After graduating from MSOE I was in deep trouble to think what would be the field I am interested in and would like to follow in my future career. Luckily a friend of mine was already working at Dropbox, so I got a peak into what the cloud would effectively mean as a field of business. It was then when an idea arose to create a cloud storage service which would address not only the storage of files, but also the collaboration with others.
A couple of years went by doing research, during this time I was already working for Amazon just in my field of interest - the cloud. So when the setting was right, I took the chance to create XXL Cloud as being an alternative to the already established cloud storage firms. So one might ask, why create a cloud storage service, when the competition is already light years ahead in acquiring and forming the market?
Do your thing, even if the odds are against it
Doing my homework, checking out the cloud storage market I found one very interesting thing. The cloud was a multi-billion dollar market already. So would I put myself in the position to compete with unicorns like Dropbox or Box.com? Friends and relatives voted against this venture, approaching VCs and Angels - the same. So what would be the sense to create a Cloud Storage business if I wouldn't be able to fund it? And yet. I decided to go for it. To create something really great I would be proud of. Yet I had not found what would be the USP (Unique Selling Proposition) for what I had to offer, but this crystallized pretty soon after getting hands on, actually writing the prototype of XXL Cloud. Security was in demand, and when thinking about it, there was a huge gap between simply storing files with a provider such as Amazon S3 and securely storing data in the cloud, without anyone being able to tamper with my data. So the idea changed and switched towards a secure service, which would allow users to store files encrypted, and this being said, encrypted end-to-end.
Data would need to be encrypted on a users device with a key which would not be allowed on any other device, and not be transferred to the servers which would handle data synchronization. After the initial problem solving phase - after all there was a prototype which we tested with a sample 2500 users. 6 month of fixing bugs and creating the final release version. Finally I launched the service - against any odds, and now, 6 month in business a dazzling 100K users are already using it.
So never ever don't do your thing. If you believe it, go for it. Whoever, whatever - find out for yourself - and be the entrepreneur you deserve to be.