Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How to Kill a Great Idea

inc.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 47 posts

Re: How to Kill a Great Idea

#21

Post by staunch »

albertsun wrote: post #4

My favorite bit of the article. [Abrams] was particularly vexed by the company's apparent obsession with partnerships. "At the board meetings they would say, 'We should do a deal with AOL," he recalls. "And I'd be like, 'Guys, the site is not working." He never got anyone's attention, and in 2005 he was stripped of his chairmanship.

Straight out of the The Business Man handbook. What does running a company mean? It means doing Business Deals with other Business Men. The rest of the time you need to sign Business Papers in your Business Chair while making Business Calls.

Re: How to Kill a Great Idea

#22

Post by uriel »

> Rather than address the problem of too many calculations, Sassa opted to make massive investments in hardware and software in 2004. Under Winner's leadership, a team of engineers completely rewrote Friendster's code into a different programming language and spent more than $1 million on a Hitachi (NYSE:HIT) storage area network, effectively halting business development for six months.

Anyone knows the technical details? What was Friendster originally written in, and in what did they rewrite it?

Re: How to Kill a Great Idea

#23

Post by wayne »

uriel wrote: post #22

> Rather than address the problem of too many calculations, Sassa opted to make massive investments in hardware and software in 2004. Under Winner's leadership, a team of engineers completely rewrote Friendster's code into a different programming language and spent more than $1 million on a Hitachi (NYSE:HIT) storage area network, effectively halting business development for six months. Anyone knows the technical det…

Java to PHP: http://ma.tt/2004/06/friendster-goes-php/

Re: How to Kill a Great Idea

#24

Post by jfarmer »

kgrin wrote: post #16
fh wrote: post #15

Friendster? Socializr? This guy has a talent of coming up with the most generic Web 2.0-style names imaginable.

Friendster launched circa 2002; I don't have the etymology of "Web 2.0" committed to memory, but it's safe to say the silly naming really kicked in much later.

If anything, "Friendster" is what started that trend.

Re: How to Kill a Great Idea

#25

Post by devinj »

python123 wrote: post #13

Great story and a perfect illustration of why old people shouldn't shoot for the stars. Old people do not understand tech trends. They try to, but it is beyond their ability. Friendster was a site created by old people, run by people, and filled with old people users. Anything that starts from the old will never migrate to the young. Old people are not leaders. They do not determine the trends. Facebook got it right…

I may not be old, but I still find your blatant ageism disturbing (I would say only slightly disturbing, except that you've taken this offensive viewpoint to something of an extreme-- so it's not slight at all). "Old people" can be just as hip, modern, and trendy as the rest. Sure, it doesn't fit the stereotype-- maybe it doesn't even fit the trends (I wouldn't know)-- but they can be. Not hiring people just because they're old is illegal and immoral (at least as much as discriminating on any blanket classification is, such as race, gender, religion, etc.).

Re: How to Kill a Great Idea

#26

Post by iamwil »

python123 wrote: post #13

Great story and a perfect illustration of why old people shouldn't shoot for the stars. Old people do not understand tech trends. They try to, but it is beyond their ability. Friendster was a site created by old people, run by people, and filled with old people users. Anything that starts from the old will never migrate to the young. Old people are not leaders. They do not determine the trends. Facebook got it right…

both successes and failures don't only have one cause.

Re: How to Kill a Great Idea

#27

Post by Hates_ »

python123 wrote: post #13

Great story and a perfect illustration of why old people shouldn't shoot for the stars. Old people do not understand tech trends. They try to, but it is beyond their ability. Friendster was a site created by old people, run by people, and filled with old people users. Anything that starts from the old will never migrate to the young. Old people are not leaders. They do not determine the trends. Facebook got it right…

"Anything that starts from the old will never migrate to the young. Old people are not leaders."

Yes, because everyone who uses the internet is young and because every great company is run by someone young. I honestly can't believe I'm reading a comment that seems to believe the web/business world exists only within a bubble of young people. A huge proportion of great businesses are/were started by "old" people and there are plenty of examples of tech businesses that have been spectacularly successful that were also started by "old" people.

Re: How to Kill a Great Idea

#28

Post by python123 »

Hates_ wrote: post #27
python123 wrote: post #13

Great story and a perfect illustration of why old people shouldn't shoot for the stars. Old people do not understand tech trends. They try to, but it is beyond their ability. Friendster was a site created by old people, run by people, and filled with old people users. Anything that starts from the old will never migrate to the young. Old people are not leaders. They do not determine the trends. Facebook got it right…

"Anything that starts from the old will never migrate to the young. Old people are not leaders." Yes, because everyone who uses the internet is young and because every great company is run by someone young. I honestly can't believe I'm reading a comment that seems to believe the web/business world exists only within a bubble of young people. A huge proportion of great businesses are/were started by "old" people and t…

Most users are old people, but most users are also sheep. The shepherds are not old people. Name some great tech companies created by unaccomplished old people who just decided to flip on the entrepreneurial switch.

Re: How to Kill a Great Idea

#30

Post by RevRal »

python123 wrote: post #13

Great story and a perfect illustration of why old people shouldn't shoot for the stars. Old people do not understand tech trends. They try to, but it is beyond their ability. Friendster was a site created by old people, run by people, and filled with old people users. Anything that starts from the old will never migrate to the young. Old people are not leaders. They do not determine the trends. Facebook got it right…

Umm, what are you talking about? This is one of the least intelligent comments I've read on HN, and I've really tried to make sense of it.

You know what they say about Finnegan's Wake? That you can start from anywhere in the book, read to the end, start from the beginning, then read to where you initially started, and the book will make just as much sense.... Well, your comment is a little like that.

If there's a thesis in there, it's something like: "of course, old people ruin anything that has to do with technology." Which is disprovable.

Post reply on HN