Just a caveat to anyone who DOES want to start an "easy business"... In Founders at Work (another great book from Apress), Paul Graham talks about starting Via

Just a caveat to anyone who DOES want to start an "easy business"... In Founders at Work (another great book from Apress), Paul Graham talks about starting Viaweb (which Yahoo bought to power Yahoo Stores): Graham: "We had this angry phone conversation where he [co-founder Robert Morris] said something like, 'We’ve been working on this thing for a whole month, and it’s still not finished.' It’s funny in retrospect, because we were still working on it 3 years later. At the time, I was just thinking about how to get him to keep working on it for another month..." In the same book, Max Levchin talks about starting Paypal: Levchin: "It was pretty funny because we met with all these people in the banking and credit card processing industry, and they said, 'Fraud is going to eat you for lunch.' We said, 'What fraud?'" Levchin ended up spending almost all of his time writing software to tackle fraud, which turned out to be Paypal's core competence. He now calls PayPal "a security company pretending to be a financial services company." So, again, keep that caveat in mind when you're looking for an "easy" business. Letting people email money? What could be easier? Muahahahahahaha...