Mocked And Misunderstood
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Being mocked and misunderstood seems neither necessary nor sufficient to making it big.
I think Fred is arguing that it's often necessary or quasi-necessary or something.
This really seems more like an emotional reaction to negative press than Fred's normal well-thought-out posts.
Also, is Twitter profitable yet? That gets asked way too much, but I still don't know the answer yet.
Hell, there's even a problem with correlation here. We've all seen plenty of crap that is mocked and misunderstood that sank to the bottom of the sea without fanfare.
is this a clever ploy to try and get some sagging stock up?
I think he's trying to say something along the lines of "even if you're mocked and misunderstood, persevere, because it does not mean that your product is not good."
It's a pretty poor way to go about saying that, though, and it comes off as if he's bitter about what he heard and trying to reassure himself that his product is good.
We remember the startups that were mocked but became breakout successes. We don't remember the 1000 startups that were mocked because they were terrible ideas, and failed because of it.
"They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown."
[1] Apparently he really did say it too: https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Carl_Sagan#Sourced
i think the flaw in my post is you need something more than being mocked and misunderstood. you need traction, usage, momentum, etc.
but when you have that and continue to be mocked and misunderstood, that's a very positive signal to me.
http://blog.twitter.com/2010/10/promoted-promotions.html
that is what they have been focusing on for the past few years and it is producing a lot of revenue now
Companies that have traction, usage, momentum, etc and ARE NOT mocked and misunderstood certainly outperform the ones that fit those criteria and were mocked and misunderstood.
Nonetheless, if you look at all the variables that could play a role in a company's success I doubt "mocked & misunderstood" has any predictive value over a large enough sample.
Is that really so with Kickstarter?
When Chuggy G. raises money for an album on kickstarter, you might be surprised to discover that Accenture does not actually audit her.
The value for marketers is clear. It's an inexpensive way to build organic traction.
The value for individual users, who are the product, is less clear. Twitter is immensely noisy, and is becoming more noisy as it's use as a PR tool increases. It's not clear to me why, overall, it's worth it for people to read their Twitter feeds. I certainly don't read mine, I just push out a tweet a day to signal I'm trendy.
For example, Fred Wilson's Twitter updates are links to his blog posts plus some (for me) out of context public messages to people I don't know, ie. junk (for me). I might as well unsubscribe and add his RSS to Google Reader and save myself the noise. Just did.
silly -> controversial -> progressive -> obvious
Fred's post touches on the silly part. I haven't been able to find much more of Lant's model other than the slide Kottke links to.
When I was in graduate school I was timid. If I had an idea that people didn't get right away, I wouldn't stick with it.
Today if I'm working on something and people don't think I'm crazy, I think I'm wasting my time. If everybody understands the value of something, you're getting in too late.
My mother doesn't know shinola about Dropbox, yet I'd say they're successful.
Twitter is an excellent example -- in its earlier days it really was something special, but people mocked it in the manner he describes. And of course now it's indispensable. Basically everything Apple made in the last 10 years or so would be another example.
I think it's because to ridicule this things is to imply that their users are essentially idiots, whereas the one doing the ridiculing is a free-thinking skeptic. Then, slowly, you watch them all get iPods and Macbooks and Twitter accounts...