7 ms·

"I thought people had an idea first before leaving"

71 points by PStamatiou 14y ago

mindcrime 14y ago
There's another common thought I hear voiced often: That you have to come up with an idea that no one else has done before - a green field idea. That's wrong. Competition in a space is often a sign that there's something valuable there. Competition is energizing. A lot of the ideas I'm thinking about exploring already have established players or startups - it's just that I think I can execute much better than them. Yep. There's a quote from Bob Parsons (of GoDaddy fame) that goes something like (paraphrased roughly) "Don't be afraid to enter a crowded market, just be better than everybody else." This is kind of our mindset at Fogbeam Labs, where - depending on how some details shake out - we'll be competing with everybody from Jive Software, Yammer, Alfresco and Broadvision (among others), to Salesforce, IBM, Cisco and Microsoft. But that's fine. We have an angle to pursue that we think will let us make some inroads against those guys, and we're spoiling for a good fight. Heck, as far as I'm concerned, those guys should be sleeping with one eye open. :-)
- jlarocco 14y ago
  Does that really change anything, though? In one case the great new idea is a new product, in the other case the great new idea is how to be better than the competition.
- varelse 14y ago
  I suspect Peter Thiel would likely say something along the lines of pursue the thing you know you're right about and which everyone else insists you're wrong... Which boils down to either extreme failure or extreme success and little in-between...
  - gaborcselle 14y ago
    This is something I don't agree with Peter Thiel on - at least for your first startup. Elon Musk couldn't have started SpaceX and Tesla right out of school, he had to build up skill, credentials, and connections first. For your first startup, make something awesome but try to fly people to Mars. A small acquisition or a business with nice revenue might be the better goal.
    - ovi256 14y ago
      I think you meant "but don't try to fly people to Mars". I'm mostly leaf reading, but it seems to me you are recommending a lean startup / lifestyle business as a first startup. A less ambitious endeavour than say, Google or Amazon, with the primary goal of acquiring skills, small but safer revenue, a stepping stone to the next, bigger, enterprise. Very inspiring, and something young engineers should think about. BTW, I restate my request from my unsolicited email (hope you don't mind): please share some startup ideas, even if execution is everything, some of us younger, less experienced engineers find brainstorming and finding ideas harder, and would really appreciate some inspiration.
      - bfe 14y ago
        Google started as an umpteenth search company on cheap machines and offered to sell out for one million, and Amazon started just by selling books from a website with buggy tech and workers kneeling on the floor to package the books. They both started at an easily accessible entry point too. But they each had a feasible path from humble to world-changing in a way that Elon maybe didn't going from online media and payments through a step function into disrupting transportation energy and yanking humanity into a spacefaring civilization. Even with, he was learning to get better at the game as he went along, and laying the foundation for SpaceX at the level of asking the rich questions, making the connections, and digging hard for elusive answers while he was still at x.com/PayPal. You probably always have to go through the foundation of exploring for the right questions to explore, to emerge with a meaningful advantage.
      - gaborcselle 14y ago
        Oh yes, I did mean the negative - thanks for the correction. Responded to your email too.
    - varelse 14y ago
      You have to take Peter Thiel as an ala carte buffet: In my own life, had I chosen the startup over grad school, I would easily be worth $100M+ right now. I had a ground floor opportunity I idiotically passed on because I was young, stupid, and too idealistic. So I see his point. That said, I shudder at the thought of hiring a programmer who struggled with calculus and nothing assures me better on that axis than straight As on math and computer science courses above and beyond requirements for their major. Individuals vary, and one of the best coders I know got a 2-year associates degree out of community college, but this is a really nice foot in the door for me when I don't know the person already.
  - mindcrime 14y ago
    I suspect Peter Thiel would likely say something along the lines of pursue the thing you know you're right about and which everyone else insists you're wrong... I didn't even realize it was Peter Thiel who said that, but I embrace that mindset as well. We have a document in our repo called "What we believe" that is where we catalog the things that we think about the world, that we suspect most everybody else would disagree with us on. Looking at that periodically is a valuable tool to help us focus on how we're going to be different.
Mz 14y ago
I am a little tired of the "ideas are a dime a dozen" mantra. It implies they are all equally "cheap". Yes, anyone can dream up some silly idea and spout off all day long about it and accomplish absolutely zilch. My dad was an armchair politician who had a "brilliant solution" to every social ill imaginable and never got off his duff to implement any of his ideas. So he never really got real world feedback concerning which ideas had merit and which were him just blowing smoke up everyone's ass. But that does not mean all ideas are equally cheap and worthless. They aren't. Good ideas are like the DNA of a product or service. Separating the wheat from the chaff is the purpose of executing and iterating. And don't confuse ideas with how people initially attempt to express what's rolling around in their head. People often don't know how to really effectively communicate such things. Iteration is often just an exercise in trying to figure out how to properly express the underlying idea. That is what pivoting is often about. Good ideas are not a dime a dozen. They aren't all that common. They are testable, the way Einstein's Theory of Relatively is provably a more accurate concept than Newtonian gravity.
- j2labs 14y ago
  The artist is nothing without the gift, but the gift is nothing without the work.
- joshu 14y ago
  I think what people typically call ideas should actually be called something else. I like the term "seeds" - plant it and it will grow into an actual idea. Execution is the water with which it grows.
- InclinedPlane 14y ago
  A big difficulty I think is that some people have a tendency towards idea reductionism. The idea for the iPod was a great one, but reducing that idea to its bare essentials of "I want to create another mp3 player" leaves a lot to be desired. But there are also some ideas that are so elegant and straightforward to implement that they can't be diminished by over simplification and they are valuable all on their own (hesco barriers being a perfect example). And there are some ideas that are tricky to express correctly and to execute but are still incredibly valuable. Ideas aren't everything, but they're a lot more than nothing as well.
Kuiper 14y ago
Competition in a space is often a sign that there's something valuable there. The company that this really brings to mind is DuckDuckGo. They're competing for the search market with Google and Microsoft--two of the biggest competitors you could possibly face. But search is huge and if you can claim even 0.1% of that market, you've got more than enough users to justify your existence.
- varelse 14y ago
  Google is fat and happy in search and ripe for the death by a thousand paper cuts IMO. DuckDuckGo is the first cut, Siri is the second, CloudSearch is the third. There will be many more.
  - myko 14y ago
    Siri? Doesn't Siri essentially aggregate Google's results directly? Also I'm not sure what user statistics on the service are but I don't know anyone who regularly uses Siri for anything other than to show people when asked about it.
michaelbuckbee 14y ago
My perception may be shaped by past experiences at various LargeCo's, but when I hear the phrase: "I'm leaving to work on my own thing, but don't have an idea yet." My mind translates that into: "I have an extremely clear idea of what I want to do, I also am extremely aware that any ideas that could possibly be thought of on company time may be claimed as the intellectual property of my employer." This may or may not be the case of Gabor and Google as I can't speak to their intellectual property arrangements, but there is nothing quite like a very public statement that you are intellectual property unencumbered to start things off.
- ChuckMcM 14y ago
  That would always be the safe response. There isn't a whole lot to be gained for the employee by telling the company why they are leaving. Some folks like to 'get off their chest' all their grievances in an exit interview but even that isn't advisable. The fact that you're leaving those 'losers' behind is great now, but later you might need to work with them again and well, lets just say that debt accumulates.
  - protomyth 14y ago
    On that note, do yourself a favor, write the resignation letter (on your own computer, turn the internet off) that you really want to write. Add all your gripes, hatreds, and problems with the place. Tell the true story of your leaving and why your soul was at risk if you stayed any longer. now print it out and delete the electronic copy Now you can turn back on the internet (since you now don't have to worry about accidentally sending something) and write a one paragraph resignation saying what your last day is and how you love everyone. Print and hand that in. Every time in the future when you wonder why you left, read the print out of your rant.
    - keithpeter 14y ago
      I used my diary (pure pen) but similar principle. Never burn the boats as you might need them!
  - 14y ago
amirmansour 14y ago
Well I'm glad my comment got you thinking. You really answered my question with the last line of your post: "it's just that I think I can execute much better than them." In a competitive space where so many products are doing the same thing execution becomes everything. You obviously have the experience and I wish you the best in whatever idea you pursue. One thing I do have to mention is that I bring a different perspective when I made my comment. I'm an electrical engineering student (graduating in two weeks) with only work experience from JPL and SpaceX. If I take up a job at any of those places after graduation, I would have to think more than twice before I ever contemplate leaving to pursue an idea. Then again my generation is full of risk takers, and I think I'm one of them.
- gaborcselle 14y ago
  Yes! Thanks a lot for the comment amirmansour. It certainly was the source of much controversy on here :-) One interesting change from last time I started a company (in the nuclear winter of 08/09) is that angel and seed funding is much easier to come by. That leads to a situation where there are lots of companies in almost every interesting space. Thus being able to out-execute them becomes even more relevant.
gyardley 14y ago
For web and mobile products, the act of building or prototyping is where you do most of the learning. I believe that you can't come up with great ideas in a vacuum. You build some mocks, you write some code, and you discover a bunch of things that you could improve on. Please tell me this sort of thinking isn't typical of Google's product organization. You do learn as you execute, but this just moves you towards a local maximum - a local maximum that might not be that exciting, if you've badly misunderstood the people you're building for. You do the most learning prior to starting, when you listen to the people you plan to build for and get to know them intimately - their problems, aspirations, values, and ethics. Getting to really know the worldview of your targets is how you come up with the direction that leads toward the global maximum, and it's all done before you write a line of code.
- gaborcselle 14y ago
  Good point, but taken to the extreme, if you listen to people too much they'll tell you they want a faster horse. You have to combine the aspirational thinking of "let's build a self-driving car" with the day-to-day grind of actually building it. Without the first, you end up in the local maximum you describe, without the latter you land in the "talk is cheap" box. My post is about the fact that you can in fact leave your job and go through a phase of prototyping one product after another, and deliberately testing each idea for not just how great it sounds but how buildable it is.
alexshye 14y ago
I'm no expert in entrepreneurship, but have to believe this is true for the most part. Before leaving, most people probably have a vision of something to start on -- but without (1) building the real product, (2) dealing with the details, and (3) interacting with customers, its only a vague vision. Along the way, things will change, people pivot, founders get new ideas, etc. Here's another way to think about it: there is probably a good reason behind YC accepting people without an idea.
typicalrunt 14y ago
Ideas are dime a dozen. Give me some smart friends to brainstorm with and we'll come up with several great ideas today that will be $100M+ businesses in a few years. Those are some big words to swallow. I doubt he could do that but I'd love to be proven wrong. If anything, what he wrote comes down to the old adage of "easier said than done".
- coreygoodie 14y ago
  As DMX poetically said, "Talk is cheap, motherlover."

71 points by PStamatiou 14y ago

There's another common thought I hear voiced often: That you have to come up with an idea that no one else has done before - a green field idea. That's wrong. Competition in a space is often a sign that there's something valuable there. Competition is energizing. A lot of the ideas I'm thinking about exploring already have established players or startups - it's just that I think I can execute much better than them. Yep. There's a quote from Bob Parsons (of GoDaddy fame) that goes something like (paraphrased roughly) "Don't be afraid to enter a crowded market, just be better than everybody else." This is kind of our mindset at Fogbeam Labs, where - depending on how some details shake out - we'll be competing with everybody from Jive Software, Yammer, Alfresco and Broadvision (among others), to Salesforce, IBM, Cisco and Microsoft. But that's fine. We have an angle to pursue that we think will let us make some inroads against those guys, and we're spoiling for a good fight. Heck, as far as I'm concerned, those guys should be sleeping with one eye open. :-)

jlarocco 14y ago
Does that really change anything, though? In one case the great new idea is a new product, in the other case the great new idea is how to be better than the competition.
varelse 14y ago
I suspect Peter Thiel would likely say something along the lines of pursue the thing you know you're right about and which everyone else insists you're wrong... Which boils down to either extreme failure or extreme success and little in-between...
- gaborcselle 14y ago
  This is something I don't agree with Peter Thiel on - at least for your first startup. Elon Musk couldn't have started SpaceX and Tesla right out of school, he had to build up skill, credentials, and connections first. For your first startup, make something awesome but try to fly people to Mars. A small acquisition or a business with nice revenue might be the better goal.
  - ovi256 14y ago
    I think you meant "but don't try to fly people to Mars". I'm mostly leaf reading, but it seems to me you are recommending a lean startup / lifestyle business as a first startup. A less ambitious endeavour than say, Google or Amazon, with the primary goal of acquiring skills, small but safer revenue, a stepping stone to the next, bigger, enterprise. Very inspiring, and something young engineers should think about. BTW, I restate my request from my unsolicited email (hope you don't mind): please share some startup ideas, even if execution is everything, some of us younger, less experienced engineers find brainstorming and finding ideas harder, and would really appreciate some inspiration.
    - bfe 14y ago
      Google started as an umpteenth search company on cheap machines and offered to sell out for one million, and Amazon started just by selling books from a website with buggy tech and workers kneeling on the floor to package the books. They both started at an easily accessible entry point too. But they each had a feasible path from humble to world-changing in a way that Elon maybe didn't going from online media and payments through a step function into disrupting transportation energy and yanking humanity into a spacefaring civilization. Even with, he was learning to get better at the game as he went along, and laying the foundation for SpaceX at the level of asking the rich questions, making the connections, and digging hard for elusive answers while he was still at x.com/PayPal. You probably always have to go through the foundation of exploring for the right questions to explore, to emerge with a meaningful advantage.
    - gaborcselle 14y ago
      Oh yes, I did mean the negative - thanks for the correction. Responded to your email too.
  - varelse 14y ago
    You have to take Peter Thiel as an ala carte buffet: In my own life, had I chosen the startup over grad school, I would easily be worth $100M+ right now. I had a ground floor opportunity I idiotically passed on because I was young, stupid, and too idealistic. So I see his point. That said, I shudder at the thought of hiring a programmer who struggled with calculus and nothing assures me better on that axis than straight As on math and computer science courses above and beyond requirements for their major. Individuals vary, and one of the best coders I know got a 2-year associates degree out of community college, but this is a really nice foot in the door for me when I don't know the person already.
- mindcrime 14y ago
  I suspect Peter Thiel would likely say something along the lines of pursue the thing you know you're right about and which everyone else insists you're wrong... I didn't even realize it was Peter Thiel who said that, but I embrace that mindset as well. We have a document in our repo called "What we believe" that is where we catalog the things that we think about the world, that we suspect most everybody else would disagree with us on. Looking at that periodically is a valuable tool to help us focus on how we're going to be different.

Mz 14y ago

I am a little tired of the "ideas are a dime a dozen" mantra. It implies they are all equally "cheap". Yes, anyone can dream up some silly idea and spout off all day long about it and accomplish absolutely zilch. My dad was an armchair politician who had a "brilliant solution" to every social ill imaginable and never got off his duff to implement any of his ideas. So he never really got real world feedback concerning which ideas had merit and which were him just blowing smoke up everyone's ass. But that does not mean all ideas are equally cheap and worthless. They aren't. Good ideas are like the DNA of a product or service. Separating the wheat from the chaff is the purpose of executing and iterating. And don't confuse ideas with how people initially attempt to express what's rolling around in their head. People often don't know how to really effectively communicate such things. Iteration is often just an exercise in trying to figure out how to properly express the underlying idea. That is what pivoting is often about. Good ideas are not a dime a dozen. They aren't all that common. They are testable, the way Einstein's Theory of Relatively is provably a more accurate concept than Newtonian gravity.

j2labs 14y ago
The artist is nothing without the gift, but the gift is nothing without the work.
joshu 14y ago
I think what people typically call ideas should actually be called something else. I like the term "seeds" - plant it and it will grow into an actual idea. Execution is the water with which it grows.
InclinedPlane 14y ago
A big difficulty I think is that some people have a tendency towards idea reductionism. The idea for the iPod was a great one, but reducing that idea to its bare essentials of "I want to create another mp3 player" leaves a lot to be desired. But there are also some ideas that are so elegant and straightforward to implement that they can't be diminished by over simplification and they are valuable all on their own (hesco barriers being a perfect example). And there are some ideas that are tricky to express correctly and to execute but are still incredibly valuable. Ideas aren't everything, but they're a lot more than nothing as well.

Kuiper 14y ago

Competition in a space is often a sign that there's something valuable there. The company that this really brings to mind is DuckDuckGo. They're competing for the search market with Google and Microsoft--two of the biggest competitors you could possibly face. But search is huge and if you can claim even 0.1% of that market, you've got more than enough users to justify your existence.

varelse 14y ago
Google is fat and happy in search and ripe for the death by a thousand paper cuts IMO. DuckDuckGo is the first cut, Siri is the second, CloudSearch is the third. There will be many more.
- myko 14y ago
  Siri? Doesn't Siri essentially aggregate Google's results directly? Also I'm not sure what user statistics on the service are but I don't know anyone who regularly uses Siri for anything other than to show people when asked about it.

michaelbuckbee 14y ago

My perception may be shaped by past experiences at various LargeCo's, but when I hear the phrase: "I'm leaving to work on my own thing, but don't have an idea yet." My mind translates that into: "I have an extremely clear idea of what I want to do, I also am extremely aware that any ideas that could possibly be thought of on company time may be claimed as the intellectual property of my employer." This may or may not be the case of Gabor and Google as I can't speak to their intellectual property arrangements, but there is nothing quite like a very public statement that you are intellectual property unencumbered to start things off.

ChuckMcM 14y ago
That would always be the safe response. There isn't a whole lot to be gained for the employee by telling the company why they are leaving. Some folks like to 'get off their chest' all their grievances in an exit interview but even that isn't advisable. The fact that you're leaving those 'losers' behind is great now, but later you might need to work with them again and well, lets just say that debt accumulates.
- protomyth 14y ago
  On that note, do yourself a favor, write the resignation letter (on your own computer, turn the internet off) that you really want to write. Add all your gripes, hatreds, and problems with the place. Tell the true story of your leaving and why your soul was at risk if you stayed any longer. now print it out and delete the electronic copy Now you can turn back on the internet (since you now don't have to worry about accidentally sending something) and write a one paragraph resignation saying what your last day is and how you love everyone. Print and hand that in. Every time in the future when you wonder why you left, read the print out of your rant.
  - keithpeter 14y ago
    I used my diary (pure pen) but similar principle. Never burn the boats as you might need them!
- 14y ago

amirmansour 14y ago

Well I'm glad my comment got you thinking. You really answered my question with the last line of your post: "it's just that I think I can execute much better than them." In a competitive space where so many products are doing the same thing execution becomes everything. You obviously have the experience and I wish you the best in whatever idea you pursue. One thing I do have to mention is that I bring a different perspective when I made my comment. I'm an electrical engineering student (graduating in two weeks) with only work experience from JPL and SpaceX. If I take up a job at any of those places after graduation, I would have to think more than twice before I ever contemplate leaving to pursue an idea. Then again my generation is full of risk takers, and I think I'm one of them.

gaborcselle 14y ago
Yes! Thanks a lot for the comment amirmansour. It certainly was the source of much controversy on here :-) One interesting change from last time I started a company (in the nuclear winter of 08/09) is that angel and seed funding is much easier to come by. That leads to a situation where there are lots of companies in almost every interesting space. Thus being able to out-execute them becomes even more relevant.

gyardley 14y ago

For web and mobile products, the act of building or prototyping is where you do most of the learning. I believe that you can't come up with great ideas in a vacuum. You build some mocks, you write some code, and you discover a bunch of things that you could improve on. Please tell me this sort of thinking isn't typical of Google's product organization. You do learn as you execute, but this just moves you towards a local maximum - a local maximum that might not be that exciting, if you've badly misunderstood the people you're building for. You do the most learning prior to starting, when you listen to the people you plan to build for and get to know them intimately - their problems, aspirations, values, and ethics. Getting to really know the worldview of your targets is how you come up with the direction that leads toward the global maximum, and it's all done before you write a line of code.

gaborcselle 14y ago
Good point, but taken to the extreme, if you listen to people too much they'll tell you they want a faster horse. You have to combine the aspirational thinking of "let's build a self-driving car" with the day-to-day grind of actually building it. Without the first, you end up in the local maximum you describe, without the latter you land in the "talk is cheap" box. My post is about the fact that you can in fact leave your job and go through a phase of prototyping one product after another, and deliberately testing each idea for not just how great it sounds but how buildable it is.

alexshye 14y ago

I'm no expert in entrepreneurship, but have to believe this is true for the most part. Before leaving, most people probably have a vision of something to start on -- but without (1) building the real product, (2) dealing with the details, and (3) interacting with customers, its only a vague vision. Along the way, things will change, people pivot, founders get new ideas, etc. Here's another way to think about it: there is probably a good reason behind YC accepting people without an idea.

typicalrunt 14y ago

Ideas are dime a dozen. Give me some smart friends to brainstorm with and we'll come up with several great ideas today that will be $100M+ businesses in a few years. Those are some big words to swallow. I doubt he could do that but I'd love to be proven wrong. If anything, what he wrote comes down to the old adage of "easier said than done".

coreygoodie 14y ago
As DMX poetically said, "Talk is cheap, motherlover."