Sarah, We Got Your Memo | Hacker News Reader

Sarah, We Got Your Memo

graffitigeo.posterous.com

60 pointsjmtame14 comments

I can think of 100 things a startup founder should be doing before writing a public reply to something Sarah Lacey said.

You mean "before writing a blog post that garners them publicity"?

How much publicity and what kind? There's 3 comments on the post. Unless you're actually selling things to the hacker/TC crowd, does it have any value? Graffiti is a consumer app, is it not?

Even Google didn't become Google until they hit upon the whole adwords/adsense idea which wasn't even an original idea of theirs. In the early stages, world changing ideas are probably more found by intuition than logic.

Most things really worth it require intelligence, hard work and, not to be underestimated, luck.

World changing ideas in the early stages are more found by LUCK than logic or intuition, I mean, if something could be reasonably (logically or intuitively) known to be world-changing, it wouldn't be so unexpected or valuable when it happens. I doubt any of those founders, even intuitively, expected their ideas or companies to be world changing when they founded them.

The reality is that the trailblazers tend to take it in the shins. Google just got search right. They were about the zillionth company to try. Facebook seems to have gotten social networking right, also at the zillionth variation on the theme. Nobody talks wistfully about becoming the next WebCrawler or Friendster.

Really? I would certainly say Google and Dell were revolutionary. Now, they may not have been the first to do it, but they were early, and they were the best (at that time). Facebook and twitter, get a little bit of a "meh" from me, they more or less took an existing concept, spun it their way, and got lucky. Microsoft, paypal and Youtube (if the article is correct about the last two, I had never heard that before) apparently significantly altered what they started out doing. While not revolutionary, it certainly is a very impressive thing, to completely shift your focus as a business.

Now, my idea for a startup is really just a twinkle in my eye, and some big talk around the water cooler, but I can tell you this: I don't just want to make it into the next computer security company, I want to change the way computer security is run as a business. I've been working on it in my spare time for almost a year now, and am bordering on having a working model of stage one, which I know will be revolutionary, but won't shock anybody. That's what I look for when I see a new start-up, someone who isn't just trying to start a business, but someone who is trying to change the very rules that type of business runs by.

Dell & Google would not have seemed revolutionary to the writer of that "memo." Facebook and twitter have had a profound effect on the way people interact with each other. Microsoft & Paypal happened upon revolution or took the opportunity when they saw it, not in their first 6 months.

heh, Yahoo did try to acquire Google early on actually. Trying to find exact link.

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/15.02/yahoo.html

You can look at, or create, innovation all day long and not even see, recognize it.

Alternately, you can try with all your might to innovate and create brilliant new concepts all day long and fail miserably.

Meh. Who cares what Sarah Lacey says. I don't see her changing the world.

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