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Everyone working mobile had this idea earlier in the decade. Most people working in the field knew that the biggest issue was going to be getting carriers to pu

Everyone working mobile had this idea earlier in the decade. Most people working in the field knew that the biggest issue was going to be getting carriers to put this thing on their phone, not actually building the app itself. Sam Altman was young and inexperienced enough (i.e. not jaded) to push it through. That said I wonder how loopt is going to respond to the Foursquare thing from the dodgeball people. Out here in early adopter land it seems like Foursquare is the new hotness and people consider Loopt a gay hookup application. Not that a gay hookup application is necessarily a bad market to be in...

pg 17y ago
Everyone working mobile had this idea earlier in the decade. Had it at the resolution of a one-paragraph text description, maybe. At that resolution, Google = Excite. I also think you're doing Sam an injustice by attributing his success to youth and inexperience. Youth and inexperience are plentiful, but they don't seem to produce much except when combined with brains and determination.
- menloparkbum 17y ago
  I didn't mean to downplay his determination and brains, sorry if it seemed that way.
- zimbabwe 17y ago
  Why can't it be both? Youth and inexperience may not necessarily mean attempting the impossible, like menloparkbum suggested, but certainly being youthful means having a better grasp on what's going on. So it's right to attribute part of his success to youth: he made a product that appeals to the youthful market. Similarly, youth is a good reason to think that Foursquare could be a threat. The people making Foursquare have already created a successful product in this market. They spent a few years working for a powerful company that didn't understand their ideas. So they're the people who hit the market before Sam did, and they're returning with a more refined concept than they had before. The fact that they're youthful and determined is why I'm watching them and ignoring attempts like Google Latitude, which practically scream sterile.
  - axod 17y ago
    There have been several startups doing the same sort of thing, all failing. I'm still not convinced people want this (Location aware social networking mobile thingy). It's a shame you can't get traffic figures so easily for mobile apps - without user/revenue numbers it's all speculation as to how successful or otherwise loopt is. IPO seems like crazy talk to me.
    - zimbabwe 17y ago
      I don't use my cell for networking. I don't like that constant connectivity. But within that market, I would suggest that the Dodgeball team is a force to be reckoned with. Perhaps I'm biased because Loopt is ugly as sin, and Foursquare is slightly better.
- Alex3917 17y ago
  Someone as smart and determined as Sam could have made 10 million in any number of much easier ways. But the fact is that he chose to do it pretty much the most difficult way imaginable. This seems like inexperience to me, at least when you look at it from the perspective of a business person rather than the perspective of a hacker.
  - pg 17y ago
    What's the error on your estimate of how hard what he's done is? Several hundred percent? A thousand percent? What are the alternative ways of making $10m that you casually assume to exist? And how do you know how hard each of them is?
    - zimbabwe 17y ago
      How does the quote go? "It's easy to be rich if all you want is to be rich"? If the goal is simply money, making it is not necessarily hard. There are many corporate positions that pay an obscene amount of money at the cost of being very dull. Somebody who enters a market with the goal of making money and nothing else is going to make a lot of money. Most of the routes available are much easier than the one that he picked, which requires a good idea and a lot of luck. Alex was not slamming Sam's achievement. He just said that from a business perspective rather than a hacker's perspective, the hacker route to riches is very fraught and few people ever make it. You're an outlier, as is Sam, but statistically speaking, more people fail as hacker/entrepreneurs than fail as high-powered corporate lawyers or as cutthroat schmoozers. Even the moderate successes, like Sam (moderate being relative to, say, the people who created Facebook/Microsoft/Google), aren't particularly better-off than the people who merely submit to the system and work their asses off, so the risk doesn't pay a higher financial reward. The only reward is that of personal fulfillment.
      - divia 17y ago
        "Big money isn't hard to come by. All it costs is a lifetime of singleminded devotion to acquiring it and making it grow into more money, to the utter exclusion of all other interests. They say that the age of opportunity has passed. Nonsense! Seven out of ten of the wealthiest men on this planet started life without a shilling--and there are plenty more such strivers on the way up. Such people are not stopped by high taxation nor even by socialism; they simply adapt themselves to new rules and presently they change the rules. But no premiere ballerina ever works harder, nor more narrowly, than a man who acquires riches." -A Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein

pg 17y ago

Everyone working mobile had this idea earlier in the decade. Had it at the resolution of a one-paragraph text description, maybe. At that resolution, Google = Excite. I also think you're doing Sam an injustice by attributing his success to youth and inexperience. Youth and inexperience are plentiful, but they don't seem to produce much except when combined with brains and determination.

menloparkbum 17y ago
I didn't mean to downplay his determination and brains, sorry if it seemed that way.
zimbabwe 17y ago
Why can't it be both? Youth and inexperience may not necessarily mean attempting the impossible, like menloparkbum suggested, but certainly being youthful means having a better grasp on what's going on. So it's right to attribute part of his success to youth: he made a product that appeals to the youthful market. Similarly, youth is a good reason to think that Foursquare could be a threat. The people making Foursquare have already created a successful product in this market. They spent a few years working for a powerful company that didn't understand their ideas. So they're the people who hit the market before Sam did, and they're returning with a more refined concept than they had before. The fact that they're youthful and determined is why I'm watching them and ignoring attempts like Google Latitude, which practically scream sterile.
- axod 17y ago
  There have been several startups doing the same sort of thing, all failing. I'm still not convinced people want this (Location aware social networking mobile thingy). It's a shame you can't get traffic figures so easily for mobile apps - without user/revenue numbers it's all speculation as to how successful or otherwise loopt is. IPO seems like crazy talk to me.
  - zimbabwe 17y ago
    I don't use my cell for networking. I don't like that constant connectivity. But within that market, I would suggest that the Dodgeball team is a force to be reckoned with. Perhaps I'm biased because Loopt is ugly as sin, and Foursquare is slightly better.
Alex3917 17y ago
Someone as smart and determined as Sam could have made 10 million in any number of much easier ways. But the fact is that he chose to do it pretty much the most difficult way imaginable. This seems like inexperience to me, at least when you look at it from the perspective of a business person rather than the perspective of a hacker.
- pg 17y ago
  What's the error on your estimate of how hard what he's done is? Several hundred percent? A thousand percent? What are the alternative ways of making $10m that you casually assume to exist? And how do you know how hard each of them is?
  - zimbabwe 17y ago
    How does the quote go? "It's easy to be rich if all you want is to be rich"? If the goal is simply money, making it is not necessarily hard. There are many corporate positions that pay an obscene amount of money at the cost of being very dull. Somebody who enters a market with the goal of making money and nothing else is going to make a lot of money. Most of the routes available are much easier than the one that he picked, which requires a good idea and a lot of luck. Alex was not slamming Sam's achievement. He just said that from a business perspective rather than a hacker's perspective, the hacker route to riches is very fraught and few people ever make it. You're an outlier, as is Sam, but statistically speaking, more people fail as hacker/entrepreneurs than fail as high-powered corporate lawyers or as cutthroat schmoozers. Even the moderate successes, like Sam (moderate being relative to, say, the people who created Facebook/Microsoft/Google), aren't particularly better-off than the people who merely submit to the system and work their asses off, so the risk doesn't pay a higher financial reward. The only reward is that of personal fulfillment.
    - divia 17y ago
      "Big money isn't hard to come by. All it costs is a lifetime of singleminded devotion to acquiring it and making it grow into more money, to the utter exclusion of all other interests. They say that the age of opportunity has passed. Nonsense! Seven out of ten of the wealthiest men on this planet started life without a shilling--and there are plenty more such strivers on the way up. Such people are not stopped by high taxation nor even by socialism; they simply adapt themselves to new rules and presently they change the rules. But no premiere ballerina ever works harder, nor more narrowly, than a man who acquires riches." -A Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein