How to Kill a Great Idea | Hacker News Reader

How to Kill a Great Idea

inc.com

99 pointsfaramarz45 comments

This was a pretty interesting read. I think the important lesson from the demise of Friendster as well as the subsequent demise of MySpace (which some people try not to admit) is that engineering actually matters. Friendster failed because it did not work. It was too slow, sometimes pages would not load at all and it was too easy to spam.

So it got to the point where people had to take forever just to delete the spam from their folders, because it would take a couple of minutes to open each message and discover it is spam.

The article talks a lot about business decisions, but the business side does not really matter that much until you get your web site to work.

That's a great take-away I think. I think that is one of the reasons Facebook was so successful. I've been a member of Facebook since 2004 and I can't remember a single piece of spam I've ever seen through it.

In 2004 when I joined, it was a pretty simple, no-AJAX standard PHP site and worked very quickly. From there, it just took off and they were able to hire some of the best engineers and server architecture people out there.

I've gotten 5-10 pieces of spam through facebook in the last year or two, but it's all been from non-techie friends who had their account phished. So at least I was able to help them clean it up and (hopefully) learn how to avoid it in the future.

When your company has no revenue, the "obvious" answer is to sell as hard as you can until your cashflow positive. But it's not going to help unless the product actually works.

This seems to be the gist of the comments here, but I'd like to propose a third requirement: operations.

Ultimately, a business has to become self-sustaining, and that can't happen until the acts of building the product and selling the product become sufficiently well defined that they can be handed over to a professional staff. (See also: E-Myth)

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.

That was an amazing read. And it shows that the winners get to write the history books.

I think this is a great warning for those who think that VC funding immediately equals success. Eating your ramen noodles for a while gives you time to get good foundations in place before things start moving too fast.

It made me feel much better about bootstrapping Gridspy

Friendster, the first online social network

Factually inaccurate? Friendster was launched in 2002, LiveJournal, for example, in 1999.

Great article, and a good moral.

It does fail lesson #1 of journalism though: put the important bits at the beginning, not the end. It was tedious to read through a history I already knew.

I knew almost nothing about Friendster and I found the article captivating. Maybe you already knew the important bits?

Some stories are written in newspaper style like you describe. This is written in a storytelling style - much more informative for most of the audience who know very little of friendship.

Having not followed Friendster and its history, I found this a pretty compelling read.

The interesting thing about Friendster is that it was recently bought for around $100 million. Not Facebook returns, but not bad.

Looks like less - $26M according to Crunchbase.[1] Far less than the capital it raised. Maybe you mean FriendFeed?

[1] http://www.crunchbase.com/company/friendster

I seem to remember there were a number of news articles reporting the $100 million figure. I'm not privy to any inside information on this so I don't really know the answer. Tech Crunch is probably the most reliable for this kind of information.

A few of the $100 million articles:

http://www.brandrepublic.com/News/973571/Friendster-bought-1...

http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/20091210/friendsters-caution...

http://www.itproportal.com/portal/news/article/2009/12/4/unk...

http://www.thetechherald.com/article.php/200949/4892/Friends...

The print friendly version is hard to read due to unbroken lines. The normal version has too many pages splits.

Does anyone know a good javascript commandlet that will apply good style to plain text?

http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/

You probably want this awesome little thing:

http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/

Makes most any website really, really, _readable_. One of goals when I build my own sites is to make it so I don't want to switch readability on when I'm using it.

In contrast, here's a 2004 interview with Charlie Rose at the height of the companies growth explaining what Friendster is.

http://bit.ly/9EAhU9

http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/1229

FYI: URL shorteners are neither required nor preferred on HN.

gotcha. thanks

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.

Ever heard of Napster?

he he. good one, paulster

WHY YES.

> 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?

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

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 from the start by restricting it to colleges. I'm sure people wanted to open it up sooner, but the talented young leaders of Facebook knew that the next big thing would be determined by how young people choose to adopt it. Old people would follow like cattle later on, which they did. Facebook even made sure to hire young talent at the start because any bad hire would hurt the company when it was small. If you haven't made something of yourself by 30, don't think you're gonna quit your job as a career software engineer and come up with the next big thing. If you wanna do a start-up, you're only chance is to create a lifestyle business or maybe have a mild exit, which is still pretty good.

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.).

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

"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.

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.

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.

Spoken with the false confidence of youth.

Here's a few examples of fairly revolutionary achievements post-30, even within the relatively narrow field of tech startups:

* Jimmy Wales was 36 when Wikipedia was founded. Larry Sanger was 34.

* Steve Jobs was 30 when he founded NeXT, 31 when he took over Pixar, 40 when Toy Story, their first major film was released, and 42 when he returned to Apple and led them to a major market turnaround, OS X, the iPod/iTunes, the iPhone/AppStore, etc.

* Jeff Bezos was 30 when he founded Amazon, 37 before it turned a profit.

* John McCarthy was 31 when he first designed LISP.

* Marc Benioff was 35 when he co-founded Salesforce.com (I don't know how old his cofounders were.)

* David Winer was 33 when he founded UserLand, 41 before they started offering web publishing software.

* Larry Ellison was 33 when he founded Oracle, 35 when they made their first sale, 40 when Oracle became an ACID-database.

* PG was 40 when YCombinator first launched.

That's just off the top of my head (I had to look up the dates) and I don't particularly pay attention to the age of tech company founders. I'm sure there are dozens of better examples.

For a more comprehensive survey, see http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1431263

I actually kinda hope you're trolling with this comment, you're way off base.

Why don't you actually read my comment? I said that old people with no achievements aren't going to suddenly become great entrepreneurs.

Jimmy Wales - extremely successful options and futures trader

Steve Jobs - I forget what company he was involved with before NeXT, but I think it was pretty big

Jeff Bezos - one of the top people at D.E. Shaw, right under Shaw himself

John McCarthy - programming languages don't really count as entrepreneurship, but I'm sure you could find many examples of old people creating languages

Marc Benioff - youngest VP in Oracle history

David Winer - I really have no idea what UserLand is

Larry Ellison - ok, fine. I guess if you're trying to make Oracle, it's ok to be old. I don't mean that as a slight to Oracle, but I don't think Oracle's story applies to web startups.

PG - I didn't say anything about old people not being able to become investors

Now I know you're trolling. Good day.

How on Earth is that trolling? I completely refuted your argument, and you can't respond so you call it trolling. None of those people were 30-year-old career software engineers who had achieved nothing and dreamed of entrepreneurship. They were all already successful.

And I know Hacker News is mostly that type of person, but you people need a reality check. You can downvote all you want, but it won't change anything. I bet you really wish it could because forums like this are probably all you have left. You're going to wake up tomorrow and do what you're doing. I'm going to wake up tomorrow and do what you dream of doing.

You're refuting it with examples of men in their mid-30s? That's quite an interesting definition of old age.

It's going to really suck to be you in about 15 years.

What are you, 12?

That's a pretty sad piece of advice. If you're over 30 and haven't made something of yourself the best thing you can do is realize that time is passing you by and get moving rather than listen to this defeatist crap.

Here's a thought. Friendster failed in part because he got the name wrong. And his new business, Socializr - much worse.

Thanks for sharing, I wasn't aware of his story.

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