - as you cannot rely upon free labor. You must pay people to do work for you. It’s the only way to get code done.

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