For example, think of all the software people go go to school, learn java, and then build big ugly enterprise bank, insurance, whatever software inside some megacorp that nobody cares about.
For what it's worth, nothing requires Enterprise software to be big, ugly, boring, hard to use, etc. Maybe I'm biased, since I'm working on an Enterprise Software startup, but I think this stuff can be damn interesting. Then again, I'm in the "Enterprise 2.0" space, and am working with interesting stuff like social network analysis, activity streams, machine learning, text mining, semantic web tech, etc. Maybe writing accounting software is boring, but the stuff we're doing has a lot of interesting aspects to it, IMHO.
From my experience of working in a large enterprise, it's that people don't really buy the software, they buy the support, the ecosystem, and (buy into) the sales process. In our case we were finally going to implement online code-review. There were plenty of "cooler" products out there, and my team tested a few of them, but ultimately the company decided to go with another company because it was established, their sales guy came out and schmoozed, and they liked the support contract that was offered over having to maintain things themselves.
I think the successful companies that make the boring software have simply realized that the cool-factor of the software is not a major selling point in their market.
Not in the sense of looking for "employees", no. Looking for (a) co-founder(s), yes. A co-founder would need to be (or be able/willing to re-locate to) somewhere pretty close to Raleigh/Durham, NC. If you're interested, shoot me an email.
Note that this is still in self-funded, bootstrap", "nights and weekends" mode. :-)
For what it's worth, nothing requires Enterprise software to be big, ugly, boring, hard to use, etc. Maybe I'm biased, since I'm working on an Enterprise Software startup, but I think this stuff can be damn interesting. Then again, I'm in the "Enterprise 2.0" space, and am working with interesting stuff like social network analysis, activity streams, machine learning, text mining, semantic web tech, etc. Maybe writing accounting software is boring, but the stuff we're doing has a lot of interesting aspects to it, IMHO.