Harvard Business Publishing

Merrill, Lehman, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Bear Stearns, WaMu, AIG...thank goodness.

I was really starting to doubt myself.

This week has been one of those "crisis in confidence" periods for me, and it's not just that I'm expecting a child in 3 months--and hearing the sleepless, diaper-changing, non-stop- crying jag stories is starting to get to me. My worry has also been about Jamseed and feeling confident that we have the right idea at the right time and can execute on it.

The rebuild of our alpha site into beta is taking a month longer than expected. There's competition that's getting ever closer to our idea.

And, in my private conversations, I am having trouble getting people to believe in us. Let me give you some examples of what friends have said to me:

"What you need are top programmers, not some computer science students. You get what you pay for."

"Isn't [someone.com] already doing this? What do you know that they don't?" (For "someone.com," substitute any of a hundred names of startups backed by well-heeled VC funds.)

"If there were money in your idea, wouldn't someone already be doing it?"

"What's to keep bigguy.com from just sweeping and taking your idea?" (For "bigguy.com," substitute MySpace, Facebook, Apple, Sony, Warner, BMG, etc.)

And that's where the meltdown of Wall Street has restored the buoyancy in my step.

Because if you measure businesses skill by the yardstick of compensation (and how else to measure it?) the 7 CEOs of the firms listed above must be the smartest people in the world--they made more than $200 million in 2007, which is as much as the New York Times spends on its entire newsroom budget, including 1,332 employees. And if they can go from solvency to bankruptcy in the blink of an eye, who should you or I listen to but our own counsel?

To put it another way, if these educated, savvy, experienced managers don't have all the answers, why listen to them or anyone in blind faith? Why not think that someone without a track record can have as much of a shot as anyone else?

Bill Gates made his company in the shadow of the impossible-to-beat IBM. In fact, the US Government was still suing IBM for monopoly when Microsoft was pushing them out of the desktop software business. The boys at Google came along when DEC, Yahoo!, and others felt that Internet search had already been solved.

Maybe I'm right about Jamseed. Maybe I'm wrong. But we'll never know if I just give into the doubts and doubters.

Being successful and wealthy doesn't mean being infallible. It never did. I suppose having the financial backbone of our country implode shouldn't be required for me (or anyone) to have faith in themselves--a Lifetime movie would be less catastrophic--but it has reminded me that opportunity comes to people who don't give up on themselves.