There's a reason for this phenomenon. It might be misguided in this particular case, but there is a reason that it exists. It's the same reason that everyone here loves businesses based on technology. It's the same reason that VCs are willing to invest millions of dollars in nascent companies which will, in all likelihood, fail in the near future. It's the same reason I spend my evenings working on my own startup.

The reason is scalability.

My dad was always shocked that investors valued the last startup I worked for in the tens of millions of dollars while we were losing money. He's worked in construction his whole life for firms that do on the order of $100MM in revenue per year. Like all construction firms, however, their margins are razor thin. Their revenue doesn't grow much faster than their costs (employees and materials, primarily).

A construction company that loses money is not going to be worth $50MM any time soon. A tech company with similar financials might be. A tech company might take a while to get their technology right. But when they do, they can leverage it. Their revenues can grow far faster than their costs. Software as a product scales better than just about anything I can think of. Software businesses often go from slightly in the red to huge annual profits in very little time.

Everyone in tech is trying to find the Next Big Thing. This includes us (entrepreneurs), the media, and investors. In the case of the media, they're just trying to be the first ones to break the next big story, as usual. Just like investors, if they want to succeed, they have to be willing to take risks. They have to bet on companies that look like they have potential. Sometimes they're wrong. But in those rare cases where it pays off, it usually pays off big.

Other industries lack this quality. In other industries 1 success is not going to make up for 10 failures. In technology you make money by picking winners before everyone else. It's somewhat of a crap shoot. But the bar is low because the potential reward is high.

I think you're probably wrong. Plumbing scales like any services business: you stop being able to manage your inbounds, so you hire another plumber who makes less than you. Repeat N times. At some point, you're making enough off the top of all the plumbing work to stop doing plumbing; now you're a full-time business manager. You brand, promote, and scale --- by franchising, hiring more managers, partnering, or securing large contracts. Somewhere in the middle back there, you became a millionaire.

What is also probably true is that it is very hard to go out of business as a freelance plumber. It is very easy to go bust as a tech entrepreneur. The flip side of that: on a steady income, the plumber gets more opportunities to grow her business than the tech entrepreneur --- she can stay in business, turning different knobs, indefinitely. You hope that the tech entrepreneur's individual opportunities are much more valuable, but that depends, doesn't it?

There's also the classic factoid that most millionaires got there not by striking gold, but by managing their money well.

Be careful about Geek Exceptionalism. It will burn you. People excelled in business long before there was an Internet.

It isn't technically Google-operated: they've outsourced it, which is fairly common for promotional goods. (McDonalds doesn't specialize in making T-shirts, after all.)

What I find hilarious is that if you buy an $8 T-shirt from Google you can actually talk to a human being about it, which makes that approximately the only Google-brand product sold for under $100,000 where that is reliably true.

"...does not teach you anything you couldn't have learned from a brochure about the places you're visiting."

Sorry, That's not right. It's funny that you say it, specially when you have no stories to support. Perhaps, you confuse travel with being a tourist. Travelling is a different ball game than being a tourist - going by the brochures, paying the entry fee to the biggest shoe in the world and then hitting the bar in the evening and catching the flight back home. Travelling is not going to Disney-world. Travelling is even living at a place for an unplanned amount of time.

context- i met many 'travellers' in the past week - during a visit to a remote part of china. me and wife didn't go to the touristy parts of the area. Infact spent a day just sitting and listening to nature. Among them, I met this european couple (with kids) who are living there to save enough money to make to the next goal - RVing across Americas. I met this couple who travelled all around and found their funds depleted in Malaysia and so they have been working there to save money..until the next step. There was this one guy from Norway who worked super hard last year to just travel 6 months (mostly by land). Travellers don't go by brochure, they go by recommendations by other travellers. And mostly all 'travellers' try to avoid flights to the extreme (even taking a van across the Gobi desert)

I actually asked blunt questions(with prior permission) about their learning/philosophy/future plans..etc(even their kids)..too long to post here. But I will say this - they do learn - actually continuous learning, learning from cultures, respecting people, not being judgemental(do you the see the homeless man and the bentley salesman in the same way, talk the same way?)..many more things.

Apologies, but I am surprised that many people 'agree' with you without your giving your 'proofs'.

Wikipedia is amazing.

I was going to write "For all its faults..." but I suddenly realised that Wikipedia has never been anything less than fantastic in anything I've experienced. All the bad stuff has been related to me 3rd hand and the vast majority of it seemed to be coming from cranks with axes to grind.

I'm saddened that it isn't celebrated more, but take solace in the fact that it has, fairly quietly considering, become a fundamental part of the internet and our society.

Plumbers make a lot more money than people think. But when Amazon started, Jeff Bezos was still probably making more in interest payments than any Plumber makes in a year. So, two responses: (1) Amazon, and (2) what's your point?

Lots of plumbers are more successful today than lots of YC startups.

<sigh>

37Signals' products weren't profitable for a year or more, if memory serves. They took "investment" from the other side of their business (consulting). Every month, when their product revenue grew, I'm sure they were thinking, "Wow, we're going to be profitable in X months"... and eventually, they were.

Product profitability takes resources. You need:

1) Time (you can accelerate this with cash if you're disciplined) 2) Money (you can use savings, investment, or you can "buy" money/time with consulting)

That's immutable.

EverNote and their ilk ("our ilk", I should say, as RescueTime falls squarely in that world) is trying to build a business formula that works... And it looks like they're succeeding. Presumably they could cut dev staff, stop all experiments, and get to profitability MUCH sooner-- maybe even today.

But that's how business works, right? It's all about intelligent debt to ultimately maximize the metrics you care about (presumably some combo of growth, revenue, profit, and lifestyle). You hire an employee, and you are spending time and money on them for a while before they are really contributing. You take funding so that you can run the experiments that require capital. You take your consulting profits and pump them (and your spare time) into product efforts. And some businesses scale differently than others (Amazon is a great example).

That's ALL DEBT. And it can all be smart debt (like a mortgage used to be!).

Just because companies are choosing a different flavor of debt or choosing markets that scale differently doesn't make them bad. I personally am THRILLED to give up a relatively small stake in our company so I don't have to consult and can run experiments about as fast as I want to.

Scarcity FORCES you to be smart-- but the lack of scarcity doesn't mean that you CAN'T be.