Underpants Gnomes: the wisdom of South Park

I repeat myself a lot. I have to; people are thick headed. People come into my office, or my email box and tell me all about their great business idea. I see startups get millions upon millions of VC money and all with the same business plan – which can be boiled down to this:

Phase I : Collect Users
Phase III : Profit

As I walked around explaining that plan to every jackass with a laptop and a table staked out in a coffee shop, I knew I had heard it before.

In 1998, the Underpants Gnomes episode of South Park aired. While they never really called out the tech bubble explicitly, as South Park is apt to do, the statement is clear.

Gnome: Stealing underpants Biiiiig business!
Kyle: Wait, business?! You know about business?!
Gnome: Sure! That’s what Gnomes do!
Kyle So, why have you been stealing all our underpants?
Gnome Phase I = Collect Underpants … Phase III = Profit!
Kyle Wait, what’s Phase II?
Gnome Don’t you understand!? It’s simple! Phase I = Collect Underpants … Phase III = Profit!

…. and so on.

A cartoon from 1998, gets it … how do you still not?

Gnomes Episode

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This entry was posted on Friday, April 3rd, 2009 at 2:51 pm and is filed under business, internet, retarded. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

One Response to “Underpants Gnomes: the wisdom of South Park”

  1. Nickolay Kotev says:
    April 3, 2009 at 2:52 pm

    Dear Friend!
    Welcome to my “Blog”, with electronic adress URL: http://nikotev.wordpress.com/ . The name of the blog is “History and I”
    The Blog is for SOE, OSS activity on the Balkans during the WWII, some problems of the modern wars in the end of XX Century, American Foreign policy and etc.
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    Your friend Nikolay Kotev

    Reply

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