31–40 of 231 posts
Ideas I'd consider not stupid include self-driving cars, Google Glass, and Bitcoin. Whether or not those are good ideas is yet another discussion…
I'm not sure Vine is yet a "success". I don't see a lot of activity there yet. My (completely biased and limited) litmus test for social apps is to see how many of my non-techie friends get on board and how quickly. With Facebook, Instagram, and even Pinterest, that was pretty quick. Vine seems to still be lagging. It's too much work for the payoff for most people, is my gut feeling.
Except the really stupid ones, of course.
Nothing is better than irc, usenet, MUDs, and email/lists, with the exception of making things mobile, detachable/multi device, more secure, and I guess supporting non Latin alphabets. There are still a few products missing from the perfect Internet (a great usenet/forum replacement, a way to run individual agents in the background, a way to great all communications as filter ably as email, and a great payment system), but I'm fine without another catalog sharing site, etc.
I accept that consumer services could become popular, but I have no way to predict it, and once they have traction, they are expensive investments. I am kind of at a loss as to how one could be a high value add investor in the seed consumer space without just focusing on founders nearly exclusively.
Is it the case that these people articulated the best case for their products and businesses when Dustin saw introduced to these projects in their infancy?
Developing a product, and the right pitch is an evolutionary process, and it may just very well be the case that Dustin encountered them too early.
He may very well be at fault for thinking these ideas were stupid at the time, but then again he might very well not be.
Being introduced to a work in progress is always a negotiation. Asking the right questions is part of it, and on the flip side, having an interlocutor who has some sense of how to answer your questions.
Also, some ideas are just stupid.
What a stupid idea, I thought. The only interesting thing it does is let you upvote things by hovering your mouse in a circle.
A few points, some already cited here: * 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 i…
If you had told me 5-6 years ago that Twitter would be one of the top social media platforms and have 500 million registered users, I would have been completely flabbergasted.
A few points, some already cited here: * 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 i…
I don't think he's trying to show any superiority by telling us the details of how his conversations went about.
Ha, I still think Vine and Pinterest are stupid ideas. But, Pinterest at least has done a good job at making lazy, vapid, narcissism easy, and there's certainly demand for that. Not sure how you monetize it (is Pinterest?), but they have a lot of users. I'm not sure Vine is yet a "success". I don't see a lot of activity there yet. My (completely biased and limited) litmus test for social apps is to see how many of my…
Care to elaborate? My interpretation of Pinterest is really "visual social bookmarking."