Instead of asking PG for ideas he'd like to fund, why don't we get back to focusing on solving a real problem with a great team in a growing market?
What kind of unfair advantage can you get working off someone else's idea?
273 karma · joined August 16, 2010
Formerly, I was a management consultant, helped non-profits crowd-source fundraising, created a new kind of mailing adhesive, researched novel forms of solar power, and acted as an environmental nonprofit's director.
What kind of unfair advantage can you get working off someone else's idea?
(Or do some social engineering and figure out which db company has a 9 letter name.)
However, I think you gave one of the most valuable and counter-intuitive points in the book too light a treatment: That successful 10X'ers not only consistently hit their goals, but actively tried not to exceed them.
Living in the start up echo chamber you'd think that "speed" was everything; we do "agile" development, we take venture rounds to "supercharge growth". Hockey stick graphs are treated like the tech world's pornography, depicting circumstances just a tad too good to be real. The mantra is that if a little growth is good, a lot of growth is really good.
GBC turns that on its head. Growth is good, but only a little bit. Only as much as you can handle. Explosive growth can quickly become uncontained growth can quickly become webvan. Facebook limited itself to college campuses, taking years to go public. Southwest started with 3 planes and didn't expand their routes until they had to. Zipcar stayed in Boston until it was absolutely sure it was ready to go to NYC.
The 20 mile march is as much about having discipline in self-restraint as it is about pushing forward.
Your chances for being hired at an elite firm are roughly .5-1%, or roughly 1 hire per 100-200 applications. No filtering system in the world could accurately filter that many candidates in a reasonable amount of time. As it stands, using the highly flawed criteria we use, it still is an enormous drag on the firm to do hiring.
The criteria used - 'elite' school, impressive extracurriculars, good grades - were selected because of their performance in a quality-time trade off. Your choice in reading resumes is to do a good job with 90% accuracy at 15-20 minutes per resume vs a quick filter with 30% accuracy at 1-2 minutes per resume. With hundreds of applications to read through, which would you prefer?
Cloud is renting servers: low cap-ex but high op-ex, minimal risk exposure, highly nimble. Dedicated hardware is buying servers: high cap-ex but low op-ex , more risk, and more consistent.
There's nothing inherently "better" in either strategy; they each suit a different need.
One successful CEO described it to me as such: "If you're Steve Jobs, and you have that talent, you can be an asshole. For the rest of us though, you can't be an asshole, because no one wants to work with an asshole. People just want to do business with a good guy."
No matter how great technically, no matter what the reward is at the end, if you can't get people to use the product it's not useful.
It's a beautiful psychological play. The % off, the timer, the social pressure - an automated version of the used-car salesman pitch. It doesn't matter what the absolute price is - studies have shown the consumers are more willing to buy a product that is at its "everyday low price", even when it's that price... every day.
In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if the deals had special "Groupon only" pricing. Gilt Group went through this a few months back with their "Made for Gilt" specific items - they were selling inventory which had ridiculously inflated "retail prices" pulled out of thin air.
It's a time-money play. We do the work that creating or scaling a corporate strategy group would do if you had the 6-12 months to go out, hire a team, train them together, create the necessary links to the organization, and go do the work. With consultants, you can hire and fire us at any time, no severance, pensions, or hard feelings. Once our work's done, we leave.
I'm not saying it's the best thing since sliced bread. But zero net contributor it isn't.
His theory is that you can't just drop everything and start over - you have to leverage the assets you've built up over your professional life. You gain enormous bargaining power by having this wealth of professional assets on your side, and utilizing them intelligently allows you to change your work to better fit your passions.
In other words, it's not the work that's making you unhappy. It's the workplace.
[1] http://calnewport.com/blog/2011/08/13/dont-quit-your-day-job...
Ira Glass was once asked about how he became a great radio host [1]. His response was that he continued to work on his craft even when he knew it was terrible. Knowing your work is terrible is crucial because it means that you have taste - you know what needs to be done, and you know what would fulfill it, even if you don't have the ability to execute it.
Style is about taste. And note, style is not equivalent to 'dressing up'. Style is knowing what pieces go together to create an aesthetically pleasing form. Style is knowing your body type, your personality, and your needs and putting together outfits that compliment and combine those strengths.
When developers get made fun of for not dressing up, it's not because you're wearing a t-shirt and jeans. It's because you've put no thought into which t-shirt with what jeans. There's no thought about how the pieces fit together. There's no taste.
Taste is critical for us because it's what makes or breaks a product. What makes Apple great? Taste. What let Instagram beat out the plethora of other photo apps? Taste. What allowed Facebook to take over MySpace? Taste. Taste is what will give me confidence that when you are on my team, you will do exactly what is necessary to make us win.
Taste is imperative. Take every chance to show that you have it.
[1] http://kottke.org/11/04/your-taste-is-why-your-own-work-disa...
On the other hand, however, I'm not sure that's only a bad thing. The barrier to entry is present but not insurmountable, and it gives the "Twitterati" a clubby sort of feel. Everyone wants to feel special - back when Facebook was invite only, people would claw and clamor for invites. There's a balance in there, and it seems like Twitter's gotten close. Not perfect, but close.
Google news bypass of paywall: http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=newssearch&cd=...
In fact, I've never figured out why first class has to board first. When I rode on Cathay Pacific on business, the attendants come get you from the traveler's lounge last, once everyone else has boarded. You don't need to jockey for overhead luggage space, so why wait longer in the cramped confines of the cabin? I wish more airlines did that.
How?
Made to Stick has a great story about a math teacher who struggled to convince his students of math's importance in life. As he put it, math is like weight lifting. You don't work out to prepare for the day a rogue barbell comes and traps you on the ground, you work out so you can run faster, tackle harder, and jump higher. Math is weight lifting for your analytic mind - it helps you rationally think through problems and establish logical steps to the solution.
Learning to program, and to take it further, learning computer science, is not about making the best app ever created. CS is mental weight lifting on the _process_ of tackling business problems. Dissecting an app into its MVC components will help you understand the business you plan to create, what is core, and what is fluff. In other words, learning to program will make you a better business person, even if you suck.
Much like a MBTI, this is probably useful in the broad sense, but should not be depended upon objectively.
[1]http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/education/st...
Damn near every place I went to with a photocopy of my job offer did I get offered a spot. Try getting something in paper from the company you're working for and bringing that to some open houses. I got much better responses from that tactic than bringing beer or nothing at all.
IP trolls only really come after you once you have enough success to be worth suing. The value that IV gets is from a license or a settlement, both of which require money. And to have money, you have to have... success.
Why didn't Android get sued before being bought by Google? Because no one cared.
The time to start thinking about licensing from a troll is the minute you think you have enough to defend yourself against one.
Honestly, while the tea party is strong, my feeling is that the majority of the Republican party are somewhat reasonable conservatives who actually like having an economy. They'll use the softness in the stock market to reinforce why they need additional tax cuts or other concessions and ride to the rescue when they 'miraculously' come to a compromise days before the limit.
Such is the state of politics today.
That being said, I do think it's a great way to shape up your general management skills, and an excellent post-college option.
Edit: Actually found Tin Eye's response on HN after the fact [1]. They claim that their business model (licensing to businesses) is sufficiently different from Google's consumer focus. This might be true at the moment, but it's only a matter of time until this ends up in Google Apps or the search appliance.
Feels like Groupon is doing something similar. With Google and Facebook moving closer into local deals and LivingSocial nipping at its heels, its only a matter of time before Groupon starts feeling the heat.
Your job as the CEO is to make sure work gets done, regardless of what happens. Doesn't matter if you're a $1B company or a 3 person startup. Get. It. Done.