What a stupid idea

I still don't know why Instagram is a thing.

I always picture myself in the following situation: A guy comes into my office in 2005, and says: "Uhm, excuse me, we're looking for investors in our new great product. It's for sending messages!" - "You mean, like email?" - "Yes. Except, you only have 140 characters." - "Err?" - "Oh, and you can't determine who will receive the message." - "Excuse me?" - "Yes, that's right. Would you like to invest?"

I would have laughed that guy out of my office back then...

...and now he'd be laughing at me.

Thus I'm very glad, no-one ever comes to my office in real life.

The End.

That said, one of my VC friends defines an Entrepreneur as someone who can take a stupid idea and make it successful. Sort of an homage to the whole idea that they can see something you cannot.

These days when I'm confronted by this sort of proposal I ask the person making the proposal to describe the world where their idea has succeeded. What is different about that world from today, and what is the same. What do people do in that world that they do differently now or can't do at all. And perhaps more importantly what do they do today which they no longer have to do.

If you can paint that picture in enough detail you can figure out who is going to be working against this person and who is going to be cheering this person on, you might get a sense of how much work is between here and there and the kinds of people needed to do that work. And if you know this person well you might be able to guess whether or not they are up for that, or perhaps more importantly, committed enough.

* Survivor bias (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivor_bias) is yielding a self-selection in the positive results. I'm sure there are plenty of stupid ideas that went nowhere. Probably as much as "Great" ideas that went nowhere. So, I think saying that his opinion that something was stupid is a counter-indicator of its degree of success doesn't have much merit.

* Second, an idea or early prototype has little correlation to its inevitable success or failure. As is often said, execution is everything. The idea is necessary, but not sufficient to guarantee a market success, as defined differently by different markets.

* Third, while he decries his stance as calling something "stupid" as an arrogant position, this article itself comes across as arrogant -- in effect he's positioning himself near the beginning of these companies' inception and being in the position of being asked his opinion in a taste-maker fashion. I suspect in reality, he was one of many people that were exposed to this idea and his opinion was mostly irrelevant in their efforts to pursue the idea. It can be interpreted as very Forrest Gump to position ones self at the crux of so many eventual market successes when in reality that is not the case. I'd like to understand the context of these meetings. I've certainly been at the early-stages of many ideas, but no one asked for, or cared about, my opinions. In which case, saying that they were stupid ideas was an opinion offered only to myself. And I probably did indeed think they were stupid at the time. Was I arrogant? No. But then I don't claim that anyone cared about my opinion.

* Finally, I call your attention to Pinterest's actual success path (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinterest and http://www.famousbloggers.net/history-pinterest.html). They iterated and "failed" for 2 years before becoming an "overnight success". I dare say that perhaps at the time of the meeting, Pinterest's idea and execution were probably stupid, and it took time and relentless iteration to make it a success. In fact, "Silbermann said he personally wrote to the site's first 5,000 users offering his personal phone number and even meeting with some of its users." Which goes to show just how many people's opinions he solicited in the process of building to its current level of success.