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I am not trying to get personal. I use the second person as a rhetorical device because properly consistent use of the third person sounds really stuffy. That

I am not trying to get personal. I use the second person as a rhetorical device because properly consistent use of the third person sounds really stuffy. That said, you are touching on something I left implicit in my original post. Yes, there is a really small chance that you are the smartest person with the most relevant experience relative to a given problem to approach it. And, if this is the case, that is your valid answer to why you haven't seen someone else do it before. But for most people this is simply not the case and even for the people you are thinking of now as the smartest should assume it isn't the case, at least at first. If analyzing the situation and doing research legitimately leads you to "I am better/luckier than everyone else who's approached this", good for you because you're off to a great start. As far as Larry Page goes, a sibling post said that pg, to name one person, had something very similar to PageRank futher driving in the point that you usually can't count on being the first to figure out a solution. But, regardless, it absolutely would have been fair to ask Larry those same questions at the time he was founding Google. No matter how smart you are, due diligence is a key concept.

chacham15 14y ago
How would Larry Paige or Drew Houston have done research to conclude that they are "better/luckier than everyone else who's approached this"? After all, Google was one of the last search engines to enter the industry. I am not even convinced that that is true. As I said in the last post, given a certain number of people that can solve a problem, what are the chances that they are working on the same problem as Larry or Drew? Furthermore, the amount of time that it takes to prove that an idea is actually a good one is a few years at the least. Next, the range of ideas is so large, that this group of people is going to be heavily segmented in different areas. Lastly, as I pointed out with Dropbox, innovation doesn't always lie entirely in the difficulty of the problem, but also the execution. All of these factors go to increase the minimal size of smart people who can be the first to innovate in their fields.
- masterzora 14y ago
  > How would Larry Paige or Drew Houston have done research to conclude that they are "better/luckier than everyone else who's approached this"? In a negative sense, mostly. If it's absolutely a good idea that you know you have the solution for and it doesn't require a ridiculous amount of capital to execute and said execution is fairly straightforward and a sizeable market exists and etc, etc then the only possible conclusion is that you are legitimately close enough to the first one to solve the problem that you can go ahead. But odds are against this being the case so you should assume that it's not and then figure it out from there rather than assume that it is the case and you have an easy business ahead of you. Anything else would just be a bad investment of your time and resources.

chacham15 14y ago

How would Larry Paige or Drew Houston have done research to conclude that they are "better/luckier than everyone else who's approached this"? After all, Google was one of the last search engines to enter the industry. I am not even convinced that that is true. As I said in the last post, given a certain number of people that can solve a problem, what are the chances that they are working on the same problem as Larry or Drew? Furthermore, the amount of time that it takes to prove that an idea is actually a good one is a few years at the least. Next, the range of ideas is so large, that this group of people is going to be heavily segmented in different areas. Lastly, as I pointed out with Dropbox, innovation doesn't always lie entirely in the difficulty of the problem, but also the execution. All of these factors go to increase the minimal size of smart people who can be the first to innovate in their fields.

masterzora 14y ago
> How would Larry Paige or Drew Houston have done research to conclude that they are "better/luckier than everyone else who's approached this"? In a negative sense, mostly. If it's absolutely a good idea that you know you have the solution for and it doesn't require a ridiculous amount of capital to execute and said execution is fairly straightforward and a sizeable market exists and etc, etc then the only possible conclusion is that you are legitimately close enough to the first one to solve the problem that you can go ahead. But odds are against this being the case so you should assume that it's not and then figure it out from there rather than assume that it is the case and you have an easy business ahead of you. Anything else would just be a bad investment of your time and resources.