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Contact: sam@askumbrella.com
author here– agree with many of your points, except two:
1) I think great ideas are surprisingly rare, and are very difficult to recognize. It's especially hard because of how important execution is for 'uncovering' a great idea. Great idea, badly executed = looks like a bad idea
2) I think "burning passion" oversimplifies things. Many great businesses are built without 'passion' for the solution...just a passion for some part of the business...and sometimes that's just recognition of a great financial opportunity.
> I think great ideas are surprisingly rare, and are very difficult to recognize.
Great ideas are super common. What is exceptional is great execution of those ideas. For every 'great idea' that you see around you go back to the root. Then you'll find many still born or eventually dead companies around that exact same 'great idea' but executed in a half-hearted or wrong way.
> Great ideas are super common. What is exceptional is great execution of those ideas.
I'd like to see this unpacked. What is it about an idea that makes it great? What's the difference between those and the bad ideas? How do you figure out whether your idea is great or whether it sucks?
Is it really that the idea just doesn't matter? That's where I'm leaning. The idea itself as something that's iterated on until you get to some intermediate state between problem-solution fit and finding traction.
I actually wrote a long post about this exact topic because I am sick of the meme that good ideas are nothing [1]. If anyone has any ideas that hit 10 or more checkpoints on my list let me know so I can steal it from you :)
Idea: A place where people anchor themselves on the web
Execution: geocities: hobbled by the tech available at that point in time, MySpace: a bit better but still missed the boat, FaceBook: excellent execution, more limited in presentation than the previous two and that became their strength.
And so on. For every one of these the names I've listed there were already relatively successful companies validating the idea. But then a party came along that was excellent in their execution of the idea and they wiped the established competition off the map.
If you go back further you'll find that the search engine was already a concept pioneered by many other companies, ditto the 'social network' or 'personal homepage'.
An example from the physical world:
Car companies, when the car was invented there were 100's of car companies all trying their hardest to get a share of the cake. But the majority of them absolutely sucked at execution. Take the UK brands, super nice to look at, occasionally brilliant ideas but absolutely horrible in quality in spite of having a head start post WW II they still had to have a bunch of guys with hammers at the end the production line to make the doors fit the chassis. In the end they simply could not compete. All the exact same idea: personal transportation.
That's what competition is all about, excellence in execution, if you mess that one up in the long run you will not survive. This is one of the reasons why in spite of the network effects I see Ebay and LinkedIn eventually being replaced.
OK, that doesn't answer my question. You're taking different executions of the same idea. Obviously anybody that's been paying attention during the last twenty years or so knows that execution is more important.
But how do you vet the idea itself against other ideas? How do you know whether spending your time reinventing search is going to be better than building a new productivity app?
You're going to execute the best you can, assuming, again, that you're aware that execution is the biggest factor. How much, if any, effort and validation should go into choosing your idea?
> But how do you vet the idea itself against other ideas?
Apologies for missing the essence of your question (4 am here...)
I don't have a foolproof algorithm for evaluating single ideas but when I look at a number of ideas side-by-side I go through a number of exercises to figure out which one I'll devote my time to. Some of these are formalized, SWOT analysis for instance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SWOT_analysis which can be useful if not taken religiously, trying to sell others on the idea, simply trying the idea in a limited setting to see if it gains momentum or if I have to push it forward all the time. The better ones tend to stand out.
A really good idea tends to have the 'I can't believe this doesn't exist yet' feel to it, coupled with a word-of-mouth element once it does get implemented, even in the most basic version.
I think you are oversimplifying "the idea". Google's idea wasn't that "people will want to search online." Google's insightful, interesting idea that was then well-executed was the PageRank algorithm.
Geocities, Myspace and Facebook were all very different ideas. If the first two had executed better, all 3 would probably still co-exist.
> Google's insightful, interesting idea that was then well-executed was the PageRank algorithm.
That doesn't parse but I think I get what you mean. PageRank was not a new idea. Citations in the scientific world form a graph and these had been used before to determine the relevance of a paper. What was new was to apply such a mechanism to the problem of searching the web for relevant content but for the end-user of the service it did not matter much how the results were arrived at, as long as they were relevant and in the case of a switch from one engine to another, more relevant. So even if the basic idea ("people want to search for stuff online") was the same it was the implementation of that idea that mattered. The fact that google was lightning fast helped a lot too and that by itself would have made some people switch (after all, speed matters), and this is a very clear point of execution rather than 'an idea'.
> Geocities, Myspace and Facebook were all very different ideas. If the first two had executed better, all 3 would probably still co-exist.
MySpace still exists, Geocities still exists but not through Yahoo!, there are several mirrors only there won't be page updates. There are also newer re-implementations of Geocities. And yet, FaceBook rules, the network effects they baked in are just too strong and that's a very important part of why I think their execution was excellent. They realized that the other parties had not gotten that aspect of the idea right and by doing that right they more or less locked up the market. FaceBook will be here for a long long time to come.
> And yet, FaceBook rules, the network effects they baked in are just too strong and that's a very important part of why I think their execution was excellent.
Are the network effects really that strong? I've never seen another company even come close to providing the value that Facebook does. I feel like if there were really a social networking idea that was better right now than Facebook, then that company would have already found a way around the network effect. For example, plenty of people have challenged Craigslist first by crawling their site, however illegal that is. None yet have succeeded, but that tells me that CL just provides a better product.
I think the real reason nobody has dethroned Facebook yet is that Facebook meets everybody's needs and hasn't yet gotten complacent. Perhaps they'll make some strategic missteps in the future a la Microsoft and someone else will eat their lunch, but right now, they're still the best available. Ditto Apple, ditto Google.
Examining ideas is important in that it can tell you what not to try to do.
I'd argue that there were social-networking platforms that were better than Facebook years before it came out. LiveJournal, for instance, was one of the few online places where you actually make new friends instead of just collating the ones you already had. I just hung out this Thanksgiving with a couple who I met on LJ over a decade ago; they also met doing LJ support, and at their wedding 7 years ago, about 3/4 of the guests were friends from LiveJournal, many of whom had never met in person before. A lot of the features that Google+ has "innovated" with (Circles/friends-groups, Communities) or that have Facebook has recently added (mood icons, threaded commenting) were things that LJ had a decade ago.
Facebook won because the killer feature that distinguishes a social network is who's on it. They started out at the most high-status house on the most high-status college in the most high-status country, and then spread like wildfire from there. By contrast, LJ was popular with fandom and with Russians, neither of which are groups that ordinary, affluent, socially-connected Americans would much like to hang out with.
I really think the network effects on FaceBook are what keeps it where it is. I know people that would love leave FB, except for one little detail: all their friends, family and co-workers are on it and they use it for everything from planning birthday parties to holidays and staying in touch. That's a very difficult thing to attack head-on.
Craigslist is another example of such a service, you need the market and the goods, if you have only one (for instance by crawling CL) then you still won't have the market.
That's a really nice example of 'good enough' execution combined with a chicken-and-the-egg situation for any followers.
Of some things there can only be one, something similar happened in NL with the Marktplaats website, when Ebay wanted to gain marketshare here they found they just could not beat it so they ended up buying it.
I think you're taking idea effects and clothing them in the trappings of execution. In order for a business to get really big, it has to provide 10x the value that the current incumbent provides. Microsoft beat out IBM because software had many times the potential that hardware of the time had. Sure, IBM failed horribly on software, but that's because IBM didn't think software was important, not because it couldn't build decent software. The thinking behind the idea gives you the zeal to execute on it.
If the idea is right, meaning it is 10x better than the current best offering, and it's executed properly, then network effects can go screw themselves. Nobody took search seriously before Google did, that gave them a leg up over the competition. (who were they again?) It's just not the right time to start a Facebook or Craigslist challenger. Maybe in a few or ten years the market will change such that most people interact with the Internet differently enough that it's worth building a social network to serve their needs. Right now it would be foolish to do so, because their needs are already being more-or-less perfectly served by Facebook, ditto for CL.
I think instead of "idea", we should use the word "market opportunity". Some opportunities make more business sense than others because a lot more ppl experience the pain, but there still needs to be good execution to take advantage of them.
This is the more common meme, and I think it is healthy to keep 'idea folks' away. Even great ideas, without execution, are worthless.
But as you say, a great idea combined with a great execution is where things get really special. Still, I do think great ideas are rare. It depends a bit on how you define what an idea is: is it a social network? is it a social network within a college campus? is it requiring real world identity?
The idea was 'a place that people will call their home online', and in the initial phase of FB my guess is that it was a place where you could find potential mates and a way to get introduced to them.
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In theory, yes. In practice, most people aren't entrepreneurs. Try convincing someone living in the Bay Area to walk from their 200K/yr plus stock units from FB/Google/etc. and you'll find out the reality: what really separates capital from labor is risk tolerance.
Labor = show up, do your job, get paid. Capital = put money at risk without any guarantee of getting anything back, let alone earning a profit. Capital makes the rules because half of America is two paychecks away from bankruptcy (I read this somewhere credible) and can't/won't take any risk.
People talk as if everyone can become a creator, which it ain't so (partly because of the personal skills needed, partly because there's no economy where "everybody is a creator" -- for the same reason why not everybody can be a millionaire at the same time (money loses it's value then). Any large scale economy needs few sellers/creators and many buyers).
So what this trend does, it empower a few programmers/creators (ok, more than the past few large capital owners), and makes all the other programmers redundant or devalued.
Because enterprises are infinitely complex and diverse and there will never be a single piece of software that can run all the businesses in the world with a couple configuration setting tweaks.
