"Opportunity cost of working on wrong ideas can set back growth by years."
I feel like this is spoken by someone who hasn't seen more than one technology cycle come and go.
What I've observed - having started my career back in the Java-will-eat-the-desktop days and then adapted through webapps, big data, mobile, and now AI - is that the people who are best positioned to capitalize on an emerging technology wave are the ones who started working on it before anyone realized it was important, just because it was interesting to them. They're the ones who write the papers and software that everyone else evangelizes, and then get multi-million-$ signing bonuses or stock grants (or billions of dollars worth of cryptocurrency) when corporate interests catch on that this is a new technology wave. But at the time they start working on the idea, it's both useless and unlikely to work.
You can make a decent living always being on the look out for a new technology wave and jumping on it as soon as it's clear that it's hot. I spent much of my 20s doing that, and made enough money doing so that I can take it a bit easier now. But it's exhausting, and you'll never be the one actually driving change.
It's also usually not clear what's the "wrong idea" except in retrospect. DropBox is rsync with cloud storage and some pretty slick desktop app integration, done at a time when everybody thought that desktop apps were dead and Drew's Windows hacking skills were old news. But it's that familiarity with old technology that put him in a place to realize that new technology could make the old technology dramatically more useful, to the tune of a $10B company.
For every person who rode a powerful technology wave, there are also many others who rode the wrong ones.
One of my favorite stories from Drew was that when he first started Dropbox, he created a 4-minute demo video showcasing the product that functioned as an MVP for the product. The video drove hundreds of thousands of people to their site and grew their beta mailing list from 5,000 to 75,000 people overnight.
On the outside looking in, skeptics might have thought that it was nothing new. But the MVP provided validation around what future customers actually thought.
My main takeaway from that story (and that I share in the book) has always been to validate your ideas early and often, so that you can get more signal on whether the assumptions you're using to shape your behavior are accurate.
It's definitely a gamble. When the Apple Newton came up I thought pen computing would be the future, threw everything into it and was at the forefront for a few years. But by 2000 or earlier it was pretty clear that I had bet on the wrong horse. I guess my lesson is to jump ship sooner but then you also often hear that perseverance is the key. Tough equation. Now my belief is that you have to be persistent but also need a lot of luck to be at the right place at the right time.
The Apple Newton was clearly what happened when Jobs had the idea for the iPad 20 years before the technology could actually deliver a usable experience for it. And even then you can see sketches of it all the way back to the 60s: https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=CEc1OOGmA5IC&pg=PA91&lpg...
That's true and part of the challenge. It's not always clear what's a powerful technology wave and what's the wrong one.
I've actually got a bit more of a personal connection to DropBox - Drew was active on HN before founding it, he posted it here before posting it on Digg [1], and he took me out to lunch right after they'd gotten their Sequoia seed round and asked if he could convince me to be employee #2. At the time, I was working on a casual game creation startup with a friend, and I declined, #1 because I felt I couldn't leave my cofounder and #2 because Drew had a startup, I had a startup, and at the time it wasn't clear which of us was actually more likely to be successful.
Before you laugh, consider the environment in Feb 2008 (when this occurred). My cofounder was a consultant at Monitor Group, where he'd been researching the casual gaming space and had run across multiple reports saying it would be a $200M, $1B, etc. space (market research reports never agree on market size, because they're largely bullshit). Kongregate had just raised a Series A from Reid Hoffman, Jeff Bezos, and other luminaries. Max Levchin had just raised $50M for Slide the month before. Zynga had just been founded but Farmville hadn't come out yet. The Web 2.0 bubble was in full swing, AJAX and Javascript were the new hot buzzwords (I had just ported Arc - PG's pet programming language, which HN is written in - to Javascript, which is what caught Drew's interest in the first place), and as you can see from the first comment on DropBox's "Show HN", anything that required installation of software was considered a non-starter. And our product concept let everyone, from teenagers to retirees, build their own games instead of being at the mercy of a studio & professional developers.
My lesson from how things evolved - learned much later, and I'm probably still grasping the implications - was to preference personal experience over industry zeitgeist and prestigious research reports. Drew's personal experience with the problem domain and his 75,000 beta signups were worth a lot more than the famous people and industry market research reports around the problem domain we were solving. And this insight has actually saved me a lot of time & aggrevation chasing fads that people realize are bad ideas 4 years in.
But this is not obvious to someone just starting their career, probably because they don't actually have all that much personal experience to draw upon, and because it takes a certain amount of chutzpah to hear about all these eminent people saying "This will be the next hot thing, you better get in now!" and think to yourself "Actually, sounds like bullshit to me." Personal experience is also inherently limited because you've only got your own and it takes years to build; it turns out that the set of problems you can viably solve is actually quite small.
Wow, that is an amazing story. Thanks for sharing.
It really hammers home how hard it is to disentangle good & bad advice and how easy it is for an outsider looking into to really underestimate the depth of someone else's expertise in a given domain.
“For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software.” CVS!!!
I learned a similar lesson when I was working on a product around two years back. I used to extrapolate current trends and predict why my idea could be important in the future. While those predictions sounded good in theory, in reality, it was just me trying to paint my assumptions as facts. None of what I predicted happened.
When you are working on any idea, there's a temptation to be a visionary about your product's impact. But nothing good comes out of this feel-good bullshit. It's better to focus on solving meaningful problems that exist today, rather than being hopeful that they will become relevant tomorrow.
> takes a certain amount of chutzpah to hear about all these eminent people saying "This will be the next hot thing, you better get in now!" and think to yourself "Actually, sounds like bullshit to me."
More of a personality thing. If you would pitch Dropbox or Facebook to me today, I would consider it bullshit just like back then. Nice little niche maybe but certainly no Unicorns. Who would put sensitive personal information into the cloud?! Obviously not much of a market.
But without the benefit of hindsight, how do you tell the difference?
When I look at some of the giant wins of the last major tech wave, often times the key factors in their success were external events that happened after the formation of the company. AirBnB benefitted massively from the housing bubble & financial crisis (3 years after formation), which created a large class of people who were desperate for income and whose primary residence was their primary income-producing asset. Uber had to try the idea multiple times before cell phone batteries became good enough to run navigation continuously in the car (2 years after formation), and took off because of the publicity of getting sued by San Francisco. WhatsApp took off after the addition of push notifications to iOS (~18 months after formation) made it feasible to use as a messenger rather than just a status update.
All of these companies certainly did things to influence their success, in particular having a product on the market at the time the market changed to take advantage of the product. But for most of them the product was actually wrong in the sense that it was a complete failure in the market until that market changed. Brian Chesky's fond of calling AirBnB "the worst startup idea that actually worked".
It's like the formula for success = preparedness + luck. This cribsheet does a good job at preparedness, but you have to acknowledge the role of luck if you want to actually capitalize on that preparedness, and being afraid to work on the wrong ideas will often shut you out of ideas that require some luck to work.
I like the bottom-line perspective you provide at the end, of "success = preparedness + luck."
Preparedness is what we can train ourselves for, and preparedness also has the effect of making you more able to see and take advantage of opportunities that come your way. And to someone who doesn't know how much you've prepared, it appears that you're just luckier.
I used to work for a startup whose founder loved quoting Louis Pasteur: "Fortune favors the well-prepared mind." Then again, that dude was building a medical device based on his PhD research. Most Silicon Valley founders would scoff at that quote.
But these examples are cherry picked. Was Google lucky? Oracle? Hotmail? Take away what luck might exist, and would they not still be billion dollar companies?
> But without the benefit of hindsight, how do you tell the difference?
See value missed by others.
Do you have sources for any of the success factors you described? My understanding was that WhatsApp's success was largely due to focusing on feature phones, increasing ubiquity.
Regardless, none of this changes the fact that OP is correct in saying that you shouldn't work on the wrong ideas, of course.
I was wrong about timing though: it was only about 6 months after WhatsApp was incorporated (2 years after they left Yahoo though, so they might have been working on it beforehand).
> is that the people who are best positioned to capitalize on an emerging technology wave are the ones who started working on it before anyone realized it was important, just because it was interesting to them
Its not just “interesting” there is also happenstance
There are going to be college kids working on “XEM Smart Contracts” for some ICO consultancy startup just because they had more java classes across semesters
And they will be heralded as pioneering geniuses just because some fortune 500 starts looking for the word smart contract on linkedin
I feel like this is spoken by someone who hasn't seen more than one technology cycle come and go.
What I've observed - having started my career back in the Java-will-eat-the-desktop days and then adapted through webapps, big data, mobile, and now AI - is that the people who are best positioned to capitalize on an emerging technology wave are the ones who started working on it before anyone realized it was important, just because it was interesting to them. They're the ones who write the papers and software that everyone else evangelizes, and then get multi-million-$ signing bonuses or stock grants (or billions of dollars worth of cryptocurrency) when corporate interests catch on that this is a new technology wave. But at the time they start working on the idea, it's both useless and unlikely to work.
You can make a decent living always being on the look out for a new technology wave and jumping on it as soon as it's clear that it's hot. I spent much of my 20s doing that, and made enough money doing so that I can take it a bit easier now. But it's exhausting, and you'll never be the one actually driving change.
It's also usually not clear what's the "wrong idea" except in retrospect. DropBox is rsync with cloud storage and some pretty slick desktop app integration, done at a time when everybody thought that desktop apps were dead and Drew's Windows hacking skills were old news. But it's that familiarity with old technology that put him in a place to realize that new technology could make the old technology dramatically more useful, to the tune of a $10B company.