How Many Ways Can You Spin an Idea?

One insight can produce many companies. My obsessive music habit as a teen has already driven three.

- DON MACKINNON

I have built two companies and am now growing my third, Hark Audio. Often, people wonder how serial entrepreneurs like me continually come up with new ideas, and my answer is this: Starting a business doesn’t always mean starting from scratch. If you have a powerful, foundational insight about something people love, you can make a career out of building concepts on top of it.

Dennis Crowley did something like this. His obsession with location-based social media led him to form Dodgeball, which he sold to Google, and then to cofound Foursquare. Similarly, Paul Davison and Rohan Seth were passionate about finding new and more intimate ways of connecting people, which led to multiple failed startups and then one that hit: Clubhouse.