17. Fire vs Insurance

I remember a Far Side cartoon I read a few years ago. Two cavemen were standing around a little fire which, apparently, they had discovered by accident. They had a look of surprise and joy on their face, and their hands were in the air.

The first caveman exclaimed: "I invented fire!"

The second caveman exclaimed: "I invented insurance!"

The insight here is pretty deep: although fire is one of the four elements, nobody has ever been able to create a business, let alone an industry, based on fire.

Insurance, however, is a multi-billion-dollar industry.

In a way, the Internet is like fire. The inventor of the Internet, Vincent Cerf, didn't make money from it. One Christmas eve, he generously decided to "give it away" to the millions of people on Earth (he was rewarded only years later with a $500,000 prize from a European organization).

Other people, such as the founders of Netscape, Yahoo!, Amazon, eBay, Skype, etc. DID make a lot of money from the Internet.

The basic difference between inventors who don't make money (inventors or discoverers of fire, Internet, etc.) and entrepreneurs who DO make lots of money, is that the latter had a clear system for creating value and for delivering that value to people who wanted it and were willing to pay for it.

This is precisely what we teach in the BMW workshop: create a business system that creates economic value all the time, so you can make money all the time (even when you're sleeping).