God's Crowdsourcing Ctd.

The post below on God as a crowd-sourcer makes the argument that many aspects of the web use the evolution concept over the intelligent design concept. I meant to link as well to this post from the Union Square Ventures blog, which was an inspiration for my argument, this time applying it not to the design of a site or program, but rather to the design of a company itself. The post is from waaaay back in 2005:

Nick is right, there are two ways to build a company (and probably many more).

You can design it from scratch, figuring out exactly what you want to build, getting it all down on paper, raising some money, and then building it. And there are plenty of success stories for that way of building a company.

Or you can just find yourself doing a startup because something you started as a hobby, or to serve your own needs, just took on a life of its own and you have no choice but to evolve it into a business.

We don't have a preference for one way or the other, but I will say that there is something particularly special about the companies that are created via the evolution approach.

They seem more "authentic", to borrow a word from David Beisel.