I can’t take credit for the title, it’s a direct quote from a fantastic talk that I just saw by Peter Diamandis, the force behind the X Prize Foundation. Peter is a superb speaker. The room was packed and he didn’t disappoint. He is passionate, eloquent and flat-out inspiring. Now, I’ve been incredibly lucky to be surrounded by inspiration at MIT, Cloudant and Y-Combinator, but… Something about this talk really struck home.

From our time in YC and beyond, Paul Graham has always been pounding home a single message: make something people want. By now I’m sure everyone has seen the t-shirts and knows the slogan. Something about this motto has always struck me as just a bit, well, incomplete. Yes, I want to make something people want. Yes, that’s as good of a guiding principle as any on the path to success. However, following that mantra to its logical end can actually lead to sub-optimal outcomes on a whole. I’d bet a decent chunk of entrepreneurs (PG clearly included) actually want to make the world a better place while following their passions. Most of us at Cloudant spent the better parts of our young careers trying (sometimes in vain) to understand what the universe is made of and how it behaves! And somehow I’ve always felt this tension between those two poles: what the market wants and what actually makes the world a better place. And that’s when Peter’s message finally hit home.

Peter recognizes that sometimes free market forces alone don’t converge on the global minimum. Sometimes they need a nudge to escape a local minimum, and Peter has made it his life mission to use incentive prizes to nudge the market as needed.

The X Prize Foundation is awesome. They identify hard problems with high stakes impact on society as a whole (water, medicine, energy, enviornment) and create an innovative/entrepreneurial environment to solve those problems. For profit. Yes the X Prize Foundation is strictly philanthropic, but the contestants are anything but. The foundation only gives prize money to the winning team, but that doesn’t matter – they’ve just created a new market from scratch, and a big one to boot! In the case of the first X Prize, for space flight (actually 100 km elevation, to be precise), they’ve created a billion dollar industry, nearly overnight¹. To an entrepreneur that is simply amazing: the prize and the ecosystem it spawned ameliorate the risk. You don’t have to win the prize to be successful. Great team, great gumption, and clarity of vision: you’ve got a fighting chance to do anything. Great team, great gumption, clarity, revolutionary space, and guaranteed market‽ Now you’re really talking!

Finally, Peter opened and closed with a question: “What are you passionate about?” This is a big one. At Cloudant, we are passionate about innovation and it’s heartening to see the explosion of not just new companies and technology, but also forces such as YCombinator and the X Prize Foundation that are changing both the way innovation happens as well as what it targets. PG and Peter D. — keep it up!