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!

1. Ok, we can quibble about the market’s existence prior to the 1st prize (hell, Boeing is in the news daily here in Seattle). But.. I walked away convinced that there was at least $1B of new market created, in addition to anything pre-existing.

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The number 402 is following me, you could call it my lucky number. And apparently I’m sharing the luck with my cofounders. I should probably take our investors’ money to Vegas and bet on 402. Back when I first moved to the east coast my first apartment was at 402 Broadway in Cambridge. My office at MIT, where I first met and worked with my cofounders was in Building 26, office 402. When we started Cloudant we set up shop in a small basement office at 402 Highland Ave. in Somerville. Starting to get creepy right? Well, this week we finally moved into our new office space in the south end. We had outgrown the place in Davis Sq. and as much as we are going to miss its horror-movie ambiance (no really, when we moved in that office looked like the set of “Saw”) we couldn’t be more excited about our new digs. Where are they? 580 Harrison Avenue, Suite 402. If I were a man that believed in such things, I would think the universe was trying to tell me something. My colleagues tell me that 402 is an obscure HTTP error code for “Payment Required.” Maybe the universe is calling in some IOUs, or maybe it’s just suggesting that we need to charge more.

Anyway, here are a few pictures of the team working in the new space. The new office has exposed brick wall, large windows without bars on them, and enough room for more than three desks. All of these amenities were lacking in the old office.

It’s a big upgrade from our previous place. If you have the time and the inclination, please stop by to say hi. We’re always happy to chat about CouchDB, startups, complex data problems, NOSQL, and our favorite Twilight Zone episodes. Oh yeah, and if all this sounds enticing (and how could it not?) we’re looking for a crack devops engineer to join the team. If you are serious about keeping the servers well-oiled, building distributed systems, and providing a great cloud service, apply here