11–20 of 51 posts
Be real with yourself: Cleverness is a finite resource, even yours. Leverage it in the most efficient way possible. (So alpha-geek pissing matches are clearly a waste. Everything should be focused towards furthering your company's goals while avoiding bugs and making refactoring easier.)
The telephone? It was referred to as the "speaking telegraph" (telegraph + speakers).
The car? Horseless carriage (engine + wheels + steering + brakes)
The plane? Glider + engine. The Wright brothers invented powered flight - not flight. The difficulty was getting the weight to lift ratio high enough with a primitive heavy engine on board. Gliders already existed - you just couldn't go anywhere with them! You can't just jump off a cliff and glide to China.
Google? A more advanced MITS algorithm + inktomi's commodity cluster map-reduce architecture + inktomi's PPC. Indeed, had inktomi doubled down on search instead of their CDN, we might well be talking about inktomi and not Google.
General and Special Relativity? Nope - http://www.quora.com/If-Albert-Einstein-had-never-existed-at....
There are no really new ideas out there - merely combinations old ones that "hang in the air". There are no new ideas - merely old ones combined in unique ways.
Everything is a remix (https://vimeo.com/14912890).
Zip2, Elon's first company, didn't invent anything new or solve any hard problems either (it started out as an online yellow pages). But it was really important that Elon learned from that process. And I know that he enjoyed it, I remember meeting with him when they were 10 guys in one room. And Zip2 was worth $300M to Altavista, which is how Elon paid for the Maclaren mentioned in the recent video.
I'm also glad that Peter Thiel and Max Levchin and others have started to create social pressure for us to think about how to do big things that really benefit society. And maybe we only need to feel that pressure after we've done one or two successful things. As individuals it's also ok to ignore it and say hey I really enjoy building companies and don't need to change the world in a huge way.
It's really hard to build a company. It's really admirable to build a successful tech company, no matter how lofty or straightforward the project. The Instagram guys are also heroes to me. Zip2, Elon's first company, didn't invent anything new or solve any hard problems either (it started out as an online yellow pages). But it was really important that Elon learned from that process. And I know that he enjoyed it, I…
At least that's what I've read (it's also probably the reason he started all over again with X.com which eventually morphed into PayPal).
1994, simpler times.
Be real with yourself: Cleverness is a finite resource, even yours. Leverage it in the most efficient way possible. (So alpha-geek pissing matches are clearly a waste. Everything should be focused towards furthering your company's goals while avoiding bugs and making refactoring easier.)
It takes all kinds. The world would be a duller place if all of us were chasing current goals.
Let me just ask - When has anyone ever actually invented anything totally new? The telephone? It was referred to as the "speaking telegraph" (telegraph + speakers). The car? Horseless carriage (engine + wheels + steering + brakes) The plane? Glider + engine. The Wright brothers invented powered flight - not flight. The difficulty was getting the weight to lift ratio high enough with a primitive heavy engine on board.…
Arguing that things come about as combinations upon combinations of small, 'not completely new' inventions is begging the question. When you compare the state of human affairs in 5000 BC with the state now, you can't possibly mean that no 'completely new' things have been created.
This is the same problem as e.g. distinguishing species in biology. Of the countless intermediate forms, you cannot point to a single one as a 'completely new' species. However, 1000 generations after an earthquake, the species on both sides of the created ravine have diverged so much they can no longer interbreed. There are now two species where there was one, so a new one must have come into existence, right?
Andreessen is completely right in suggesting you don't want to aim to invent something 'completely new' on the spot. Nevertheless, if you can see where something could be going, you could aim for something new say 10 years down the road.
Let me just ask - When has anyone ever actually invented anything totally new? The telephone? It was referred to as the "speaking telegraph" (telegraph + speakers). The car? Horseless carriage (engine + wheels + steering + brakes) The plane? Glider + engine. The Wright brothers invented powered flight - not flight. The difficulty was getting the weight to lift ratio high enough with a primitive heavy engine on board.…
Upvoted, but I disagree. I think you are spot on with suggesting actual progress does not happen by inventing anything 'new' from scratch. But I do not agree nothing new is ever invented. Arguing that things come about as combinations upon combinations of small, 'not completely new' inventions is begging the question. When you compare the state of human affairs in 5000 BC with the state now, you can't possibly mean t…
> Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
> if you can see where something could be going
This is kind of a punctuated intellectual evolution. The idea is to "go where the puck is going to be" - which is perfectly reasonable as intelligence is not constrained by natural evolutionary mechanisms.
YouTube's Jawed Karim said this exactly when he stated that their success was a "confluence" (see what I did there) of Dot-com bust dark fibre lighting back up, the introduction of cheap DSL broadband, the integration of computers in all American households, the domination of Adobe Flash and the rapidly decreasing cost of storage/computation.
He also stated that YouTube was nothing new. It was merely a combination of other technologies which arrived at the right time to be held up by a rich society and progressive technology to become one of the biggest internet properties the world has ever seen.
A confluence of events if you will.
Let me just ask - When has anyone ever actually invented anything totally new? The telephone? It was referred to as the "speaking telegraph" (telegraph + speakers). The car? Horseless carriage (engine + wheels + steering + brakes) The plane? Glider + engine. The Wright brothers invented powered flight - not flight. The difficulty was getting the weight to lift ratio high enough with a primitive heavy engine on board.…
Upvoted, but I disagree. I think you are spot on with suggesting actual progress does not happen by inventing anything 'new' from scratch. But I do not agree nothing new is ever invented. Arguing that things come about as combinations upon combinations of small, 'not completely new' inventions is begging the question. When you compare the state of human affairs in 5000 BC with the state now, you can't possibly mean t…