13 ms·

What a stupid idea

517 points by nate 13y ago

mehrzad 13y ago
Curtis was right about Pinterest though.
- TezzellEnt 13y ago
  I guess I'm missing what you mean, could you elaborate? What I got was that "a 20-something guy" reached a target market that he was not a part of, and did very well at it too.
- workbench 13y ago
  Sounds like it was a completely different product when he was consulted anyway
S201 13y ago
The key to success is not in the idea itself, but rather the execution of the idea. The idea is only a multiplier to the level of success.
brianwillis 13y ago
I felt the same way about Wikipedia at first. An encyclopedia that anyone can edit? What could possibly go wrong? I thought Twitter was a solution looking for a problem too. Interestingly, Twitter's usefulness (at least for me) stems from it's popularity rather than its content. Pretty much everyone I care about listening to is there, but most of the tweets that I'm interested in link me to some place that isn't Twitter.
stmchn 13y ago
If you had told me 5-6 years ago that Twitter would be one of the top social media platforms and have 500 million registered users, I would have been completely flabbergasted.
- kleiba 13y ago
  Exactly. I always picture myself in the following situation: A guy comes into my office in 2005, and says: "Uhm, excuse me, we're looking for investors in our new great product. It's for sending messages!" - "You mean, like email?" - "Yes. Except, you only have 140 characters." - "Err?" - "Oh, and you can't determine who will receive the message." - "Excuse me?" - "Yes, that's right. Would you like to invest?" I would have laughed that guy out of my office back then... ...and now he'd be laughing at me. Thus I'm very glad, no-one ever comes to my office in real life. The End.
- vacri 13y ago
  Twitter has the odd phenomenon of being a private company that news media has to constantly publicly refer to. Even to the point of some articles printing what an unrelated no-name had to say about the event in question. It's bizarre, though it seems also to be in part a lazy way to get 'bystander comments'.
Detrus 13y ago
It's a mistake to relate the stupidity of an idea to its potential for success. And yet even with success they can remain stupid and you can remain right.
ArikBe 13y ago
In 2008/2009 I was browsing Brian Gossett's website http://since78.briangossett.com/ http://since78.briangossett.com/ . Back then he had a digital mood board, which was simply a giant collection of JPG files on a white background with appropriate spacing. I saw these same mood boards on other websites - usually belong to designers. Some things hit me while browsing that website. Wouldn't it be awesome if there was a service that let you... - easily bookmark content from the web onto your personal "mood board", probably using a booklet. - organize that content into collections - share it with a social network built around the original idea. I shit you not, even my original design (which was mainly white on white) looked like Pinterest. I quit on it because I couldn't program at all. I've had multiple experiences since where I thought of something and then something similar either already exists or it shows up soon after. The Pinterest example was the most extreme though, because I really had a copy of Pinterest (minus the identity ofc) in my mind and on paper. What this taught me is that I have a brain that is capable of thinking up stuff that is apparently wanted [1] and as such it has boosted my confidence. At the end of the day, the person who wins is the person who executes. Execution is key. [1] Allow me to be very careful here. I may suffer from cognitive bias causing me to discount the amount of ideas that I've had that are probably absolutely shit, but in my own defence I'm the first person to shoot down my ideas. Also, knowing what the market wants requires you to test your assumptions. I'm well aware of this.
- msutherl 13y ago
  Even if you could have coded Pinterest, that's just the beginning.
cybernoodles 13y ago
"I'm not sure if there's any lesson here other than a warning against arrogance, but I have two stories to share." Of course there is. You mentioned it yourself!: "The future is extremely hard to see through the lens of the present, and it's very easy to unconsciously dismiss the first versions of it as frivolous or useless. Or as stupid ideas."
codeulike 13y ago
Survivor bias? How many ideas has he thought were stupid, and then they went nowhere?
krapp 13y ago
I thought Twitter was stupid when it came out. "Why would any one choose to limit themselves to 140 characters? Also the name is dumb and childish. 'tweet'? Who wants to 'tweet'? I'm a grown man, I don't want to 'tweet...' etc." I still don't know why Instagram is a thing.
- leephillips 13y ago
  A stupid population makes stupid things popular.
- jonathanjaeger 13y ago
  I could never take a good picture. I used Instagram for the first time and it was fast, so easy, and I was actually proud of the interesting pictures I could take (not necessarily to share widely, but at least for myself). Instagram got someone like me, who never carried a camera in his life except for when I was kid holding a camera for my parents on vacation, to actually use their phone as a camera.
  - krapp 13y ago
    Ok, that makes sense.
- format 13y ago
  How could you not see how Instagram is a thing? You can take a picture then press few buttons and now everyone you know can see your picture. If you don't see how that is popular maybe the problem isn't with Instagram.
  - krapp 13y ago
    And people couldn't share photos online before? I can see how it's popular. I just don't see why it's as popular as it seems to be. And obviously i'm not arguing the problem is Instagram, since this is a thread about not being able to see why ideas take off. Clearly I just don't get it.
dave_sullivan 13y ago
Of course, the flipside is maybe more dangerous. "Hey, this sounds like a really stupid idea... then again, I thought pinterest sounded stupid too, and look how that turned out. Ok dubious business opportunity, here's my time/money!" I'm being facetious of course, but the best deals are often the ones you don't make. The real question is how much of an impact an anomalous success story should have on the way you evaluate business opportunities.
- RyJones 13y ago
  Got animal house made. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0077975/trivia?item=tr0781514 http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0077975/trivia?item=tr0781514
deleted 13y ago
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bulatb 13y ago
> The future is extremely hard to see through the lens of the present And the past is hard to see without the lens of hindsight warping things. A decision might look silly in the face of information from the future, but that doesn't mean it was the wrong decision at the time. It wasn't. You made the rational play and you happened to lose. Your information was just incomplete. And unlike the founders who ended up winning, you had no incentive to assume the gaps would be filled in with magic traction and a bag of money.
ChuckMcM 13y ago
In 1978 I thought Bill Gates trying to sell BASIC interpreters for what was 90% of the cost of the computer to run them was a pretty stupid idea :-) That said, one of my VC friends defines an Entrepreneur as someone who can take a stupid idea and make it successful. Sort of an homage to the whole idea that they can see something you cannot. These days when I'm confronted by this sort of proposal I ask the person making the proposal to describe the world where their idea has succeeded. What is different about that world from today, and what is the same. What do people do in that world that they do differently now or can't do at all. And perhaps more importantly what do they do today which they no longer have to do. If you can paint that picture in enough detail you can figure out who is going to be working against this person and who is going to be cheering this person on, you might get a sense of how much work is between here and there and the kinds of people needed to do that work. And if you know this person well you might be able to guess whether or not they are up for that, or perhaps more importantly, committed enough.
- CapitalistCartr 13y ago
  I thought bottled water was idiotic "Who's gonna pay that for water ? ! ? Gone in six months." And phone sex lines. "1.99$ first minute, $.99 each additional minute? Please!" In six months their rates doubled. Business models can be hard to judge.
  - geoffc 13y ago
    This one hits home. 25 years ago I zigged into the water filtration business when I should have zagged in the bottled water business. I had the choice and never saw that businesses would pay so much to have water trucked to them. Doh!
  - derefr 13y ago
    Both of those are very well-studied business models, though: 1. sell to the lonely and impulsive who are willing to trade money for attention (Also see: therapists, people who run cons on the elderly, everything else involving real interaction with a woman in the sex industry); additionally, take advantage of the sunk-cost bias to keep people after they would have otherwise "passed their limit" (Also see: casinos) 2. run advertising campaigns that separate the world into "good/beautiful/healthy/upper-class people" and "bad/ugly/disgusting/lower-class people" by which kind of products they use, then position yourself as the most convenient/eminently-consumable product in the "good people" product class. (Also see: deodorant, diamonds, hybrid cars)
deleted 13y ago
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rexreed 13y ago
A few points, some already cited here: * Survivor bias (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivor_bias https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivor_bias) is yielding a self-selection in the positive results. I'm sure there are plenty of stupid ideas that went nowhere. Probably as much as "Great" ideas that went nowhere. So, I think saying that his opinion that something was stupid is a counter-indicator of its degree of success doesn't have much merit. * Second, an idea or early prototype has little correlation to its inevitable success or failure. As is often said, execution is everything. The idea is necessary, but not sufficient to guarantee a market success, as defined differently by different markets. * Third, while he decries his stance as calling something "stupid" as an arrogant position, this article itself comes across as arrogant -- in effect he's positioning himself near the beginning of these companies' inception and being in the position of being asked his opinion in a taste-maker fashion. I suspect in reality, he was one of many people that were exposed to this idea and his opinion was mostly irrelevant in their efforts to pursue the idea. It can be interpreted as very Forrest Gump to position ones self at the crux of so many eventual market successes when in reality that is not the case. I'd like to understand the context of these meetings. I've certainly been at the early-stages of many ideas, but no one asked for, or cared about, my opinions. In which case, saying that they were stupid ideas was an opinion offered only to myself. And I probably did indeed think they were stupid at the time. Was I arrogant? No. But then I don't claim that anyone cared about my opinion. * Finally, I call your attention to Pinterest's actual success path (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinterest https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinterest and http://www.famousbloggers.net/history-pinterest.html http://www.famousbloggers.net/history-pinterest.html). They iterated and "failed" for 2 years before becoming an "overnight success". I dare say that perhaps at the time of the meeting, Pinterest's idea and execution were probably stupid, and it took time and relentless iteration to make it a success. In fact, "Silbermann said he personally wrote to the site's first 5,000 users offering his personal phone number and even meeting with some of its users." Which goes to show just how many people's opinions he solicited in the process of building to its current level of success.
- nostromo 13y ago
  It's a bit uncharitable to call "I thought Pinterest and Vine were dumb" arrogance.
hcarvalhoalves 13y ago
In all fairness, Pinterest still looks like a stupid idea. Like Twitter. Like Instagram. Stupid is popular, though. You don't need to build more than the most mundane of the things to have a popular product.
iwritecode 13y ago
I still do this - it's something I'm actively trying to fix. I'm worse still when products never materialize into a full-fledged success, still seem mvp/alpha but provide enough interest and income to spin up a proper shop here and there. I think the root of it, for me at least, is just a bit of envy staring down at me from my shelf of half-completed and less interesting ideas.
gnuvince 13y ago
Stupid idea doesn't mean it's not gonna make money. Great idea doesn't mean it's gonna make money. It's damn near impossible to predict what the public is gonna like.
michael_nielsen 13y ago
The moral of this isn't that stupid ideas are good. It's that unfamiliar insights can be hard to understand and recognize, even for smart people. The right question to ask when confronted with something new isn't "What's wrong with this?" It's "What's the most interesting new insight(s) here?" A lot of smart people like to ask the first question at the expense of the second, and that's a mistake.
duopixel 13y ago
I think this happens because we're poor judges of character. Yes, there's many bozos out there, but if you ask enough questions you will be able to differentiate them. I'm still working on this, but I've seen that if you put aside your preconceptions and try to understand the product that is being showed to you, using it, asking a lot of questions and really giving yourself some time for big picture conversation, you are able to tell them apart.
seeingfurther 13y ago
We built an app that 'listens' to social media and closely correlates with the S&P 500 http://elite.kredstreet.com/all http://elite.kredstreet.com/all (zoom in to see the correlation) You have no idea how many people have ignored us along the way and yet our signal will be used by high frequency traders to trade the stock market. Talking to investors often reminds me of this gem... http://www.xtranormal.com/watch/7203877/fundraising http://www.xtranormal.com/watch/7203877/fundraising EDIT: someone just emailed me and said this was stupid. LOL
jere 13y ago
>I want to make an app for browsing catalogs. It's like a fashion catalog, but you can organize and share outfits Is this really a fair description of Pinterest today though? Maybe as originally described it is a dumb idea. Vine, on the other hand, is really awesome and Curtis saw it right then, but was more worried about how it would find popularity rather than whether it was a "good" idea.
- pseut 13y ago
  That seems to be pretty much how my wife uses pinterest. Outfits and gardening.
sgdesign 13y ago
Those were stupid ideas. Nobody said stupid ideas couldn't be successful. In fact, I suspect an idea's stupidity has very little impact on its success one way or another. Ideas I'd consider not stupid include self-driving cars, Google Glass, and Bitcoin. Whether or not those are good ideas is yet another discussion…
- ibudiallo 13y ago
  Smart ideas are very hard to implement. I always go for the stupid ideas because they also fail faster
greghinch 13y ago
Ha, I still think Vine and Pinterest are stupid ideas. But, Pinterest at least has done a good job at making lazy, vapid, narcissism easy, and there's certainly demand for that. Not sure how you monetize it (is Pinterest?), but they have a lot of users. I'm not sure Vine is yet a "success". I don't see a lot of activity there yet. My (completely biased and limited) litmus test for social apps is to see how many of my non-techie friends get on board and how quickly. With Facebook, Instagram, and even Pinterest, that was pretty quick. Vine seems to still be lagging. It's too much work for the payoff for most people, is my gut feeling.
- jeffgreco 13y ago
  lazy, vapid, narcissism Care to elaborate? My interpretation of Pinterest is really "visual social bookmarking."
  - greghinch 13y ago
    Sure. The main use of Pinterest is to show your friends and everyone else what good taste you have. "Look at this collection of bridal dresses I like!" "Check out all these vacation spots I want to go to!" If you just wanted to collect photos of these things to give yourself ideas, you wouldn't need to share it with everyone. So you have an easy way to show everyone how cool all the stuff you like is, and by extension you are, with very little effort on your own part to actually create or realize (i.e. actually do work) those things into being. Sure there are elements of this across all social networks, but Pinterest has really distilled it down to the lowest common denominator point and click. More of an indictment of society than of Pinterest itself I suppose. Pinterest or something like it was bound to show up sooner or later.
    - chc 13y ago
      I can't help but feel this is just an uncharitable way to describe sharing ideas in general. My fiancee and I have gotten a lot of good use out of other people's good taste on Pinterest — we've found outfits to steal for the wedding, decorating ideas and lots of tasty recipes. How is this any more vulgar than sharing ideas in any other context?
paul_f 13y ago
There are no stupid ideas. Except the really stupid ones, of course.
rdl 13y ago
I feel this way about almost all consumer web services. Nothing is better than irc, usenet, MUDs, and email/lists, with the exception of making things mobile, detachable/multi device, more secure, and I guess supporting non Latin alphabets. There are still a few products missing from the perfect Internet (a great usenet/forum replacement, a way to run individual agents in the background, a way to great all communications as filter ably as email, and a great payment system), but I'm fine without another catalog sharing site, etc. I accept that consumer services could become popular, but I have no way to predict it, and once they have traction, they are expensive investments. I am kind of at a loss as to how one could be a high value add investor in the seed consumer space without just focusing on founders nearly exclusively.
knowtheory 13y ago
But really. Did these entrepreneurs really understand what they were building at the time? Is it the case that these people articulated the best case for their products and businesses when Dustin saw introduced to these projects in their infancy? Developing a product, and the right pitch is an evolutionary process, and it may just very well be the case that Dustin encountered them too early. He may very well be at fault for thinking these ideas were stupid at the time, but then again he might very well not be. Being introduced to a work in progress is always a negotiation. Asking the right questions is part of it, and on the flip side, having an interlocutor who has some sense of how to answer your questions. Also, some ideas are just stupid.
dclowd9901 13y ago
A blogging platform centered around the idea of inviting tech elites to circlejerk over their pithy thoughts and lord over us with their limited membership. What a stupid idea, I thought. The only interesting thing it does is let you upvote things by hovering your mouse in a circle.
andrewhillman 13y ago
"Everything is obvious once its successful. Big wins come when you can spot something before its obvious to everyone else." -ev williams.
brucehart 13y ago
I had a similar experience when I was 14 years old. At the time I was running a very popular trivia web site that had been featured on Yahoo and in a few magazines. A guy e-mailed me and said he liked my site. He asked if he could pay me a small fee to run a banner ad for his new business. I told him I appreciated the offer, but I didn't think it was allowed under the Geocities terms of service. I was really into discovering new web sites at the time and had not heard of this company. I looked at the guy's site to see what it was about. I remember thinking it was ugly design and a stupid idea. Not much longer after that, the company began to take off. The guy that had e-mailed me was Pierre Omidyar and the site was EBay. I've tried to look at new businesses with an open mind since then.
tikhonj 13y ago
Amusingly, I've had the opposite problem: I see some things, think they are the best ideas ever and then watch them fizzle away. Perhaps the largest example of this would be Wave. When I first heard about Google Wave, I was incredibly impressed and immediately signed up for the beta. I really did think it would replace email and IM--it was an elegant solution that did both, at the same time. I then played around with it, rather liked it and even got some friends to use it. I was still trying to use it well after almost everyone gave up on it. I was rather disappointed in its ignominious decline and eventual death. I also really liked webOS. All your apps would just be web apps! It would be great. It wasn't. I really loved the Zune HD. It had one of the best interfaces I had ever seen and was incredibly capable for its price. I still have mine, and I still like it, mostly. I've had people on the subway ask me about it simply because they didn't know what it was :P. I thought Gnome 3 was awesome and a gigantic step forward from Gnome 2. You could customize your entire environment, all in JavaScript. And yet almost nobody I know uses it. Unity may have gotten panned by internet critics, but at least plenty of people I know use it. Gnome 3? Maybe one person. A disproportionate number of the things that I get really excited about--rather than just interested in--seem to fizzle out. Maybe it's just selection bias, of course. I imagine the contrast between my expectations and reality make things stand out more. But it does seem that the more enthusiastic I am about something the more likely it is to flop. Right now, the technology that I'm really excited about in a very similar way is Rust. I hope it breaks this rather annoying trend! It's basically the only new programming language that I genuinely like and don't view as a waste of time and space. I honestly think it will take off, but that's what I thought about all the other examples too. I guess this doesn't have much to do with the actual article. It's just a lament about my own misplaced enthusiasm. But it does feel better to have written about it :P.
- bsimpson 13y ago
  The examples you listed died because of marketing, more than technology. Wave was essentially a social network that your friends couldn't get invites for if they wanted. It was a hugely hyped ghost-town. Wave was a tech preview because it was ungodly slow and made some questionable UX decisions (like badly reimplementing the scroll bar) - Google would have been embarrassed to call it a fully-fledged product. At the same time, they hyped it up like one, which led many people to pass judgement on it too soon, while the ones who wanted to use it either couldn't get access or didn't know anyone who had access to write to. webOS, from everything I've heard, was quite good. Unfortunately, the history of Palm didn't leave them enough resources to grow it organically - it was a high pressure do-or-die launch with rushed hardware that was universally panned. They didn't have enough resources to wait for good hardware to pair with it. They also banked on Verizon covering the marketing budget, but Verizon famously used Motorola's Milestone to launch the DROID brand instead. (There's a really interesting article from the Verge about it.) I don't know enough about Linux or Zune to comment on those, but you got excited about webOS and Wave because you saw the promise of the vision. The execution is what bungled both.
redshirtrob 13y ago
There are so many things that seemed like a stupid idea to me: - Seinfeld: Who is this guy, really? - Frasier: Come on, a spinoff? (So, I didn't realize spinoffs were a thing) - Twitter: Haiku and vanity plates for the Internet. - Jeni's Splendid Ice Cream: Salty Caramel, you've got to be kidding me. I don't want salty ice cream. - Arrested Development: Wait, Jason Bateman. He was so bland on The Hogan Family. - There's Something About Mary: Their promo seemed ripped off the Zelda commercials, or that's how I felt. - Blogging (Well, Live Journal): Do I really care what other people are doing? - Scrubs: I don't know, I just didn't like the idea. - Freaks and Geeks: How dare they try to explain what it was like to be adolescent me? - McGriddles: Sausage, syrup and pancakes? - Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Slow animals doing karate makes no sense. The only common thread I can find in these things is me. I have no idea why I had negative, visceral reactions to these things. It's gotten to the point where I try to pay special attention when an idea causes me to have this reaction.
- dasil003 13y ago
  That's an awesome list.
- lotyrin 13y ago
  I don't know, most of those initial reactions make sense to me. I think it's as simple as others are saying: in a market full of humans, making sense is not a dependency of success. and many of us justify the things that succeed after the fact. If we're dismissing things for good reasons, I don't think we should try to inhibit our reasoning in order to just be less discriminating. Instead, the magic (or at least seemingly magic to engineers such as myself, when it works) of marketing is to account for and scrutinize based on the irrational.
- adventured 13y ago
  To be fair, McGriddles have always been available with bacon, which makes all the difference to me. Good list though.
- phaus 13y ago
  Salted caramel has always been and will always be awesome. Another deceptively awesome dessert is chocolate with pepper in it. Sounds weird, but its actually one of the original ways that cocoa was enjoyed. What kills me about ice cream is the immense popularity of all of the stupid "Ben and Jerry's" style knock-offs that use a 10:1 candy:ice cream ratio. When I want to eat ice cream, it doesn't mean that I really want a candy bar.
markdown 13y ago
A well-written humblebrag.
- zabraxias 13y ago
  It reads that way a little but as a front-end dev I've had sit-downs with a few founders trying to hire me and in some cases I thought their ideas were stupid. It didn't seem like they wanted my opinion on their idea as much as they wanted to get me excited about the future they are trying to create. Turns out one of them succeeded in a sense.
  - imsky 13y ago
    That's the founders' job though. They don't hire developers to critique their strategy, they hire them to implement it.
- artursapek 13y ago
  Ain't nobody humblebrag like Dustin Curtis humblebrags.
  - rmrfrmrf 13y ago
    - 309 points and 108 comments - comments about the "vapid" and "useless" nature of Pinterest and Vine - absolutely no discussion about how there's no takeaway from the post aside from "I'm so important that I blew off two of these successful guys." I was really expecting some kind of goal that he'd set for himself or way to improve his pessimistic attitude. Oh well.
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ekianjo 13y ago
However. Its not because its popular that its not stupid.
sramsay 13y ago
I more often experience the facepalm of watching an uncomplicated idea turn into a global sensation. It's 2005 (hardly the distant technological past), and someone gets the idea for a site where you can store and watch videos. This is not some kind of radical technological innovation. This is not something beyond the ambit of current capabilities. This is not some brazen insight into the future. This is a site. Where you store videos. And watch them. This, of course, is YouTube -- a site that was eventually sold to Google for $1.6 billion dollars. facepalm
- pfitzsimmons 13y ago
  Well, to be sure the magic ingredient in Youtube's success was not the idea of uploading and watching videos. Many people were working on video sharing at that time (myself included). Youtube's secret was that the founders were already successful entrepreneurs who were well connected to VC's. Thus they had access to the capital that allowed them to lose ungodly amounts of money in the quest for growth.
  - sramsay 13y ago
    Man, that sucks. Win a game like that, and you never have to have another idea as long as you live.
  - wpietri 13y ago
    Well, they also had an impressively cavalier attitude to copyright. Which was a major advantage. But they also had excellent design sense. YouTube made uploading, viewing, and sharing content very, very easy. I did some consulting for a semi-competitor, so I paid a lot of attention to the market then. YouTube did a great job, which helped them get users, which surely didn't hurt with VCs. Also, Crunchbase says they took $3.5m from Sequoia to start, and then $8m a few months later, and my recollection was that later tranche was really just to spend on bandwidth and servers. Google bought them a few months later. So they didn't lose what I'd call ungodly amounts of VC money; that's less than 1% of what Facebook received before IPOing.
    - 13y ago
ryguytilidie 13y ago
As people have already said, this is a ridiculous case of survivor bias and to be fair, they are kind of stupid ideas. One is basically bookmarks, but with a nice UI and sharing, and the other is a kind of poorly made way to share short video clips. I met a kid making a video sharing app that was miles better just last week.
saddino 13y ago
Every killer idea is stupid until success betrays its obviousness. Most inspired ideas are probably stupid. And finally, many ideas are just plain stupid. The trick is to ignore your gut reaction and ask yourself, "If this amazingly stupid idea is executed perfectly, is there a real market for this?" Women "pinning" their desires? Check. People sharing incredibly easy-to-compose video? Check. Don't confuse the dancer with the dance.
richardg 13y ago
I like the first line on the last paragraph - "The future is extremely hard to see through the lens of the present." What we do in the present can affect the future but we can not predict what will actually happen. There's too much variables involved.
yoster 13y ago
I know the feeling. For me it was in the stock market. I had a chance to invest a substantial amount in gold about 13 years ago with someone who wanted to dump his gold stocks at a discounted price. I scoffed at the idea and thought it was stupid. Well, we all know how that turned out....
joeblau 13y ago
Dustin, let's meet at The Creamery. I gotta stupid idea to show you :)
rickdale 13y ago
This article highlights the few times he was wrong. But what about all the lunches where he left thinking 'what a stupid idea' and was right.
mikecane 13y ago
In the early 1980s, CompuServe's marketeers thought the CB Simulator was dumb. It brought in most of the money. Here we are in 2013 and there's Twitter.
bluedino 13y ago
Reminds me of 'How my brain kept me from co-founding Youtube' (http://prog21.dadgum.com/39.html http://prog21.dadgum.com/39.html) The idea that people were going to push around 500k images (Flickr) or even more insane, videos was crazy when it first started happening. Remember how long it took to download QuickTime or RealPlayer videos, and how bad the quality was? Now people are streaming HD music videos on our PHONES just to listen to it while they drive to work. They don't even watch the video.
shloime 13y ago
I just Kudos'd all your articles just because the button is so awesome :)
imechura 13y ago
I am glad that these two guys truly believed in their ideas and where not discouraged by your lack buy-in to their vision. I am often reminded of the 2001 me. When I was new developer building java web applications and full of vigor with no real responsibilities or expenses. I was dead set on this idea to build a site where people could post links, pictures, text or whatever and it would be voted and categorically managed by the user community. I shopped the idea and prototype around to people in my limited network and it was unanimous that no one would ever want to invest time into this concept. Discouraged, I scrapped the idea and accepted a position as the first non-partner employee at a consulting start-up that quickly imploded. Years later reddit moves to the forefront of the internet with striking resemblance to my original plan. My fault because I did not stick to my guns. The idea that my application could have been half as popular as reddit is unlikely but it taught me a lesson, sometimes you've got to trust your gut, even if the people you trust cannot see your vision.
timr 13y ago
I first met the AirBnB guys in 2007, at their "unofficial Startup School after party". It was my first ever San Francisco startup party. At the time, they were in the depths of their existential struggle. The "party" consisted of a few guys, a couple of liters of soda, and a few half-empty bottles of booze. I remember talking to Joe and Brian, and hearing their pitch, and thinking: "oh, so it's like couchsurfing, but for pay....good luck with that, guys". Oops.
- joering2 13y ago
  The only reason why people are willing to pay AirBnB is because of their audience (classic chicken&egg dilemma). But that audience was initially captured/harvested mostly through illegal or semi-legal ways (at least the ways that a decent human being wouldn't do that). Lookup my previous posts I rant enough about AirBnB owners and their criminal past.
cs702 13y ago
This blog post reminds me of the Bessemer Venture Partners "Anti-Portfolio" -- a list of companies they passed on that subsequently became massively successful, including Apple, Google, and Intel. They explain on their website: "Our reasons for passing on these investments varied. In some cases, we were making a conscious act of generosity to another, younger venture firm, down on their luck, who we felt could really use a billion dollars in gains. In other cases, our partners had already run out of spaces on the year's Schedule D and feared that another entry would require them to attach a separate sheet." The whole web page is filled with similar, painfully funny explanations: http://www.bvp.com/portfolio/antiportfolio http://www.bvp.com/portfolio/antiportfolio
dustingetz 13y ago
if someone i respect says something stupid, its probably not. this is why signaling is so important.
lucian303 13y ago
A great business idea can still be "stupid." Or worse: Privately run prisons. Mercenary companies providing "security" in wars. etc.
larrykubin 13y ago
Ideas I thought were stupid when I first heard them: 1) eBay - people are going to buy from random people they don't know? and bid against other people they don't know? Auctions will be rigged and I won't get my stuff. Stupid. 2) Netflix - they are going to send DVD's in the mail and I am going to mail them back? And then I have to wait for it to get to me? Aren't people going to steal the DVD's and damage them? Won't it cost too much for them to make a profit? Why don't I just go to Blockbuster? Stupid.
zobzu 13y ago
What I generally dislike with these articles is that someone quickly draw the conclusion "never criticize, always believe in the idea, even if it seems stupid at first sight" And of course, I find that terribly wrong. The author did not hint that at all (which I appreciate), however, but I still believe many will think this. The point is that you must carefully examine each idea before jumping to a judgement. Do not dismiss the bad points. Just think it through. It wont work every time, because you're not perfect, and because you don't have all elements/cards in your hands (unless you can see the future and read people's mind, of course). All you can do is a best guess. Obviously, the author is either very unlucky, either bad at doing the best possible guess.
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anigbrowl 13y ago
I felt the same way about twitter. I also still think I was right :-)
d_runs_far 13y ago
After about two decades in 'new media' I've seen and been part of some rather stupid ideas too. Off the top of my head: - business card cd-roms: I was working on rights for Canada at one point - Flash vs. Director: I was a Director guy and thought Flash was stupid; but it sure had it's day vs. Director - Digital Signage: I had worked out a couple prototypes using CRT monitors and Mac LC pizza boxes installed in integrated cases with a modem for both control and new content. All controlled with a slick little Director application - A chat program that used proximity and interest matching to bring people together. Prototype was pretty cool for 1998 :-) There are probably some others, but I love stupid ideas, they make things interesting.
jdietrich 13y ago
Success is not validation of an idea and we should be ashamed to think so. Cigarettes are one of the most successful consumer products on earth. Inhaling a lungful of carcinogenic smoke several hundred times a day is undoubtedly a stupid idea. Tobacco has made a small number of people incomprehensibly rich, to the great detriment of humanity. Personally, I think nearly all of these 'social' startups are bad news. Not as bad news as a lung cancer epidemic, but bad news nonetheless. I think they feed a culture of passivity and attention deficit. I think they fragment human interaction into the smallest possible dopamine-inducing units. I think they're essentially Skinner boxes in disguise - apps that dress up an intermittent schedule of reward as meaningful activity. The startup culture talks the talk about "changing the world", but in truth most of us couldn't care less so long as we get our next funding round. For every Watsi, we have a hundred bullshit companies with bullshit products, providing yet another means of idle distraction for indolent westerners. We can hardly distinguish between what is worthwhile and what is popular or profitable. It has hardly occurred to Curtis or anyone in these comments that an idea could be both successful and stupid. Is Pinterest really an innovative sharing tool, or is it merely a collaborative exercise in commodity fetishism? Is Vine really a radical new way to communicate, or is it merely the nadir of audiovisual culture, fragmenting the world into six-second shards of nothingness? Do we even care?
- robbiep 13y ago
  Well said. I quietly dispair at the shortened attention spans and clamour for 'likes' and 'follows' that have resulted... Whilst I browse Instagram and refresh Facebook. I am a walking contradiction...
  - gnarbarian 13y ago
    I like to blame "Loony Toons" for my short attention span.
- codyZ 13y ago
  >For every Watsi, we have a hundred bullshit companies with bullshit products, Unfortunate, but true. Everything is suddenly an app. Is there a difference between 'social' startup and 'tech' startup? I think the culture, particularly the media, is making those synonymous for the worst...
molsongolden 13y ago
At first I expected this to be a post about svbtle and all of the resistance and pushback Dustin received when he first showed us his new "blog" design and tried to explain his vision. Things seem to be picking up on that front and the content is fairly good. Can we get an iPad or web app with an easier way to explore and stumble through "magazine articles" without knowing who or what we are looking for?
gesman 13y ago
Well, between Pinterest and Vine demos - how many times you were actually right about other, really stupid ideas? :)
Myrmornis 13y ago
This is simply a vehicle for the author to show off about how he was consulted by well-known startups before they were big. These articles by dcurtis are a very ugly portrait of San Francisco tech culture. For example it beggars belief that this one was not written as a parody: http://dcurt.is/the-best http://dcurt.is/the-best
monkeyspaw 13y ago
I'll confess something similar, but a bigger whiff on my part. Wifi was becoming common when I entered college. Around that time, laptops were underpowered, especially compared to desktops. I thought wifi was a fad. After all, you generally had to plug your laptop in after 2 hours. What was the big deal about a cable for network too?
gersonaya 13y ago
Very well argued indeed. I'm glad someone shares the same thoughts as me.
tudorconstantin 13y ago
I'd have dismissed the facebook idea if zuckerberg would've came to me in the beginning. There were myspace, hi5, orkut and a few other already on the market.
outworlder 13y ago
It may not be that the ideas are 'stupid' per-se. It's just that we tend to underestimate how complex some tasks are for ordinary people. I mean, I could take thousands of pictures and automate the process of applying photoshop filters and uploading them as they arrive - and I bet most of you could do it too, perhaps in some even cooler way. That'd be just black magic for most people.
nsxwolf 13y ago
I've had this happen to me a few times. These days I don't even get the stupid ideas in the first place anymore. So I guess I don't have to feel so bad about missing the opportunities now. There aren't any!
human_error 13y ago
I think the key point isn't if an idea stupid or smart. It seems to me the key point is more like how you execute the idea.
danenania 13y ago
I think a big issue with social network ideas is just that there's so much chance involved. Maybe 1 in 100 that have a solid idea and strong execution are going to achieve the critical mass they need for success. It really just comes down to achieving trendiness, which though it can be engineered to some extent and depends to some extent on quality and uniqueness, is still fraught with chance and ultimately depends whether a product happens to appeal to the particular whims of enough people with above average influence simultaneously enough to create momentum and buzz. A few missing links in that chain can sink the ship, while catching the right eye in the right way can ensure global adoption. So having a negative attitude toward them all is safe in the sense that you'll almost always be right, and you'll be constantly reinforced in your beliefs. But since startup investment is a game of long shots, like most +EV gambling games, an investor shouldn't be focused on the absolute probability of success but on the chance of success * the potential value.
jperezsea 13y ago
Arrogant? Yes, if you thought you could figure out that they would succeed or not based on one conversation. The point of this entry is really: as an entrepreneur, push forward independent of what people who are not you target customer say/think.
mikeleeorg 13y ago
I wonder how honest Dustin was to Ben and Dom. It's entirely possible that his negative feelings about each product helped drive it further. Sometimes criticism is more important than praise. I would rather someone call my product stupid - and point out why - than to just say, "Yea, it's okay I guess." To Ben and Dom's credit, I have a feeling both saw Dustin's apathy, read it correctly as apathy, and used that to either strengthen their products, or their story, or both.
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joshuaheard 13y ago
Several years ago, I was reading a blog by a well known tech entrepreneur. He was describing his new project, a way for people to post their everyday life actions in 140 characters or less, so they could tell their friends they were going to the store, or what they had for lunch. I thought, what a stupid idea, only the vainest self-absorbed people would share such minute details of their life. His project was called Twitter.
artumi-richard 13y ago
And lo! pg did spake! "Only the good ideas that look like bad ideas are left. All the good ideas that look like good ideas have been done."
artas_bartas 13y ago
So what are the other two ideas?
segmondy 13y ago
Ha! I've heard a lot of stupid ideas and none of them have made a dollar!

What a stupid idea

517 points by nate 13y ago

mehrzad 13y ago

Curtis was right about Pinterest though.

TezzellEnt 13y ago
I guess I'm missing what you mean, could you elaborate? What I got was that "a 20-something guy" reached a target market that he was not a part of, and did very well at it too.
workbench 13y ago
Sounds like it was a completely different product when he was consulted anyway

S201 13y ago

The key to success is not in the idea itself, but rather the execution of the idea. The idea is only a multiplier to the level of success.

brianwillis 13y ago

I felt the same way about Wikipedia at first. An encyclopedia that anyone can edit? What could possibly go wrong? I thought Twitter was a solution looking for a problem too. Interestingly, Twitter's usefulness (at least for me) stems from it's popularity rather than its content. Pretty much everyone I care about listening to is there, but most of the tweets that I'm interested in link me to some place that isn't Twitter.

stmchn 13y ago

If you had told me 5-6 years ago that Twitter would be one of the top social media platforms and have 500 million registered users, I would have been completely flabbergasted.

kleiba 13y ago
Exactly. I always picture myself in the following situation: A guy comes into my office in 2005, and says: "Uhm, excuse me, we're looking for investors in our new great product. It's for sending messages!" - "You mean, like email?" - "Yes. Except, you only have 140 characters." - "Err?" - "Oh, and you can't determine who will receive the message." - "Excuse me?" - "Yes, that's right. Would you like to invest?" I would have laughed that guy out of my office back then... ...and now he'd be laughing at me. Thus I'm very glad, no-one ever comes to my office in real life. The End.
vacri 13y ago
Twitter has the odd phenomenon of being a private company that news media has to constantly publicly refer to. Even to the point of some articles printing what an unrelated no-name had to say about the event in question. It's bizarre, though it seems also to be in part a lazy way to get 'bystander comments'.

Detrus 13y ago

It's a mistake to relate the stupidity of an idea to its potential for success. And yet even with success they can remain stupid and you can remain right.

ArikBe 13y ago

In 2008/2009 I was browsing Brian Gossett's website http://since78.briangossett.com/ http://since78.briangossett.com/ . Back then he had a digital mood board, which was simply a giant collection of JPG files on a white background with appropriate spacing. I saw these same mood boards on other websites - usually belong to designers. Some things hit me while browsing that website. Wouldn't it be awesome if there was a service that let you... - easily bookmark content from the web onto your personal "mood board", probably using a booklet. - organize that content into collections - share it with a social network built around the original idea. I shit you not, even my original design (which was mainly white on white) looked like Pinterest. I quit on it because I couldn't program at all. I've had multiple experiences since where I thought of something and then something similar either already exists or it shows up soon after. The Pinterest example was the most extreme though, because I really had a copy of Pinterest (minus the identity ofc) in my mind and on paper. What this taught me is that I have a brain that is capable of thinking up stuff that is apparently wanted [1] and as such it has boosted my confidence. At the end of the day, the person who wins is the person who executes. Execution is key. [1] Allow me to be very careful here. I may suffer from cognitive bias causing me to discount the amount of ideas that I've had that are probably absolutely shit, but in my own defence I'm the first person to shoot down my ideas. Also, knowing what the market wants requires you to test your assumptions. I'm well aware of this.

msutherl 13y ago
Even if you could have coded Pinterest, that's just the beginning.

cybernoodles 13y ago

"I'm not sure if there's any lesson here other than a warning against arrogance, but I have two stories to share." Of course there is. You mentioned it yourself!: "The future is extremely hard to see through the lens of the present, and it's very easy to unconsciously dismiss the first versions of it as frivolous or useless. Or as stupid ideas."

codeulike 13y ago

Survivor bias? How many ideas has he thought were stupid, and then they went nowhere?

krapp 13y ago

I thought Twitter was stupid when it came out. "Why would any one choose to limit themselves to 140 characters? Also the name is dumb and childish. 'tweet'? Who wants to 'tweet'? I'm a grown man, I don't want to 'tweet...' etc." I still don't know why Instagram is a thing.

leephillips 13y ago
A stupid population makes stupid things popular.
jonathanjaeger 13y ago
I could never take a good picture. I used Instagram for the first time and it was fast, so easy, and I was actually proud of the interesting pictures I could take (not necessarily to share widely, but at least for myself). Instagram got someone like me, who never carried a camera in his life except for when I was kid holding a camera for my parents on vacation, to actually use their phone as a camera.
- krapp 13y ago
  Ok, that makes sense.
format 13y ago
How could you not see how Instagram is a thing? You can take a picture then press few buttons and now everyone you know can see your picture. If you don't see how that is popular maybe the problem isn't with Instagram.
- krapp 13y ago
  And people couldn't share photos online before? I can see how it's popular. I just don't see why it's as popular as it seems to be. And obviously i'm not arguing the problem is Instagram, since this is a thread about not being able to see why ideas take off. Clearly I just don't get it.

dave_sullivan 13y ago

Of course, the flipside is maybe more dangerous. "Hey, this sounds like a really stupid idea... then again, I thought pinterest sounded stupid too, and look how that turned out. Ok dubious business opportunity, here's my time/money!" I'm being facetious of course, but the best deals are often the ones you don't make. The real question is how much of an impact an anomalous success story should have on the way you evaluate business opportunities.

RyJones 13y ago
Got animal house made. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0077975/trivia?item=tr0781514 http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0077975/trivia?item=tr0781514

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bulatb 13y ago

> The future is extremely hard to see through the lens of the present And the past is hard to see without the lens of hindsight warping things. A decision might look silly in the face of information from the future, but that doesn't mean it was the wrong decision at the time. It wasn't. You made the rational play and you happened to lose. Your information was just incomplete. And unlike the founders who ended up winning, you had no incentive to assume the gaps would be filled in with magic traction and a bag of money.

ChuckMcM 13y ago

In 1978 I thought Bill Gates trying to sell BASIC interpreters for what was 90% of the cost of the computer to run them was a pretty stupid idea :-) That said, one of my VC friends defines an Entrepreneur as someone who can take a stupid idea and make it successful. Sort of an homage to the whole idea that they can see something you cannot. These days when I'm confronted by this sort of proposal I ask the person making the proposal to describe the world where their idea has succeeded. What is different about that world from today, and what is the same. What do people do in that world that they do differently now or can't do at all. And perhaps more importantly what do they do today which they no longer have to do. If you can paint that picture in enough detail you can figure out who is going to be working against this person and who is going to be cheering this person on, you might get a sense of how much work is between here and there and the kinds of people needed to do that work. And if you know this person well you might be able to guess whether or not they are up for that, or perhaps more importantly, committed enough.

CapitalistCartr 13y ago
I thought bottled water was idiotic "Who's gonna pay that for water ? ! ? Gone in six months." And phone sex lines. "1.99$ first minute, $.99 each additional minute? Please!" In six months their rates doubled. Business models can be hard to judge.
- geoffc 13y ago
  This one hits home. 25 years ago I zigged into the water filtration business when I should have zagged in the bottled water business. I had the choice and never saw that businesses would pay so much to have water trucked to them. Doh!
- derefr 13y ago
  Both of those are very well-studied business models, though: 1. sell to the lonely and impulsive who are willing to trade money for attention (Also see: therapists, people who run cons on the elderly, everything else involving real interaction with a woman in the sex industry); additionally, take advantage of the sunk-cost bias to keep people after they would have otherwise "passed their limit" (Also see: casinos) 2. run advertising campaigns that separate the world into "good/beautiful/healthy/upper-class people" and "bad/ugly/disgusting/lower-class people" by which kind of products they use, then position yourself as the most convenient/eminently-consumable product in the "good people" product class. (Also see: deodorant, diamonds, hybrid cars)

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rexreed 13y ago

A few points, some already cited here: * Survivor bias (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivor_bias https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivor_bias) is yielding a self-selection in the positive results. I'm sure there are plenty of stupid ideas that went nowhere. Probably as much as "Great" ideas that went nowhere. So, I think saying that his opinion that something was stupid is a counter-indicator of its degree of success doesn't have much merit. * Second, an idea or early prototype has little correlation to its inevitable success or failure. As is often said, execution is everything. The idea is necessary, but not sufficient to guarantee a market success, as defined differently by different markets. * Third, while he decries his stance as calling something "stupid" as an arrogant position, this article itself comes across as arrogant -- in effect he's positioning himself near the beginning of these companies' inception and being in the position of being asked his opinion in a taste-maker fashion. I suspect in reality, he was one of many people that were exposed to this idea and his opinion was mostly irrelevant in their efforts to pursue the idea. It can be interpreted as very Forrest Gump to position ones self at the crux of so many eventual market successes when in reality that is not the case. I'd like to understand the context of these meetings. I've certainly been at the early-stages of many ideas, but no one asked for, or cared about, my opinions. In which case, saying that they were stupid ideas was an opinion offered only to myself. And I probably did indeed think they were stupid at the time. Was I arrogant? No. But then I don't claim that anyone cared about my opinion. * Finally, I call your attention to Pinterest's actual success path (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinterest https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinterest and http://www.famousbloggers.net/history-pinterest.html http://www.famousbloggers.net/history-pinterest.html). They iterated and "failed" for 2 years before becoming an "overnight success". I dare say that perhaps at the time of the meeting, Pinterest's idea and execution were probably stupid, and it took time and relentless iteration to make it a success. In fact, "Silbermann said he personally wrote to the site's first 5,000 users offering his personal phone number and even meeting with some of its users." Which goes to show just how many people's opinions he solicited in the process of building to its current level of success.

nostromo 13y ago
It's a bit uncharitable to call "I thought Pinterest and Vine were dumb" arrogance.

hcarvalhoalves 13y ago

In all fairness, Pinterest still looks like a stupid idea. Like Twitter. Like Instagram. Stupid is popular, though. You don't need to build more than the most mundane of the things to have a popular product.

iwritecode 13y ago

I still do this - it's something I'm actively trying to fix. I'm worse still when products never materialize into a full-fledged success, still seem mvp/alpha but provide enough interest and income to spin up a proper shop here and there. I think the root of it, for me at least, is just a bit of envy staring down at me from my shelf of half-completed and less interesting ideas.

gnuvince 13y ago

Stupid idea doesn't mean it's not gonna make money. Great idea doesn't mean it's gonna make money. It's damn near impossible to predict what the public is gonna like.

michael_nielsen 13y ago

The moral of this isn't that stupid ideas are good. It's that unfamiliar insights can be hard to understand and recognize, even for smart people. The right question to ask when confronted with something new isn't "What's wrong with this?" It's "What's the most interesting new insight(s) here?" A lot of smart people like to ask the first question at the expense of the second, and that's a mistake.

duopixel 13y ago

I think this happens because we're poor judges of character. Yes, there's many bozos out there, but if you ask enough questions you will be able to differentiate them. I'm still working on this, but I've seen that if you put aside your preconceptions and try to understand the product that is being showed to you, using it, asking a lot of questions and really giving yourself some time for big picture conversation, you are able to tell them apart.

seeingfurther 13y ago

We built an app that 'listens' to social media and closely correlates with the S&P 500 http://elite.kredstreet.com/all http://elite.kredstreet.com/all (zoom in to see the correlation) You have no idea how many people have ignored us along the way and yet our signal will be used by high frequency traders to trade the stock market. Talking to investors often reminds me of this gem... http://www.xtranormal.com/watch/7203877/fundraising http://www.xtranormal.com/watch/7203877/fundraising EDIT: someone just emailed me and said this was stupid. LOL

jere 13y ago

>I want to make an app for browsing catalogs. It's like a fashion catalog, but you can organize and share outfits Is this really a fair description of Pinterest today though? Maybe as originally described it is a dumb idea. Vine, on the other hand, is really awesome and Curtis saw it right then, but was more worried about how it would find popularity rather than whether it was a "good" idea.

pseut 13y ago
That seems to be pretty much how my wife uses pinterest. Outfits and gardening.

sgdesign 13y ago

Those were stupid ideas. Nobody said stupid ideas couldn't be successful. In fact, I suspect an idea's stupidity has very little impact on its success one way or another. Ideas I'd consider not stupid include self-driving cars, Google Glass, and Bitcoin. Whether or not those are good ideas is yet another discussion…

ibudiallo 13y ago
Smart ideas are very hard to implement. I always go for the stupid ideas because they also fail faster

greghinch 13y ago

Ha, I still think Vine and Pinterest are stupid ideas. But, Pinterest at least has done a good job at making lazy, vapid, narcissism easy, and there's certainly demand for that. Not sure how you monetize it (is Pinterest?), but they have a lot of users. I'm not sure Vine is yet a "success". I don't see a lot of activity there yet. My (completely biased and limited) litmus test for social apps is to see how many of my non-techie friends get on board and how quickly. With Facebook, Instagram, and even Pinterest, that was pretty quick. Vine seems to still be lagging. It's too much work for the payoff for most people, is my gut feeling.

jeffgreco 13y ago
lazy, vapid, narcissism Care to elaborate? My interpretation of Pinterest is really "visual social bookmarking."
- greghinch 13y ago
  Sure. The main use of Pinterest is to show your friends and everyone else what good taste you have. "Look at this collection of bridal dresses I like!" "Check out all these vacation spots I want to go to!" If you just wanted to collect photos of these things to give yourself ideas, you wouldn't need to share it with everyone. So you have an easy way to show everyone how cool all the stuff you like is, and by extension you are, with very little effort on your own part to actually create or realize (i.e. actually do work) those things into being. Sure there are elements of this across all social networks, but Pinterest has really distilled it down to the lowest common denominator point and click. More of an indictment of society than of Pinterest itself I suppose. Pinterest or something like it was bound to show up sooner or later.
  - chc 13y ago
    I can't help but feel this is just an uncharitable way to describe sharing ideas in general. My fiancee and I have gotten a lot of good use out of other people's good taste on Pinterest — we've found outfits to steal for the wedding, decorating ideas and lots of tasty recipes. How is this any more vulgar than sharing ideas in any other context?

paul_f 13y ago

There are no stupid ideas. Except the really stupid ones, of course.

rdl 13y ago

I feel this way about almost all consumer web services. Nothing is better than irc, usenet, MUDs, and email/lists, with the exception of making things mobile, detachable/multi device, more secure, and I guess supporting non Latin alphabets. There are still a few products missing from the perfect Internet (a great usenet/forum replacement, a way to run individual agents in the background, a way to great all communications as filter ably as email, and a great payment system), but I'm fine without another catalog sharing site, etc. I accept that consumer services could become popular, but I have no way to predict it, and once they have traction, they are expensive investments. I am kind of at a loss as to how one could be a high value add investor in the seed consumer space without just focusing on founders nearly exclusively.

knowtheory 13y ago

But really. Did these entrepreneurs really understand what they were building at the time? Is it the case that these people articulated the best case for their products and businesses when Dustin saw introduced to these projects in their infancy? Developing a product, and the right pitch is an evolutionary process, and it may just very well be the case that Dustin encountered them too early. He may very well be at fault for thinking these ideas were stupid at the time, but then again he might very well not be. Being introduced to a work in progress is always a negotiation. Asking the right questions is part of it, and on the flip side, having an interlocutor who has some sense of how to answer your questions. Also, some ideas are just stupid.

dclowd9901 13y ago

A blogging platform centered around the idea of inviting tech elites to circlejerk over their pithy thoughts and lord over us with their limited membership. What a stupid idea, I thought. The only interesting thing it does is let you upvote things by hovering your mouse in a circle.

andrewhillman 13y ago

"Everything is obvious once its successful. Big wins come when you can spot something before its obvious to everyone else." -ev williams.

brucehart 13y ago

I had a similar experience when I was 14 years old. At the time I was running a very popular trivia web site that had been featured on Yahoo and in a few magazines. A guy e-mailed me and said he liked my site. He asked if he could pay me a small fee to run a banner ad for his new business. I told him I appreciated the offer, but I didn't think it was allowed under the Geocities terms of service. I was really into discovering new web sites at the time and had not heard of this company. I looked at the guy's site to see what it was about. I remember thinking it was ugly design and a stupid idea. Not much longer after that, the company began to take off. The guy that had e-mailed me was Pierre Omidyar and the site was EBay. I've tried to look at new businesses with an open mind since then.

tikhonj 13y ago

Amusingly, I've had the opposite problem: I see some things, think they are the best ideas ever and then watch them fizzle away. Perhaps the largest example of this would be Wave. When I first heard about Google Wave, I was incredibly impressed and immediately signed up for the beta. I really did think it would replace email and IM--it was an elegant solution that did both, at the same time. I then played around with it, rather liked it and even got some friends to use it. I was still trying to use it well after almost everyone gave up on it. I was rather disappointed in its ignominious decline and eventual death. I also really liked webOS. All your apps would just be web apps! It would be great. It wasn't. I really loved the Zune HD. It had one of the best interfaces I had ever seen and was incredibly capable for its price. I still have mine, and I still like it, mostly. I've had people on the subway ask me about it simply because they didn't know what it was :P. I thought Gnome 3 was awesome and a gigantic step forward from Gnome 2. You could customize your entire environment, all in JavaScript. And yet almost nobody I know uses it. Unity may have gotten panned by internet critics, but at least plenty of people I know use it. Gnome 3? Maybe one person. A disproportionate number of the things that I get really excited about--rather than just interested in--seem to fizzle out. Maybe it's just selection bias, of course. I imagine the contrast between my expectations and reality make things stand out more. But it does seem that the more enthusiastic I am about something the more likely it is to flop. Right now, the technology that I'm really excited about in a very similar way is Rust. I hope it breaks this rather annoying trend! It's basically the only new programming language that I genuinely like and don't view as a waste of time and space. I honestly think it will take off, but that's what I thought about all the other examples too. I guess this doesn't have much to do with the actual article. It's just a lament about my own misplaced enthusiasm. But it does feel better to have written about it :P.

bsimpson 13y ago
The examples you listed died because of marketing, more than technology. Wave was essentially a social network that your friends couldn't get invites for if they wanted. It was a hugely hyped ghost-town. Wave was a tech preview because it was ungodly slow and made some questionable UX decisions (like badly reimplementing the scroll bar) - Google would have been embarrassed to call it a fully-fledged product. At the same time, they hyped it up like one, which led many people to pass judgement on it too soon, while the ones who wanted to use it either couldn't get access or didn't know anyone who had access to write to. webOS, from everything I've heard, was quite good. Unfortunately, the history of Palm didn't leave them enough resources to grow it organically - it was a high pressure do-or-die launch with rushed hardware that was universally panned. They didn't have enough resources to wait for good hardware to pair with it. They also banked on Verizon covering the marketing budget, but Verizon famously used Motorola's Milestone to launch the DROID brand instead. (There's a really interesting article from the Verge about it.) I don't know enough about Linux or Zune to comment on those, but you got excited about webOS and Wave because you saw the promise of the vision. The execution is what bungled both.

redshirtrob 13y ago

There are so many things that seemed like a stupid idea to me: - Seinfeld: Who is this guy, really? - Frasier: Come on, a spinoff? (So, I didn't realize spinoffs were a thing) - Twitter: Haiku and vanity plates for the Internet. - Jeni's Splendid Ice Cream: Salty Caramel, you've got to be kidding me. I don't want salty ice cream. - Arrested Development: Wait, Jason Bateman. He was so bland on The Hogan Family. - There's Something About Mary: Their promo seemed ripped off the Zelda commercials, or that's how I felt. - Blogging (Well, Live Journal): Do I really care what other people are doing? - Scrubs: I don't know, I just didn't like the idea. - Freaks and Geeks: How dare they try to explain what it was like to be adolescent me? - McGriddles: Sausage, syrup and pancakes? - Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Slow animals doing karate makes no sense. The only common thread I can find in these things is me. I have no idea why I had negative, visceral reactions to these things. It's gotten to the point where I try to pay special attention when an idea causes me to have this reaction.

dasil003 13y ago
That's an awesome list.
lotyrin 13y ago
I don't know, most of those initial reactions make sense to me. I think it's as simple as others are saying: in a market full of humans, making sense is not a dependency of success. and many of us justify the things that succeed after the fact. If we're dismissing things for good reasons, I don't think we should try to inhibit our reasoning in order to just be less discriminating. Instead, the magic (or at least seemingly magic to engineers such as myself, when it works) of marketing is to account for and scrutinize based on the irrational.
adventured 13y ago
To be fair, McGriddles have always been available with bacon, which makes all the difference to me. Good list though.
phaus 13y ago
Salted caramel has always been and will always be awesome. Another deceptively awesome dessert is chocolate with pepper in it. Sounds weird, but its actually one of the original ways that cocoa was enjoyed. What kills me about ice cream is the immense popularity of all of the stupid "Ben and Jerry's" style knock-offs that use a 10:1 candy:ice cream ratio. When I want to eat ice cream, it doesn't mean that I really want a candy bar.

markdown 13y ago

A well-written humblebrag.

zabraxias 13y ago
It reads that way a little but as a front-end dev I've had sit-downs with a few founders trying to hire me and in some cases I thought their ideas were stupid. It didn't seem like they wanted my opinion on their idea as much as they wanted to get me excited about the future they are trying to create. Turns out one of them succeeded in a sense.
- imsky 13y ago
  That's the founders' job though. They don't hire developers to critique their strategy, they hire them to implement it.
artursapek 13y ago
Ain't nobody humblebrag like Dustin Curtis humblebrags.
- rmrfrmrf 13y ago
  - 309 points and 108 comments - comments about the "vapid" and "useless" nature of Pinterest and Vine - absolutely no discussion about how there's no takeaway from the post aside from "I'm so important that I blew off two of these successful guys." I was really expecting some kind of goal that he'd set for himself or way to improve his pessimistic attitude. Oh well.

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ekianjo 13y ago

However. Its not because its popular that its not stupid.

sramsay 13y ago

I more often experience the facepalm of watching an uncomplicated idea turn into a global sensation. It's 2005 (hardly the distant technological past), and someone gets the idea for a site where you can store and watch videos. This is not some kind of radical technological innovation. This is not something beyond the ambit of current capabilities. This is not some brazen insight into the future. This is a site. Where you store videos. And watch them. This, of course, is YouTube -- a site that was eventually sold to Google for $1.6 billion dollars. facepalm

pfitzsimmons 13y ago
Well, to be sure the magic ingredient in Youtube's success was not the idea of uploading and watching videos. Many people were working on video sharing at that time (myself included). Youtube's secret was that the founders were already successful entrepreneurs who were well connected to VC's. Thus they had access to the capital that allowed them to lose ungodly amounts of money in the quest for growth.
- sramsay 13y ago
  Man, that sucks. Win a game like that, and you never have to have another idea as long as you live.
- wpietri 13y ago
  Well, they also had an impressively cavalier attitude to copyright. Which was a major advantage. But they also had excellent design sense. YouTube made uploading, viewing, and sharing content very, very easy. I did some consulting for a semi-competitor, so I paid a lot of attention to the market then. YouTube did a great job, which helped them get users, which surely didn't hurt with VCs. Also, Crunchbase says they took $3.5m from Sequoia to start, and then $8m a few months later, and my recollection was that later tranche was really just to spend on bandwidth and servers. Google bought them a few months later. So they didn't lose what I'd call ungodly amounts of VC money; that's less than 1% of what Facebook received before IPOing.
  - 13y ago

ryguytilidie 13y ago

As people have already said, this is a ridiculous case of survivor bias and to be fair, they are kind of stupid ideas. One is basically bookmarks, but with a nice UI and sharing, and the other is a kind of poorly made way to share short video clips. I met a kid making a video sharing app that was miles better just last week.

saddino 13y ago

Every killer idea is stupid until success betrays its obviousness. Most inspired ideas are probably stupid. And finally, many ideas are just plain stupid. The trick is to ignore your gut reaction and ask yourself, "If this amazingly stupid idea is executed perfectly, is there a real market for this?" Women "pinning" their desires? Check. People sharing incredibly easy-to-compose video? Check. Don't confuse the dancer with the dance.

richardg 13y ago

I like the first line on the last paragraph - "The future is extremely hard to see through the lens of the present." What we do in the present can affect the future but we can not predict what will actually happen. There's too much variables involved.

yoster 13y ago

I know the feeling. For me it was in the stock market. I had a chance to invest a substantial amount in gold about 13 years ago with someone who wanted to dump his gold stocks at a discounted price. I scoffed at the idea and thought it was stupid. Well, we all know how that turned out....

joeblau 13y ago

Dustin, let's meet at The Creamery. I gotta stupid idea to show you :)

rickdale 13y ago

This article highlights the few times he was wrong. But what about all the lunches where he left thinking 'what a stupid idea' and was right.

mikecane 13y ago

In the early 1980s, CompuServe's marketeers thought the CB Simulator was dumb. It brought in most of the money. Here we are in 2013 and there's Twitter.

bluedino 13y ago

Reminds me of 'How my brain kept me from co-founding Youtube' (http://prog21.dadgum.com/39.html http://prog21.dadgum.com/39.html) The idea that people were going to push around 500k images (Flickr) or even more insane, videos was crazy when it first started happening. Remember how long it took to download QuickTime or RealPlayer videos, and how bad the quality was? Now people are streaming HD music videos on our PHONES just to listen to it while they drive to work. They don't even watch the video.

shloime 13y ago

I just Kudos'd all your articles just because the button is so awesome :)

imechura 13y ago

I am glad that these two guys truly believed in their ideas and where not discouraged by your lack buy-in to their vision. I am often reminded of the 2001 me. When I was new developer building java web applications and full of vigor with no real responsibilities or expenses. I was dead set on this idea to build a site where people could post links, pictures, text or whatever and it would be voted and categorically managed by the user community. I shopped the idea and prototype around to people in my limited network and it was unanimous that no one would ever want to invest time into this concept. Discouraged, I scrapped the idea and accepted a position as the first non-partner employee at a consulting start-up that quickly imploded. Years later reddit moves to the forefront of the internet with striking resemblance to my original plan. My fault because I did not stick to my guns. The idea that my application could have been half as popular as reddit is unlikely but it taught me a lesson, sometimes you've got to trust your gut, even if the people you trust cannot see your vision.

timr 13y ago

I first met the AirBnB guys in 2007, at their "unofficial Startup School after party". It was my first ever San Francisco startup party. At the time, they were in the depths of their existential struggle. The "party" consisted of a few guys, a couple of liters of soda, and a few half-empty bottles of booze. I remember talking to Joe and Brian, and hearing their pitch, and thinking: "oh, so it's like couchsurfing, but for pay....good luck with that, guys". Oops.

joering2 13y ago
The only reason why people are willing to pay AirBnB is because of their audience (classic chicken&egg dilemma). But that audience was initially captured/harvested mostly through illegal or semi-legal ways (at least the ways that a decent human being wouldn't do that). Lookup my previous posts I rant enough about AirBnB owners and their criminal past.

cs702 13y ago

This blog post reminds me of the Bessemer Venture Partners "Anti-Portfolio" -- a list of companies they passed on that subsequently became massively successful, including Apple, Google, and Intel. They explain on their website: "Our reasons for passing on these investments varied. In some cases, we were making a conscious act of generosity to another, younger venture firm, down on their luck, who we felt could really use a billion dollars in gains. In other cases, our partners had already run out of spaces on the year's Schedule D and feared that another entry would require them to attach a separate sheet." The whole web page is filled with similar, painfully funny explanations: http://www.bvp.com/portfolio/antiportfolio http://www.bvp.com/portfolio/antiportfolio

dustingetz 13y ago

if someone i respect says something stupid, its probably not. this is why signaling is so important.

lucian303 13y ago

A great business idea can still be "stupid." Or worse: Privately run prisons. Mercenary companies providing "security" in wars. etc.

larrykubin 13y ago

Ideas I thought were stupid when I first heard them: 1) eBay - people are going to buy from random people they don't know? and bid against other people they don't know? Auctions will be rigged and I won't get my stuff. Stupid. 2) Netflix - they are going to send DVD's in the mail and I am going to mail them back? And then I have to wait for it to get to me? Aren't people going to steal the DVD's and damage them? Won't it cost too much for them to make a profit? Why don't I just go to Blockbuster? Stupid.

zobzu 13y ago

What I generally dislike with these articles is that someone quickly draw the conclusion "never criticize, always believe in the idea, even if it seems stupid at first sight" And of course, I find that terribly wrong. The author did not hint that at all (which I appreciate), however, but I still believe many will think this. The point is that you must carefully examine each idea before jumping to a judgement. Do not dismiss the bad points. Just think it through. It wont work every time, because you're not perfect, and because you don't have all elements/cards in your hands (unless you can see the future and read people's mind, of course). All you can do is a best guess. Obviously, the author is either very unlucky, either bad at doing the best possible guess.

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anigbrowl 13y ago

I felt the same way about twitter. I also still think I was right :-)

d_runs_far 13y ago

After about two decades in 'new media' I've seen and been part of some rather stupid ideas too. Off the top of my head: - business card cd-roms: I was working on rights for Canada at one point - Flash vs. Director: I was a Director guy and thought Flash was stupid; but it sure had it's day vs. Director - Digital Signage: I had worked out a couple prototypes using CRT monitors and Mac LC pizza boxes installed in integrated cases with a modem for both control and new content. All controlled with a slick little Director application - A chat program that used proximity and interest matching to bring people together. Prototype was pretty cool for 1998 :-) There are probably some others, but I love stupid ideas, they make things interesting.

jdietrich 13y ago

Success is not validation of an idea and we should be ashamed to think so. Cigarettes are one of the most successful consumer products on earth. Inhaling a lungful of carcinogenic smoke several hundred times a day is undoubtedly a stupid idea. Tobacco has made a small number of people incomprehensibly rich, to the great detriment of humanity. Personally, I think nearly all of these 'social' startups are bad news. Not as bad news as a lung cancer epidemic, but bad news nonetheless. I think they feed a culture of passivity and attention deficit. I think they fragment human interaction into the smallest possible dopamine-inducing units. I think they're essentially Skinner boxes in disguise - apps that dress up an intermittent schedule of reward as meaningful activity. The startup culture talks the talk about "changing the world", but in truth most of us couldn't care less so long as we get our next funding round. For every Watsi, we have a hundred bullshit companies with bullshit products, providing yet another means of idle distraction for indolent westerners. We can hardly distinguish between what is worthwhile and what is popular or profitable. It has hardly occurred to Curtis or anyone in these comments that an idea could be both successful and stupid. Is Pinterest really an innovative sharing tool, or is it merely a collaborative exercise in commodity fetishism? Is Vine really a radical new way to communicate, or is it merely the nadir of audiovisual culture, fragmenting the world into six-second shards of nothingness? Do we even care?

robbiep 13y ago
Well said. I quietly dispair at the shortened attention spans and clamour for 'likes' and 'follows' that have resulted... Whilst I browse Instagram and refresh Facebook. I am a walking contradiction...
- gnarbarian 13y ago
  I like to blame "Loony Toons" for my short attention span.
codyZ 13y ago
>For every Watsi, we have a hundred bullshit companies with bullshit products, Unfortunate, but true. Everything is suddenly an app. Is there a difference between 'social' startup and 'tech' startup? I think the culture, particularly the media, is making those synonymous for the worst...

molsongolden 13y ago

At first I expected this to be a post about svbtle and all of the resistance and pushback Dustin received when he first showed us his new "blog" design and tried to explain his vision. Things seem to be picking up on that front and the content is fairly good. Can we get an iPad or web app with an easier way to explore and stumble through "magazine articles" without knowing who or what we are looking for?

gesman 13y ago

Well, between Pinterest and Vine demos - how many times you were actually right about other, really stupid ideas? :)

Myrmornis 13y ago

This is simply a vehicle for the author to show off about how he was consulted by well-known startups before they were big. These articles by dcurtis are a very ugly portrait of San Francisco tech culture. For example it beggars belief that this one was not written as a parody: http://dcurt.is/the-best http://dcurt.is/the-best

monkeyspaw 13y ago

I'll confess something similar, but a bigger whiff on my part. Wifi was becoming common when I entered college. Around that time, laptops were underpowered, especially compared to desktops. I thought wifi was a fad. After all, you generally had to plug your laptop in after 2 hours. What was the big deal about a cable for network too?

gersonaya 13y ago

Very well argued indeed. I'm glad someone shares the same thoughts as me.

tudorconstantin 13y ago

I'd have dismissed the facebook idea if zuckerberg would've came to me in the beginning. There were myspace, hi5, orkut and a few other already on the market.

outworlder 13y ago

It may not be that the ideas are 'stupid' per-se. It's just that we tend to underestimate how complex some tasks are for ordinary people. I mean, I could take thousands of pictures and automate the process of applying photoshop filters and uploading them as they arrive - and I bet most of you could do it too, perhaps in some even cooler way. That'd be just black magic for most people.

nsxwolf 13y ago

I've had this happen to me a few times. These days I don't even get the stupid ideas in the first place anymore. So I guess I don't have to feel so bad about missing the opportunities now. There aren't any!

human_error 13y ago

I think the key point isn't if an idea stupid or smart. It seems to me the key point is more like how you execute the idea.

danenania 13y ago

I think a big issue with social network ideas is just that there's so much chance involved. Maybe 1 in 100 that have a solid idea and strong execution are going to achieve the critical mass they need for success. It really just comes down to achieving trendiness, which though it can be engineered to some extent and depends to some extent on quality and uniqueness, is still fraught with chance and ultimately depends whether a product happens to appeal to the particular whims of enough people with above average influence simultaneously enough to create momentum and buzz. A few missing links in that chain can sink the ship, while catching the right eye in the right way can ensure global adoption. So having a negative attitude toward them all is safe in the sense that you'll almost always be right, and you'll be constantly reinforced in your beliefs. But since startup investment is a game of long shots, like most +EV gambling games, an investor shouldn't be focused on the absolute probability of success but on the chance of success * the potential value.

jperezsea 13y ago

Arrogant? Yes, if you thought you could figure out that they would succeed or not based on one conversation. The point of this entry is really: as an entrepreneur, push forward independent of what people who are not you target customer say/think.

mikeleeorg 13y ago

I wonder how honest Dustin was to Ben and Dom. It's entirely possible that his negative feelings about each product helped drive it further. Sometimes criticism is more important than praise. I would rather someone call my product stupid - and point out why - than to just say, "Yea, it's okay I guess." To Ben and Dom's credit, I have a feeling both saw Dustin's apathy, read it correctly as apathy, and used that to either strengthen their products, or their story, or both.

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joshuaheard 13y ago

Several years ago, I was reading a blog by a well known tech entrepreneur. He was describing his new project, a way for people to post their everyday life actions in 140 characters or less, so they could tell their friends they were going to the store, or what they had for lunch. I thought, what a stupid idea, only the vainest self-absorbed people would share such minute details of their life. His project was called Twitter.

artumi-richard 13y ago

And lo! pg did spake! "Only the good ideas that look like bad ideas are left. All the good ideas that look like good ideas have been done."

artas_bartas 13y ago

So what are the other two ideas?

segmondy 13y ago

Ha! I've heard a lot of stupid ideas and none of them have made a dollar!