Startups should never ask permission

VC Fred has a crucial insight for startups: you’ve got to break established rules, especially when it comes to asking permission. He cites Google as a great example. They didn’t ask permission, they just crawled other people’s web pages. Fred is right that content owners would have balked at giving permission had it been asked. Now, Google’s awesome search service drives much of their traffic. YouTube did the same thing for video. They allowed people to put anything up. If a content owner complains, they take it down. This will play out just like it did for Google: When YouTube starts selling high quality copies of copyrighted content, they will make the content owners a whole lot money, all while providing a crucial consumer service. Even now the masses of low quality YouTube videos are just free advertising for content owners.