5 ms·

"useless and unlikely to work" -/-> wrong

nostrademons 9y ago
But without the benefit of hindsight, how do you tell the difference? When I look at some of the giant wins of the last major tech wave, often times the key factors in their success were external events that happened after the formation of the company. AirBnB benefitted massively from the housing bubble & financial crisis (3 years after formation), which created a large class of people who were desperate for income and whose primary residence was their primary income-producing asset. Uber had to try the idea multiple times before cell phone batteries became good enough to run navigation continuously in the car (2 years after formation), and took off because of the publicity of getting sued by San Francisco. WhatsApp took off after the addition of push notifications to iOS (~18 months after formation) made it feasible to use as a messenger rather than just a status update. All of these companies certainly did things to influence their success, in particular having a product on the market at the time the market changed to take advantage of the product. But for most of them the product was actually wrong in the sense that it was a complete failure in the market until that market changed. Brian Chesky's fond of calling AirBnB "the worst startup idea that actually worked". It's like the formula for success = preparedness + luck. This cribsheet does a good job at preparedness, but you have to acknowledge the role of luck if you want to actually capitalize on that preparedness, and being afraid to work on the wrong ideas will often shut you out of ideas that require some luck to work.
- brucephillips 9y ago
  > But without the benefit of hindsight, how do you tell the difference? See value missed by others. Do you have sources for any of the success factors you described? My understanding was that WhatsApp's success was largely due to focusing on feature phones, increasing ubiquity. Regardless, none of this changes the fact that OP is correct in saying that you shouldn't work on the wrong ideas, of course.
  - nostrademons 9y ago
    WhatsApp's push notification story is in the Wikipedia page, though I think I'd read it in a news story profiling Jan Koum after the acquisition: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WhatsApp#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WhatsApp#History I was wrong about timing though: it was only about 6 months after WhatsApp was incorporated (2 years after they left Yahoo though, so they might have been working on it beforehand).
- edmondlau 9y ago
  I like the bottom-line perspective you provide at the end, of "success = preparedness + luck." Preparedness is what we can train ourselves for, and preparedness also has the effect of making you more able to see and take advantage of opportunities that come your way. And to someone who doesn't know how much you've prepared, it appears that you're just luckier.
  - brucephillips 9y ago
    But these examples are cherry picked. Was Google lucky? Oracle? Hotmail? Take away what luck might exist, and would they not still be billion dollar companies?
  - KKKKkkkk1 9y ago
    I used to work for a startup whose founder loved quoting Louis Pasteur: "Fortune favors the well-prepared mind." Then again, that dude was building a medical device based on his PhD research. Most Silicon Valley founders would scoff at that quote.
    - phillc73 9y ago
      What was the outcome of that startup? Did the product make it to market? I'm currently working on commercialising a pharmaceutical manufacturing monitoring device[1], based on the work from someone's PhD. [1] https://www.phyllon.at https://www.phyllon.at
- alok-g 9y ago
  >> It's like the formula for success = preparedness + luck. Would saying "success = preparedness * luck" be better?
shrimp_emoji 9y ago
Like communism!

But without the benefit of hindsight, how do you tell the difference? When I look at some of the giant wins of the last major tech wave, often times the key factors in their success were external events that happened after the formation of the company. AirBnB benefitted massively from the housing bubble & financial crisis (3 years after formation), which created a large class of people who were desperate for income and whose primary residence was their primary income-producing asset. Uber had to try the idea multiple times before cell phone batteries became good enough to run navigation continuously in the car (2 years after formation), and took off because of the publicity of getting sued by San Francisco. WhatsApp took off after the addition of push notifications to iOS (~18 months after formation) made it feasible to use as a messenger rather than just a status update. All of these companies certainly did things to influence their success, in particular having a product on the market at the time the market changed to take advantage of the product. But for most of them the product was actually wrong in the sense that it was a complete failure in the market until that market changed. Brian Chesky's fond of calling AirBnB "the worst startup idea that actually worked". It's like the formula for success = preparedness + luck. This cribsheet does a good job at preparedness, but you have to acknowledge the role of luck if you want to actually capitalize on that preparedness, and being afraid to work on the wrong ideas will often shut you out of ideas that require some luck to work.

brucephillips 9y ago
> But without the benefit of hindsight, how do you tell the difference? See value missed by others. Do you have sources for any of the success factors you described? My understanding was that WhatsApp's success was largely due to focusing on feature phones, increasing ubiquity. Regardless, none of this changes the fact that OP is correct in saying that you shouldn't work on the wrong ideas, of course.
- nostrademons 9y ago
  WhatsApp's push notification story is in the Wikipedia page, though I think I'd read it in a news story profiling Jan Koum after the acquisition: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WhatsApp#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WhatsApp#History I was wrong about timing though: it was only about 6 months after WhatsApp was incorporated (2 years after they left Yahoo though, so they might have been working on it beforehand).
edmondlau 9y ago
I like the bottom-line perspective you provide at the end, of "success = preparedness + luck." Preparedness is what we can train ourselves for, and preparedness also has the effect of making you more able to see and take advantage of opportunities that come your way. And to someone who doesn't know how much you've prepared, it appears that you're just luckier.
- brucephillips 9y ago
  But these examples are cherry picked. Was Google lucky? Oracle? Hotmail? Take away what luck might exist, and would they not still be billion dollar companies?
- KKKKkkkk1 9y ago
  I used to work for a startup whose founder loved quoting Louis Pasteur: "Fortune favors the well-prepared mind." Then again, that dude was building a medical device based on his PhD research. Most Silicon Valley founders would scoff at that quote.
  - phillc73 9y ago
    What was the outcome of that startup? Did the product make it to market? I'm currently working on commercialising a pharmaceutical manufacturing monitoring device[1], based on the work from someone's PhD. [1] https://www.phyllon.at https://www.phyllon.at
alok-g 9y ago
>> It's like the formula for success = preparedness + luck. Would saying "success = preparedness * luck" be better?

shrimp_emoji 9y ago

Like communism!