The Decisive Flow team headed along to the Webstock mini conference on Tuesday night.

Apart from now knowing more about tag clouds than we ever thought we would, we also learned about living on the fringe. And the fringe is an exceptional place.

I loved the quote “We didn’t think we’d make any money off it, and we didn’t think it would last”

What a brilliant way to form an idea or start a company. I’m not being sarcastic. To do something purely for the love of it. How could you not be successful? Despite the fact Wellington is so small everyone is like your next door neighbor, the world is quite large, large enough for other people to share your passion and buy your stuff.

People who live on the fringe don’t start something for the sake of the ability to call themselves an ‘entrepreneur’. In fact I don’t even think they would consider themselves entrepreneurs.

People on the fringe don’t care about success. Success to them is living the life we all dream of.

People on the fringe, it seems, very quickly get off the fringe, upon achieving traditional success (Bill Gates was a fringe dweller, now his company is a fringe blocker)… Unless they are a special type of person who was born to decline adoration in favor of a good time.

People on the fringe probably can’t smoothly get their ideas across and charm investors (Which I DO believe was the point of the CodeBlacks team in the Half baked Challenge), but they prove that slick presentations mean nothing in comparison to just going out there and doing it.

Despite what the speaker said (and I’m sorry, I’ve completely forgotten his name, I’m terrible with names), I don’t believe companies CAN harness the fringe. It’s like when people catch hackers and try to train them up to work for the ‘good guys’. You gotta numb the fringe and tame the beast before they can work in your world. And when you have done that, they are no longer what you are after.

What I love about the people on the fringe is that you probably will never pick them. They wont be at the very events we go to to figure them out, they don’t talk up a storm about their achievements - they don’t even look at their achievements as achievements, just something they love to do. I think that’s what I found funny in the speech, the very concept of this type of person flies in the face of coming up with any strategy to harness their power. We know they are there, but no one can do anything about it. That must freak out the big guys.