Easter Egg Hunting

Posted by Pinky on Apr 5, 2010 in Blog | 3 comments

My fiancé and I spent this Easter Sunday with some close friends and their horde of ‘little ones.’  The oldest is 4 and the youngest is <1.  (I haven’t gotten the hang of the whole age-by-months thing yet.)  Anyhow, we held an Easter Egg hunt for them.  The eggs were strewn all over the yard in mostly very obvious places, with a few challenging exceptions.  I was the official photographer.

As I entered the back yard and took a look at the landscape, my first thought was, “well, this isn’t going to be very hard.”  Really, I figured that the first kid to get back there was going to clean up and all the others would be left standing there, crying about not getting any candy.

I could not have been more wrong.

Maybe it was my towering height compared to theirs that gave me a perspective on the landscape that they were not privy to.  Maybe it was my Farmville experience, where you’re taught to meticulously harvest and plow each individual sector in order to reap the rewards.  (Though I still don’t know why I play that game.)  Whatever my advantage, I was amazed to see the kids literally stepping right over eggs on the lawn in pursuit of another that had caught their attention all the way across the yard.  And I mean literally.

I’ve been thinking about that phenomenon ever since.  As I read through a fascinating interview this morning with some of the investors behind Google, facebook, Four Square, Skype, Salesforce.com, and in some cases ALL OF THE ABOVE, I had a revelation.

Business is exactly like Easter Egg hunting.  Those with experience scratch their heads constantly, wondering why amateurs make the decisions they do.  But those newbies, so to speak, are elated at the discovery of just one of those eggs, and all the more inspired to go search for more.  In its simplest form, I think business is all about the thrill of the hunt, the joy of discovery and the drive to get in on a few jelly beans.

Happy hunting!