> 90% of my career’s projects consisted of reinventing the spreadsheet and 90% of my time was spent listening to people bikeshedding about the color of buttons.

This, but for mobile apps.

"Uber for aircraft", "Cross LinkedIn with AirBnB with Google Maps", "Read the news", "Foursquare but for my hobby"… it was exciting when I was young and fresh and didn't know what was out there; now I know that I just didn't realise how many others were doing the same things.

Competition I didn't spot meant success was all about discovery rather than actual innovation, "build it and they will come" is just not true. Discovery means paying an ad-tax to the gatekeepers of eyeballs. But that's a bidding war, an all-pay auction for your version of the widely-instantiated "innovation" to win a temporary monopoly before the feature becomes table stakes in a bigger product, like IE was to Netscape, and Sherlock was to whoever that was, and Skype to all chat apps.