Credit crisis. Blah, blah. Cut costs. Blah, blah. Don't you just love it when you get an alarm call from your hotel at 9.15 when your meeting is at 9.00? At ReadWriteWeb we have been sounding alarms about the economy for a year (here, here, here and here...enough already), suggesting strategies to cope with the coming downturn.

But what about now? This is the time to be audacious. The world has changed, totally and irrevocably. Change is the entrepreneur's friend.

In our search for that rare beast - the profitable VC backed venture - I interviewed Eileen Gittins, the CEO of Blurb. Blurb does Print On Demand publishing for both consumer and professional markets. They compete with Lulu, which announced today that it is "laying off 24 workers at its North Carolina plant because of the slowing economy". That is 25% of their workforce and includes their President. Eileen and I both had the same reaction: "you mean you only just learned that hard times are coming?!".