Startup Voice Pipes Up, Or Let's Make Some Noise!

I like blogs. I don't read them fanatically like some, nor do I even read them daily. But being the child of the Internet revolution that I am, I have my trusty Google reader set up to gather all the latest from all my favorite bloggers, and when I have a few minutes (hours) to kill, I allow myself this small guilty pleasure.

On my reading list is a blog that I really enjoy--Seth Godin's BLOG. The posts are characterized by being short and to the point, something I very much admire, having quite the opposite writing style myself (which falls more into the long and winded category, I am afraid). I think I saw a reference to Seth's Blog in Jeffrey Bussgang's book Mastering the VC Game, and got hooked!

Long story short, Seth posted a great little snippet yesterday, that has really stuck with me. It is so short, I will repost it in full:

I was talking to a colleague about all the noise out there in the world, all the messages, ads, announcements, pitches and friend requests.

"And you're sending even more every day into that maelstrom."

"No we're not," she said. "Ours isn't noise."

Yes it is.

I've been replaying the short dialogue in my mind and it is SOOO right on. But here's my take on it. We already live in an overabundant, oversaturated and oversated society. There is too much of everything, if you think about it (except maybe the stuff that you really want). There are too many TV shows, too many friends on Facebook (am I right?), too many mobile apps, too many wedding photographers, too many lawyers,... and too much noise.

Does that mean we should have less? Of course not! We, as a society, are an adaptive bunch. We just learn to navigate, to tune out the stuff that overwhelms us and then our world suddenly shrinks down to just the information that we can process, to the services we can consume, and to the friends we really care about.

If you aren't making noise, I would posit, you're as good as dead in this noisy time. And so Startup Voice is born, and we're planning on making some noise!

Subscribe to our RSS feed, add us to your reader, or just check in every so often. Or if it's just noise, ignore it altogether. We think there's enough audience for every noise-maker out there. :)

Inna Efimchik

Emergence Law Group, specializing in assisting emerging technology companies in Silicon Valley and beyond, provides incorporation, financing, and licensing services as well as general corporate counseling.