"I thought people had an idea first before leaving"
blog.gaborcselle.com
blog.gaborcselle.com
"I'm leaving to work on my own thing, but don't have an idea yet."
My mind translates that into:
"I have an extremely clear idea of what I want to do, I also am extremely aware that any ideas that could possibly be thought of on company time may be claimed as the intellectual property of my employer."
This may or may not be the case of Gabor and Google as I can't speak to their intellectual property arrangements, but there is nothing quite like a very public statement that you are intellectual property unencumbered to start things off.
now print it out and delete the electronic copy
Now you can turn back on the internet (since you now don't have to worry about accidentally sending something) and write a one paragraph resignation saying what your last day is and how you love everyone. Print and hand that in.
Every time in the future when you wonder why you left, read the print out of your rant.
Never burn the boats as you might need them!
I've never heard of this actually happening. Does it?
"I have an extremely clear idea of what I really want to do, but I haven't even built a prototype yet, so what I'm working on 2 weeks from now might well be one of the dozen other completely different ideas I've got. And I don't really want to be forever remembered as The Guy Who Left To Start Dumb Project XYZ."
There's value to oneself in declaring publicly that you are mentally unencumbered.
So it might be better to engage in some little public self-embarassment than go around telling what you're up to...
[1] http://www.ted.com/talks/derek_sivers_keep_your_goals_to_you...
I've had success writing code this way. If there's a wall, talking about it helps; if there's a flow, shutting up and letting your subconscious at it helps more.
This blog post in not a CYA tactic but was triggered by the comment I read on Hacker News, and my belief that leaving to do one specific idea is in most cases the wrong way to do it.
Yep. There's a quote from Bob Parsons (of GoDaddy fame) that goes something like (paraphrased roughly) "Don't be afraid to enter a crowded market, just be better than everybody else."
This is kind of our mindset at Fogbeam Labs, where - depending on how some details shake out - we'll be competing with everybody from Jive Software, Yammer, Alfresco and Broadvision (among others), to Salesforce, IBM, Cisco and Microsoft.
But that's fine. We have an angle to pursue that we think will let us make some inroads against those guys, and we're spoiling for a good fight. Heck, as far as I'm concerned, those guys should be sleeping with one eye open. :-)
In one case the great new idea is a new product, in the other case the great new idea is how to be better than the competition.
Which boils down to either extreme failure or extreme success and little in-between...
Elon Musk couldn't have started SpaceX and Tesla right out of school, he had to build up skill, credentials, and connections first.
For your first startup, make something awesome but try to fly people to Mars. A small acquisition or a business with nice revenue might be the better goal.
I'm mostly leaf reading, but it seems to me you are recommending a lean startup / lifestyle business as a first startup. A less ambitious endeavour than say, Google or Amazon, with the primary goal of acquiring skills, small but safer revenue, a stepping stone to the next, bigger, enterprise. Very inspiring, and something young engineers should think about.
BTW, I restate my request from my unsolicited email (hope you don't mind): please share some startup ideas, even if execution is everything, some of us younger, less experienced engineers find brainstorming and finding ideas harder, and would really appreciate some inspiration.
In my own life, had I chosen the startup over grad school, I would easily be worth $100M+ right now. I had a ground floor opportunity I idiotically passed on because I was young, stupid, and too idealistic. So I see his point.
That said, I shudder at the thought of hiring a programmer who struggled with calculus and nothing assures me better on that axis than straight As on math and computer science courses above and beyond requirements for their major.
Individuals vary, and one of the best coders I know got a 2-year associates degree out of community college, but this is a really nice foot in the door for me when I don't know the person already.
Elon Musk couldn't have started SpaceX and Tesla right out of school, he had to build up skill, credentials, and connections first.
I agree with your point, but "your first startup" is not necessarily "right out of school." In my own case, I'm working on my first startup, after about 15 years in the IT world. And it's been those years of IT experience that has led to me (and to some extent, my co-founders, both of who are younger than I) to develop those beliefs where we feel like we believe something that everybody else doesn't.
For your first startup, make something awesome but try to fly people to Mars. A small acquisition or a business with nice revenue might be the better goal.
Yeah, we're thinking IPO, and eventually acquiring Microsoft. If you're going to dream, dream big, I always say. :-)
I meant: "For your first startup, make something awesome but don't try to fly people to Mars."
I didn't even realize it was Peter Thiel who said that, but I embrace that mindset as well. We have a document in our repo called "What we believe" that is where we catalog the things that we think about the world, that we suspect most everybody else would disagree with us on. Looking at that periodically is a valuable tool to help us focus on how we're going to be different.
One thing I do have to mention is that I bring a different perspective when I made my comment. I'm an electrical engineering student (graduating in two weeks) with only work experience from JPL and SpaceX. If I take up a job at any of those places after graduation, I would have to think more than twice before I ever contemplate leaving to pursue an idea. Then again my generation is full of risk takers, and I think I'm one of them.
One interesting change from last time I started a company (in the nuclear winter of 08/09) is that angel and seed funding is much easier to come by. That leads to a situation where there are lots of companies in almost every interesting space. Thus being able to out-execute them becomes even more relevant.
The company that this really brings to mind is DuckDuckGo. They're competing for the search market with Google and Microsoft--two of the biggest competitors you could possibly face. But search is huge and if you can claim even 0.1% of that market, you've got more than enough users to justify your existence.
Please tell me this sort of thinking isn't typical of Google's product organization.
You do learn as you execute, but this just moves you towards a local maximum - a local maximum that might not be that exciting, if you've badly misunderstood the people you're building for.
You do the most learning prior to starting, when you listen to the people you plan to build for and get to know them intimately - their problems, aspirations, values, and ethics.
Getting to really know the worldview of your targets is how you come up with the direction that leads toward the global maximum, and it's all done before you write a line of code.
You have to combine the aspirational thinking of "let's build a self-driving car" with the day-to-day grind of actually building it. Without the first, you end up in the local maximum you describe, without the latter you land in the "talk is cheap" box.
My post is about the fact that you can in fact leave your job and go through a phase of prototyping one product after another, and deliberately testing each idea for not just how great it sounds but how buildable it is.
But that does not mean all ideas are equally cheap and worthless. They aren't. Good ideas are like the DNA of a product or service. Separating the wheat from the chaff is the purpose of executing and iterating. And don't confuse ideas with how people initially attempt to express what's rolling around in their head. People often don't know how to really effectively communicate such things. Iteration is often just an exercise in trying to figure out how to properly express the underlying idea. That is what pivoting is often about.
Good ideas are not a dime a dozen. They aren't all that common. They are testable, the way Einstein's Theory of Relatively is provably a more accurate concept than Newtonian gravity.
I run into this all the time when trying to talk about how I got myself well. It is a proven concept in some sense as it worked for both me and my sons. But that doesn't automatically give me the ability to effectively convey it to other people. I continue to struggle with that piece of it.
Part of what I do outside work is help out with housing cooperatives in the UK. We put ordinary not very rich people in charge of their homes. They become the landlord. Targets include < 4% void rent in any year, < 28 days property vacant &c.
Real decision making and budget responsibility (landlord liable for repairs) works wonders. You can see people grow taller, and many now have supervisory jobs...
I do envy the rental sector in US. UK has issues with artificially high prices (my opinion) preventing a free market rental sector from emerging.
The "boys" came home, often had high savings and no kids, "Rosie the Rivetter" was encouraged to quit her job so a man could have it, many women did so quite happily so they could have kids and the fulltime mom thing. Prior to the war, we were deep in The Great Depression and many people moved every thirteen months to take advantage of one free month's rent if you could pay rent in full and on time for twelve months straight. People were doubled up in small homes, etc.
Levittowns were born to meet the sudden demand for single family homes. The nation created finance mechanisms to facilitate the birth of these instant suburbs. We are still living with the legacy. It can be extremely difficult to arrange financing for anything other than a single family home.
The reason ideas are so cheap is that they are only the reflection of an action, not the action itself. Often folks take what they 'want' and then ponder a way to 'get' that and poof! idea. Like "I 'want' to work on my car's engine computer, all I need to do is take the engine out and mount it on an engine stand and hook it up to my laptop!" Simple idea, remove the engine and instrument it, but actually doing that is a lot of work. (doable, just a lot of work).
But this can also be a useful tool. Ideas that aren't a lot of work to implement but seem to have high value are usually useless. And if you can't tell why they are useless then it is sometimes worthwhile to pursue them enough to understand where the real work is.
But take something that is pretty much pure software. Let's take electronic publishing briefly. You have no doubt read a paperback book, you've no doubt read one (or looked at one) on an e-reader. All words, no pictures, just chapter breaks, perhaps the occasional font change to represent internal vs external dialog. Why can't I cut the spine off my old paperback, feed it into my Fuji Scansnap1500, and have it drop a .epub file that works on a kindle/nook/ipad/whatever ? The scansnap will give me a nice PDF of that book, even searchable. Caliber will convert it into a horrendous epub file. Why isn't this a no-brainer? I'd pay $20 for that software, no problem.
Idea, no execution. Marginal return on investment (while I would buy it if it worked well, there is no assured market here) There are bodged together ad-hoc solutions out there. Clearly there is some demand but as Gabe called out, you need passion. You need to want to build this because you want it to exist. And that, that passion, is not there.
I tell armchair politicians, hey run for city council. Solve problems. If you are good at it people will give you bigger and bigger problems to solve. If you aren't you'll both have an appreciation for what politicians are up against and a compassion for what they do get done. Not nearly as fun though. At a Tom Campbell said at a fund raiser once, its hard to appreciate the job from the outside.
Newton had to write a book to get his ideas out there and accepted.
Here's another way to think about it: there is probably a good reason behind YC accepting people without an idea.
Those are some big words to swallow. I doubt he could do that but I'd love to be proven wrong. If anything, what he wrote comes down to the old adage of "easier said than done".