The Next Big Thing is Sitting Right in Front of You

I made an offer to a guy for a job in the late nineties and he said that he was going to work on his startup instead. It was called "Grouper" and it let you find other people to negotiate group discounts with. He actually had some working code he showed me.

Might have been a better idea to get him to hire me, but I see no evidence that this went anywhere (by him, anyway)

I don't get the point of this post. You liked stalking people's class cards, so that leads you to believe that the next logical step is to create Facebook? There is so much fallacy in that logic I don't know where to begin.

First you have to recognize that people enjoy doing it and that there is a potential market for the same idea extended elsewhere (in other words you can build one that is better than what already exists). Then you have to both know how to build a website and have the wherewithal to spend hours, days, and weeks, building an initial working version with proper execution.

That's almost like saying to yourself in 1920 that you always recognized people enjoyed getting from one place to another as fast as they could, and while you were contemplating cool business ideas Henry Ford was in a shed building the Model T.

I know it's been said a billion times, but ideas are fucking worthless. There are an infinite number of brilliant businesses in every industry waiting to be built, but unless you are smart enough to build them, you aren't doing anything worthwhile. Just about everything you use every day could be built better, and not just incrementally better, but revolutionarily better in a way that would promote mass-adoption. But simply knowing that isn't enough to build a billion dollar business. It requires genius to have the vision for the starting point of what that product actually looks like in practice and then knowing how to set it into motion.

Even if it does, so what?

There is a potentially infinite number of actions one has to do right, in order to succeed with the next big thing. Facebook have had, and still have, some competitors.

It might be that it is actually harder to create a company that way. By definition, the next big thing is not fully understood, what increases the probability of screwing up badly.

And, it's not that obvious whether such model yields the highest returns, to put aside the risk reward equation. We still don't know whether Groupon or Facebook will become long-term profitable companies.

Also, in so fuzzy environment, it's extremely hard to get the timing, and assets, right. The idea of consumer cloud, as syncing the data automatically between many dummy clients, was obvious since 70s, and it actually took enormous efforts from Apple, like iPhone and iPad.

On a much broader perspective, I remain unconvinced that the next big thing is what gives the society the most innovative fruits. The idea of tablet was so cliche everyone gave up, and I'd say that iPad itself is worth much more than the Apple's cloud.

This reminds me of when I was about 13 and the web was just starting to get noticed. I was saving all my bookmarks, categorizing them, and I put them on a free hosting account provided by my dialup ISP and shared the page with friends and family so they could easily find all the great stuff I came across on the new web.

Then Yahoo showed up...

Yes, I know what it is, but I won't tell :-)

Twenty years ago, I was sitting in front of a 386-SX. Most of the Moore's Law since then has been eaten by the bigger screen and faster net. Isn't it incredible?

By what metric is fb the best internet business of the decade?

I think this is true...to an extent. Facebook is possibly "the best internet business of the decade", but not just because of the idea, but also because of the way it was executed. At least, that's how I see it.

Little known fact about Zuckerberg and Facebook; the idea and the name came from his high school, Phillips Exeter Academy. Exeter has always had a physical handbook of everyone's photo and names that was handed out to all students each year called, "The Exeter Facebook". I would know since I was in the same dorm as Zuckerberg around that time (it was a boarding school).