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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

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.