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Airbnb's first iteration was presented as being much more about actually renting air mattresses and couches in people's home. They iterated into ebay for space
by brandnewlow 15y ago
Airbnb's first iteration was presented as being much more about actually renting air mattresses and couches in people's home. They iterated into ebay for spaces.
Dropbox's first iteration was a one-guy team working on the problem. The founder iterated into a two-founder team based on feedback. I'd say that's a significant iteration.
If you read The Facebook Effect, Facebook was simply the latest in a line of "fun hacks" Zuckerberg unleashed on his fellow students at Harvard, each one building on the next.
Sounds like every one of these projects involved iteration. It's fun to think awesomeness springs fully-formed from one's forehead, Zeus-like, but I don't that happens to often in practice.
- stdbrouw 15y agoReplace "iterate" with "kept working on and improving" and your comment makes just as much sense: any company, old or new, evolves and tries out new things and abandons other things that don't work — in that sense, saying iteration is crucial to startups is pretty much just a tautology. I think PG was hinting at the fact that for startups, iterating often means pivoting, so your first iteration doesn't necessarily lock you into path dependency. Which is a lesson that doesn't really apply to Facebook or Dropbox or Google, because they got the general direction right the first time.