HXBC.us - 竹難月金

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> At a party last night someone asked me what do I want to do, after I, in an effort to increase my attractiveness, proclaimed in front of a small group that I am an unemployed bum. Fueled by alcohol, and the lack of will to give a 30 minutes rant, I just answered "something that wows me." Of course, that begs the obvious question of what that something is. Feeling like being a smartass (which is again, totally attractive), I said by definition I wouldn't know what's going to wow me. Surprisingly, there was agreement within the circle, which clearly meant my answer didn't stand out enough. So I proceeded to prove myself wrong by giving an example of what would wow me, and at the same time withheld enough details to be vague (damn NDA). This is an attempt to give a sober clarification, while at the same time be brief enough that if I were to say it in a party, no one would walk away to pretend to get a drink or take a bathroom break.
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> I will first admit that my views maybe screwed by the fact that I've been doing quite a number of interviews recently. After a while they all seem similar. You go in, shake hands with people whose names you barely know, answer a question or two, and then maybe bullshit at each other for a few minutes. Invariably, part of the process involves someone telling you that the sector they are in is a multi-billion dollar market, and they are totally going to disrupt it. After being told so many times that their companies are going to be a billion dollar company, it's hard to not go "ya right" and promptly forget everything that you've heard.
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> I will also admit that my sample space of what wows me is quite limited. Limited as in one. And my enthusiasm for that place has lowered quite a bit since I was first wow'ed, for reasons that would take too long to explain at a party, so I will omit here.
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> What wow'ed me about them wasn't about what they do, or how large their sector is, or how they are totally going to take over that entire market. In fact, what they do sounded so uninteresting that I passed on them once (which is why now I am talking to places quite indiscriminately). Before talking to them in depth, I had half a dozen theories of how they were approaching the problem. Those theories turned out to be all correct, which was boring. What wasn't boring was the fact that they lied, or at least was being misleading. They claim to be doing A, but they are actually building a flexible platform, of which A is currently the easiest way to make customers pay them. If they want to, they can easily (with a lot of hand waving) do B, C, and D. And they can do that because they've inserted themselves between their customers and their customers' customers. Not only that, what they are building is technically interesting. The technique is not entirely novel, and yet the application of it in this setting is something that I don't believe anyone else is doing, and is difficult enough that it seemed like magic.
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> So to summarize, one of the things that wows me is a technically interesting platform that happens to solve some real problems, in a way that not only I couldn't think of, but is also difficult enough that no one else is doing it.