A good founder is capable of anticipating which turns lead to treasure and which lead to certain death. A bad founder is just running to the entrance of (say) the “movies/music/filesharing/P2P” maze or the “photosharing” maze without any sense for the history of the industry, the players in the maze, the casualties of the past, and the technologies that are likely to move walls and change assumptions.Understanding history is just as important as (trying to) predict future trends. Strongly recommend Balaji's startup engineering course from which this quote notes was extracted.
https://spark-public.s3.amazonaws.com/startup/lecture_slides...
https://www.coursera.org/course/startup