Dave Eggers on waiting for

Dave Eggers on waiting for the right time to exploit your indie success:

“In your own city, you have The Onion, which was started by a few people with a little money, and now they’re doing pretty well. But they could have gone to New York right away and asked some publisher for the initial funding, and they would have been quickly refused. Or, if funded, the publisher/investor would have changed everything quickly and dramatically, until it sucked. So the Onion people could have complained about how terrible corporate America was, and how they weren’t given a chance, etc. But instead The Onion did it on their own, the way they had envisioned it, and a huge audience responded to the purity of their vision, and how fucking perfect everything they did was. Now huge publishers pay The Onion extravagantly to do exactly what The Onion wants to do. The lesson is, if you make something good and it finds an audience, you’ll always have the option of getting money people to pay you to continue doing exactly what you’re doing.”

The Internet economy that was in effect over the past couple years seemed to function in exactly the opposite manner. Maybe Dave is on to something here…