I was forunate to have lunch with Said Mohammadioun today. Said goes way back. The first company he founded Samna was the first, yes first Windows based word processer.

Said was kind to spend some time with me. I was looking for some advice on Alele. Alele is a company concept that I have been working on. Alele is a personal online media storage center that allows consumers living a digital lifestyle to securely store, access, share, and publish digital files.

Sounded good to me.

Said asks great, I mean great questions. At a pace that I could not answer them until he was off to his next point. One of them, was that if the core product, which is online storage, does not stand on its own then there is no need to start adding on other things. He was telling me to focus, which is something that I often tell others to do.

Said distilled the issues surrounding the concept down to two. The first was can I market the service. The second was what about AOL, GOOG, and MSFT. He went on to say that I can’t really do anything about the latter. As for the former he told me to figure it out as inexpenisvely as possible.

Great advice from a good man.