Just to name a few of these folks so you get the picture, there’s Amol Sarva (Peek), Ken Reisman (TLists), Damon Horowitz (Aardvark), Patrick Byrne (Overstock), Josh Snyder (Treeline Labs), and of course Chris Dixon (Hunch). And that’s just off the top of my head!

Quite an impressive bunch! I’ve come up with a few hypotheses on how philosophy training makes entrepreneurs like these so formidable:

• Philosophers seek to structure the world. So when confronted with all of the uncertainty and turbulence of a startup, they are able to structure a sensible plan that their teams can execute.
• Philosophers are deeply analytical. Rather than run their businesses on pure gut instinct, they look for evidence. By applying their analytical powers, they are able to reduce business risk.
• Philosophers strive to find deeper truths. To hire the best people for your team, you need a compelling vision. Philosophers try to identify these deeper truths, and they articulate them to attract the best talent.
• Philosophers like to argue. Intense debate is a central feature of most philosophy classes. This gives philosophers an abundance of confidence in their points of view, which helps them raise money from investors.
• Philosophers aren’t afraid of risk. After all, they chose to study philosophy in school! Anybody who goes into a field knowing there are no job opportunities must love taking a gamble.

Reading over my list, I almost wish I had studied philosophy as an undergrad! If you are still in school and want to be a tech entrepreneur, maybe it’s time to head on over to the philosophy department….

Many times in my career, I’ve had the misfortune (fortune?) of being declined for a job for the stated reason of being “overqualified”. Each time, it baffled me. I won’t reveal who some of these companies were, because I don’t wish to embarrass them, but suffice it to say that many were leaders in their respective industries. Why on Earth would a company close their doors to good people?

Some companies claim that they simply don’t have the budget to hire someone of higher skill. While this may be a valid excuse for small companies who are truly short on capital, no large company should ever voice this rationale.

After all, people are a company’s most precious resource. They are the source of all growth. Talent as it relates to growth obeys a power law: The top 5% of the people in your company really do contribute at least 50% of the value, especially in innovation-driven industries. By spending an additional 5% on compensation to get a few extra exceptional people, a company has the potential to grow 50% more quickly.

When Ken and I started Pluribo, we firmly committed ourselves to this philosophy. We engaged in serious talks with two candidates who were outstanding and possibly even “overqualified” for our immediate needs. Yet we were willing to pay them a salary far above ours and to give them outsized portions of the company’s equity. We knew that having the smartest people could cost us more in the short-term, but would multiply our chance of success in the long-run.

So when a talented person comes knocking on your door, you should bend over backwards to find a place for them in your organization. Even if you can’t find a position for them in your immediate group, shop them around to another group within your organization. If you don’t have the money to pay them at their market rate, offer them what you can. Who knows, they might love your mission enough to take it. But whatever you do, don’t let them get away.

Vivek Wadhwa, a very insightful scholar on entrepreneurship, wrote a post on TechCrunch presenting data that he says shows that most successful entrepreneurs were not “born” with a desire to build companies. Instead, they stumbled onto this path later in life. From my own experience, and from my observations of many of my peers, I find his data and his conclusions to be spot-on.

From a policy standpoint, the reason this is so important is that the vast majority of America’s economic growth comes from new ventures. So if we can find out how to scale up the number of entrepreneurs, we can achieve much more vibrant economic growth. As Vivek notes, this is a primary goal of the Kauffman Foundation, who have put together a curriculum to teach entrepreneurial skills to would-be entrepreneurs.

But I want to look back one step in the pipeline: Even if we assume that entrepreneurial skills can be “taught”, and even if we assume that a suitable curriculum can be assembled, how do we make people interested in becoming entrepreneurs in the first place? The conventional wisdom is that capitalism already provides the proper incentives. After all, if you build a successful company, you are likely to become very wealthy. Isn’t that enough motivation?

In my view, people who are primarily after financial rewards are the most anemic entrepreneurs. Instead, most of the men and women who have built America’s greatest companies were not originally motivated by wealth creation. They were just having fun.

Examples of this principle abound. Larry Page and Sergey Brin didn’t build Google because they wanted to be rich. They built Google as part of their grad school research; their passion was data mining. In fact, they didn’t want to even build a company. They would have been happy just licensing the technology. Had Yahoo taken them up on the offer, there would be no Google at all. Going back further in history, Apple was able to market an “insanely great” computer because the Woz was a gigantic hardware geek and had already built a phenomenal product — just for fun. He simply loved the challenge of designing elegant circuits. For a more modern-day example, Facebook wasn’t originally conceived as a business either. Mark Zuckerberg and friends were simply combining two of their passions: hacking code and finding women to date. The result was Facebook. Once it was clear they had a hit on their hands, only then did they form a company.

In essence, all of these innovators were accidental entrepreneurs. They were having a blast following a passion, and only later decided to take the leap to entrepreneurship. Therefore, the big challenge in my mind is not whether or how to “teach” entrepreneurship, but rather how do we get people in our society to better follow their passions? How do we get people to choose a line of work because they find it fun? If we could celebrate a set of social values that places a preeminence on working for fun rather than for wealth, I think we’d see far more entrepreneurship in our country. That, in turn, would create far more prosperity.

Check it out: <a href=”http://www.pluribo.com”>Pluribo</a>.

We even got some very nice coverage from <a href=”http://techcrunch.com/2008/06/30/pluribo-is-cliffsnotes-for-amazon-reviews/”>TechCrunch</a> and <a href=”http://lifehacker.com/397280/pluribo-summarizes-hundreds-of-amazon-product-reviews”>LifeHacker</a>, which is just about every tech startup’s dream.

It was all kind of surreal. I’ve been in Boston this weekend, and I was staying over at my sister’s apartment in Brookline. At the time our product went public, I was alone in the apartment, sitting at her dining table. With my laptop at hand, I was analyzing all of the server dashboards to make sure the system was weathering the traffic storm it was getting from those major blogs.

And there, in front of my eyes, in the silence of a quiet Brookline afternoon, I watched the traffic graph go up, up and away. It was an emotional moment– thinking that I, just one person in some anonymous apartment building, was bringing to life a technology that thousands of people were interacting with right then and there.

I’d always wanted to get into the technology business because I believed it held the promise to impact the lives of so many people. I remember reading an essay by Douglas Engelbart, the inventor of the computer mouse, in which he discussed the mind-boggling idea that through his work, he was vicariously touching millions of people every day as they held a mouse in their hands.

Well, we didn’t touch a million people today, but we did touch thousands. If I made their life better in some small way today, that’s not bad for a year’s worth of work.

Of course, now that we’re launched, the hard work really begins! Looking forward to it!