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I distrust those activities. I feel it is sometimes an IP grab by the company, which wants to give its staff fewer reasons to leave and start new (competing or

by natch 6y ago

I distrust those activities. I feel it is sometimes an IP grab by the company, which wants to give its staff fewer reasons to leave and start new (competing or not) companies. Once an idea is recorded and time stamped internally, it is effectively dead for use by anyone leaving the company. Or at least has an elevated risk. You don’t even have to be the one who submitted the idea to end up being hung up by the fact that your previous day job can claim a stake (even a weak one due to not having acted) in all these related ideas.

MattGaiser 6y ago
My perspective is a bit different. I have thousands and thousands of ideas. I can never meaningfully act on most of them. So why not turn them into a couple hundred bucks for a page or two of writing? I have some ideas I quietly research and do not reveal that I may want to turn into a startup one day, but those are just a few of all of them. For example, my winning capstone project idea during my banking internship was in the mental health space. I have won other prizes in the professional mental health space as well. My interest in ever being in that space beyond ideation is 0 so I am not giving away anything that has other value to me.
- natch 6y ago
  >thousands of ideas Yeah me too. It’s a curse... wish I could focus on just one more often. Things I’ve “invented” in my mind only include mesh networking in 1997 (people thought I was crazy... why would someone share their bandwidth?). Actually submitted that one internally to a company that had the wherewithal and positioning to do it, a multi billion dollar idea, and they said “nope.” That company is now barely a wisp of a shadow of the behemoth it once was. I’m of the school of thought that it’s the doing that counts, and I respect it when someone brings things past a finish line. Anyway nice that you’ve found a fun and rewarding outlet for some of yours.
  - LoSboccacc 6y ago
    same, I wrote a nosql in 2004 it used XML on the api because json wasn't even a thing back then and I didn't even realize it was innovative it just felt the right solution for a customer's problem
    - hedora 6y ago
      I did the same and invented MapReduce a few years before the Google paper. I had a different fault tolerance model because the programs only needed a half dozen machines to run to completion, but the programing model was the same. It was so obviously the only way to handle datasets larger than RAM that I assumed it was common knowledge. I reinvented database query execution engines and an informal relational algebra on top of SQL a few years later. That thing was basically a JSON service API, except it used a home grown XML RPC layer (it was closer to modern approaches than the XML RPC standards being pushed at the time). Since then, I’ve developed an appreciation for good marketing people.

by natch 6y ago

MattGaiser 6y ago

My perspective is a bit different. I have thousands and thousands of ideas. I can never meaningfully act on most of them. So why not turn them into a couple hundred bucks for a page or two of writing? I have some ideas I quietly research and do not reveal that I may want to turn into a startup one day, but those are just a few of all of them. For example, my winning capstone project idea during my banking internship was in the mental health space. I have won other prizes in the professional mental health space as well. My interest in ever being in that space beyond ideation is 0 so I am not giving away anything that has other value to me.

natch 6y ago
>thousands of ideas Yeah me too. It’s a curse... wish I could focus on just one more often. Things I’ve “invented” in my mind only include mesh networking in 1997 (people thought I was crazy... why would someone share their bandwidth?). Actually submitted that one internally to a company that had the wherewithal and positioning to do it, a multi billion dollar idea, and they said “nope.” That company is now barely a wisp of a shadow of the behemoth it once was. I’m of the school of thought that it’s the doing that counts, and I respect it when someone brings things past a finish line. Anyway nice that you’ve found a fun and rewarding outlet for some of yours.
- LoSboccacc 6y ago
  same, I wrote a nosql in 2004 it used XML on the api because json wasn't even a thing back then and I didn't even realize it was innovative it just felt the right solution for a customer's problem
  - hedora 6y ago
    I did the same and invented MapReduce a few years before the Google paper. I had a different fault tolerance model because the programs only needed a half dozen machines to run to completion, but the programing model was the same. It was so obviously the only way to handle datasets larger than RAM that I assumed it was common knowledge. I reinvented database query execution engines and an informal relational algebra on top of SQL a few years later. That thing was basically a JSON service API, except it used a home grown XML RPC layer (it was closer to modern approaches than the XML RPC standards being pushed at the time). Since then, I’ve developed an appreciation for good marketing people.