51–60 of 146 posts
I have always found that entire scenario very odd. How are you a start up founder if you don’t know what you want to start up? I always look at that like a soldier jacked up on adrenaline wearing an arsenal of ammunition ready to destroy the enemy having forgotten to ask who the enemy is or where they are. Lost. Maybe if they just start spraying ammo at everybody the enemy will suddenly make themselves known and some…
> (By the way, it’s useful to get good at differentiating between real trends and fake trends. A key differentiator is if the new platform is used a lot by a small number of people, or used a little by a lot of people.) As a one-time founder, I feel embarrassed to have to ask this; but in the spirit of no-stupid-question and also that there's gotta be someone else wondering the same -- which one is the real trend and…
On one hand, Sam's point is basically described by Paul Graham's essay on "Narrow and Deep" ideas [1]. You want an idea to have a few passionate users rather than lots of lukewarm users, because there's an activation energy to building a habit and if you're only lukewarm you're not going to get over it. As PG put it, "Sum that reaction over a whole population, and you have no users."
On the other hand, you have Geoffrey Moore's "Crossing the Chasm" [2]. This has the critical observation that early adopter & mainstream populations are different. About 10% of the population has an early-adopter mindset: they will try anything because it's new and cool. Those are the people Sam says you should be hanging out with in this article. But your experience with them doesn't generalize, because most people don't think like that. Most people are self-interested and have short attention spans: if it doesn't deliver clear value to them with minimal hassle, they aren't interested.
The set of world-changing products really exists in the intersection of these two worldviews. Products that had lots of passionate early adopters but failed to cross the chasm include Lisp, LiveJournal, RSS, VR (both times), and cryptocurrency. Products that aimed for too mainstream a market and only had lukewarm users include WebTV, grocery delivery, and smartwatches. In between are products like the iPhone, where the PDA market had been sitting in early-adopter limbo since 1991 but technological changes finally made it practical, or YouTube, where streaming video had been in early-adopter limbo since RealAudio in 1997 (?) but cell-phone video, Flash, and easy web uploads made it practical in 2005.
That seems like the buried lede in the blog post.
I don't know Sam or have any window into his motivations, but he seems to be (at least obliquely) addressing the current HN debate about whether fully remote is equivalent in efficacy to in-person for creative work.
Without taking a stance in that cat fight, he is making the (IMO sensible) argument that creativity requires a particular type of human environment, regardless of whether that is remote or not, and social isolation from your professional peers isn't such an environment. Of course, he goes further to suggest that a creativity-fostering environment requires a particular kind of professional peer group.
So I've tried to learn to program to execute them myself, but that's a slow, long process, I'm an excellent Project Manager but a B- programmer, plus trying to wear every hat in a company is not exactly fun.
I've seen so much talent wasted on such poor ideas over the years, it's frankly unbelievable, and it never seems to change.
/endrant
> (By the way, it’s useful to get good at differentiating between real trends and fake trends. A key differentiator is if the new platform is used a lot by a small number of people, or used a little by a lot of people.) As a one-time founder, I feel embarrassed to have to ask this; but in the spirit of no-stupid-question and also that there's gotta be someone else wondering the same -- which one is the real trend and…
> (By the way, it’s useful to get good at differentiating between real trends and fake trends. A key differentiator is if the new platform is used a lot by a small number of people, or used a little by a lot of people.) As a one-time founder, I feel embarrassed to have to ask this; but in the spirit of no-stupid-question and also that there's gotta be someone else wondering the same -- which one is the real trend and…
There's two competing lenses of thought that bookend your struggle: On one hand, Sam's point is basically described by Paul Graham's essay on "Narrow and Deep" ideas [1]. You want an idea to have a few passionate users rather than lots of lukewarm users, because there's an activation energy to building a habit and if you're only lukewarm you're not going to get over it. As PG put it, "Sum that reaction over a whole p…
The rest is time and iteration.
Frustrating article -- I have several killer ideas (and ideas for decent execution paths for them as well,) but I tend to get pigeon-holed as "just an idea guy" and generally invalidated.. So I've tried to learn to program to execute them myself, but that's a slow, long process, I'm an excellent Project Manager but a B- programmer, plus trying to wear every hat in a company is not exactly fun. I've seen so much talen…
Ideas become better when refined. Sometimes over the course of years . You can assemble a larger composite idea under the umbrella of a single vision, comprised of many smaller ideas. There's of course a balance to be struck depending on the idea's scope and urgency. Both may change with refinement. Idea generation is both a learned skill and intrinsic to a person's circumstance and psychology. Ample unstructured tim…
Agreed.This is why execution is more important than idea. Why? Because most ideas aren't born great. They evolve and progress. That's part of execution. The process of taking a good idea and make it great.