I was studying marketing when the 'super premium pet food' segment was invented. The idea that dog and cat were prepared to paid $US 3 per 4oz can of food was amazing.
At the time the best steak or fish was about $7 /lb
Tridge is considers Australia's best hacker. But he has no interest in forming any company. The only time he was convinced was to help form a company was with Linuxcare. Along with Rasmus Lerdorf (PHP), Martin Pool (Apache), Paul 'Rusty' Russell (ipchains) and Richard Morrell (SmoothWall)
He is interested in superior technological solutions.
He does not care about term sheets (aka term shits) or vesting rights etc.
He get paid VERY WELL for stuff he loves doing.
What is better than that????
BTW, he was ANU chess champion and often played blindfolded.
Concentrated Solar Thermal is more than 90% efficient. Ausra has a 175Mw base-load plant in construction. A number of Gigawatt plants will be made within a few years.
In China, there are 30 million solar hot water systems capturing the energy of 40 large nuclear plants and is growing at 20% per year. South Africa has mandated all buildings have to have solar hot water by 2010.
My company will install thousands of solar hot water systems without change and we will get the carbon credit and charge for the 'free' energy captured from the sun.
Why on Earth would ANY startup want to play "Treasury" like a large corporation? Using the KISS Principle an 'normal' bank account is much better. We all have better things to worry about than an extra 1% return on 'cash'.
As Warren Buffet says, if you don't understand it not invest in it.
That's easy. My wife has PhD in Statistics and works for a large bank. She spends her life building predictive models using archetypes. She has made hundreds of millions in revenue for the bank but now is working with the Australia Federal Police to detect both fraud and money laundering.
According to Mastercard her bank has one of the lowest fraud rates in the world.
Most large companies could increase their revenue by millions if they only knew how to understand the data they already have. It would only take 1 or 2 seriously smart people but the limiting factor is the political will to do it.
At the time the best steak or fish was about $7 /lb
This could be a multimillion dollar company.