Closer To The Ideal

Daniel Chu asks “Will you share your venture idea with others?” He then lists the pros and cons:

Benefits:

* You will get lots of feedback, mostly in the form of disbelief or rejection. However, that’s what you need to shape your business, and that’s what every business gets on a daily basis.

* You can practice your pitch before you do it in front of VCs.

* You may unintentionally find your partners / board of directors.

Risks:

* You will get discouraged and eventually give up on the idea.

* Others will steal your idea and implement it before you.

* Your competitor will find a way to destroy you before you are ready to launch.

I posted the following as a comment over there.

“Others will steal your idea and implement it before you.”

My sense is that the risk of this is typically exaggerated. I know you know this, so my comments here are not directed at you, but allow me to expand on this thought, perhaps to start a conversation.

Startups tend to be experiments – how can anyone steal the result of an experiment before the final results are known? Suppose, early in 1928, Sir Alexander Fleming told someone “I’m looking at the lifecycle of staphylococci”. Could someone then see the potential for killing staphylococci? That would be quite a jump. The big discovery happened by accident, but in an environment where Fleming and his assistants were looking for something new. It’s worth noting that at least 3 other researchers, starting 30 years earlier, in the 1890s, had already noted the negative effects that some mold could have on the growth of bacteria. And yet those previous researchers never realized the potential of what they were looking at. Assuming we all want to be the equivalent of Fleming (that is, we all want to be the ones to come up with the world-changing discovery) then we need to think about what he had that the previous researchers did not. For one thing, he had an openness to accidents. For another, he had a great crew and/or circle of former assistants – Merlin Price gave him important feedback at a crucial time.

Fleming did not know that penicillin existed until he found it. So he wasn’t looking for it. But when he accidentally stumbled across it, he had the insight to realize its importance.

A lot of big breakthroughs arise by accident while people are pursuing something else. An excellent current example would be Twitter. Roll the clock back to 2005 – Odeo launches their service for podcasting. The service does not take off. They are frustrated. They ask themselves, “How can we popularize these podcasts?” They start thinking about a messaging service, something lighter and easier than blogging. They talk to some folks who’ve been thinking about the potential of cell phones. They start a service. It soon becomes much bigger than Odeo. They are smart enough to realize the potential of what they’ve got.

What idea could you steal from either of these folks, before the moment that they realized the potential of what they had? The “lifecycle of staphylococci”? Who cares? It is a boring subject. Podcasting? Who cares? Lots of people tried podcasting startups, none of them made any serious money.

Until those folks realized the importance of what they had, there was nothing interesting to steal, and after they realized the importance of what they had, they had the advantage of being way ahead of everyone else.

I think all any startup can really aim for is be like Fleming’s lab in 1928 – go looking in an area that should have some potential, keep an open mind about what you’ll find, surround yourself with excellent people like Merlin Price, and be ready to change direction when you discover something unexpected and yet amazing.

I wrote that comment last night. I may have been guilty of underestimating the risks of someone stealing your idea. However, startups are mostly about execution. Most of the time, when you hear an entrepreneur claiming that others stole their idea, all it means is that that entrepreneur had terrible execution. It is important that we avoid becoming John Pratt:

I cannot tell you how painful it is to watch 5 assholes take your idea and run with it and not even give you credit. I hate all 5 of them for that. If I see them, I may punch each one of them in the face.

Can anyone read that and avoid the conclusion that Pratt is a terrible entrepreneur? Rage, accusations and self-pity, all condensed into a short online rant, and then followed up, in the comments, with insults aimed at everyone who read his rant? I read those words and conclude the man lacked the emotional stability to be a successful entrepreneur. Any risky venture will have its share of setbacks which must be born stoically – facing ruin an entrepreneur should aspire to the same calm resolve with which Robert Scott faced his death in Antarctica:

We took risks, we knew we took them; things have come out against us, and therefore we have no cause for complaint, but bow to the will of Providence, determined still to do our best to the last.

I should add, it is rare to have truly unique idea, especially in the area of the web. What I’ve seen, over the last 8 years, is this recurring pattern: the possibility of a new kind of site/service begins to emerge. The people I know realize it and become excited by it. We begin working on the software. 4 to 6 months later we are ready to launch. At exactly the same, several hundred other startups emerge, all with roughly the same idea. They, too, had the idea about the same time we did, and they too have spent the last 4 to 6 months working on their site/service.

I’ve seen this pattern recur with blogging software, RSS readers, podcasting, file storage, calendar software, online social networks, and video sales. Every year there was a new idea, and a race to be among the first to come out with that idea.

Rather than trying to avoid competition, one should expect it. You won’t be successful because of your uniquely creative idea, you will be successful (or not) because of your execution. And your energy should go toward executing well, rather than trying to keep your idea a secret. Again, I might draw a parallel with Robert Scott’s expedition to Antarctica. He and his team never expected to be in a race to be the first to the pole, but when they arrived in Antarctica they soon learned that a Norwegian team was nearby, also attempting to be first to the South Pole.

Scott received the news on 22 February, during the first depot-laying expedition. According to Cherry-Garrard, the first reaction of Scott and his party was to rush over to the Bay of Whales and have it out with Amundsen. However, Scott recorded the event calmly in his journal. “One thing only fixes itself in my mind. The proper, as well as the wiser, course is for us to proceed exactly as though this had not happened. To go forward and do our best for the honour of our country without fear or panic.”

To go forward and do your best, without fear or panic, is good advice for any startup.

danah boyd writes with great honesty about what it felt like when her audience began mocking her via a live, public Twitter stream:

Well, I started out rough, but I was also totally off-kilter. And then, within the first two minutes, I started hearing rumblings. And then laughter. The sounds were completely irrelevant to what I was saying and I was devastated. I immediately knew that I had lost the audience. Rather than getting into flow and becoming an entertainer, I retreated into myself. I basically decided to read the entire speech instead of deliver it. I counted for the time when I could get off stage. I was reading aloud while thinking all sorts of terrible thoughts about myself and my failures. I wasn’t even interested in my talk. All I wanted was to get it over with. I didn’t know what was going on but I kept hearing sounds that made it very clear that something was happening behind me that was the focus of everyone’s attention. The more people rumbled, the worse my headspace got and the worse my talk became. I fed on the response I got from the audience in the worst possible way. Rather than the audience pushing me to become a better speaker, it was pushing me to get worse. I hated the audience. I hated myself. I hated the situation. I wanted off. And so I talked through my talk, finishing greater than 2 minutes ahead of schedule because all I wanted was to be finished. And then I felt guilty so I made shit up for a whole minute and left the stage with 1 minute to spare.

I walked off stage and immediately went to Brady and asked what on earth was happening. And he gave me a brief rundown. The Twitter stream was initially upset that I was talking too fast. My first response to this was: OMG, seriously? That was it? Cuz that’s not how I read the situation on stage. So rather than getting through to me that I should slow down, I was hearing the audience as saying that I sucked. And responding the exact opposite way the audience wanted me to. This pushed the audience to actually start critiquing me in the way that I was imagining it was. And as Brady went on, he said that it started to get really rude so they pulled it to figure out what to do. But this distracted the audience and explains one set of outbursts that I didn’t understand from the stage. And then they put it back up and people immediately started swearing. More outbursts and laughter. The Twitter stream had become the center of attention, not the speaker. Not me.

Yes, I cried. Yes, I left Web2.0 Expo devastated. I hate giving a bad talk but I also felt like I was being laughed at. People tried to smooth it over, to tell me that I was OK, that it wouldn’t matter, that they liked the talk. But no amount of niceness from friends or strangers could make up for the 20 minutes in which I was misinterpreting the audience and berating myself. Nothing the audience could say could make up for what I was thinking about myself while on stage. So I went for a massage. And I spent 90 minutes trying to tell myself that I am a lovable creature. And when that wasn’t working, I told myself to suck it up and deal. I knew that if I could convince myself to look like everything was OK that eventually I would believe it. Or at least that it would all go away.

There are currently 206 comments on that post. Most people seem to feel that forcing the audience to read the Twitter stream (by projecting it onto a screen) served as a terrible distraction which disrupted boyd’s presentation.

I’m hoping this use of technology gets re-thought.

A Shout Out to My Pepys writes about their experience at dom com startups:

The dot coms I have known were all doomed. Almost all of them were the classic two-founder startups going after a niche in the market. All of them needed outside money to achieve their goals, and in every case the outside money wrecked the company. Uncontrolled hiring wiped out the competence and the culture of these places within months. Executives who came in with the outside money were out of their depth and resorted to arbitrary decision-making and tyranny, and sometimes deliberately failed at their fiduciary responsibilities.

Here are some examples of things I saw at dot coms: People hired to do nothing to make a company look bigger; openly racist senior executives allowed to carry out their prejudices; nonexistent products fraudulently sold by salesmen who then left with their money; stolen patents; illegal or impossible business plans designed to fail just after an executive had left for a better job; and indecision actually written into the procedures of the company to resolve differences between founders.

These things happen at bigger and better-organized companies, but it’s possible for all of them to occur at once at a startup dot com without any consequences for anyone involved. Too many of those places were all the boys playing the treehouse, complete with NO GIRLS sign, with the difference that being pushed out meant real broken bones down below.

In particular, the “two cofounders” startups were disasters. I’ll make an exception for the last one I worked at, where both of them were smart nice guys who knew what they were doing and cooperated. Everywhere else it was a disaster: Beavis & Butthead meet Leopold & Loeb. They were all white college grad males. Almost always one was technical and the other was business. They were inevitably rivals and often boyhood friends. Neither one could be completely in charge, and neither one could be seen defeated. I’ve seen situations where the two actually alternated between winning and losing the argument, so that the company sailed along zig zag for months.

I won’t ever work for a two cofounders startup again, unless it’s the last two. The rest is just the whole company as fifth wheel in the meltdown of a friendship.

I’d add sexism to the list of complaints. The last startup I worked had a project manager whose behavior seemed straight out of the 1950s. At one point, when we were trying to hire designers, I set up a lunch where the project manager could meet the 2 most talented designers I knew. These designers just happen to be one male and one female. The project manager spent the whole time talking to the male designer, the existence of the female designer was barely acknowledged. Embarrassing for me. I apologized to her later and explained that I had no idea that he was like that.

Still, I don’t think startups are uniquely awful. In the comments of the above post, someone writes:

A lot of my friends and I talk about the mythical “just a job” job as a way to be able to pursue outside Interests (like sleep) instead of struggling with being assimilated by a Very Friendly Startup. I half-tried it once, but I didn’t have anything to take the place of my emotional/personal investment, and the company in question had a monstrous work environment (really openly-hostile; people didn’t throw chairs in meetings anymore, but the people who used to throw chairs in meetings were still around and everybody knew it and “what am I going to say to X?” was used as a way of intimidating one by proxy) so I found myself a corporate nihilist with no work ethic or fear of being unemployed or whatever to drive my participation — in short, I just didn’t put up with the shit and left.

I’m left with the feeling that unprofessional behavior is common. It’s a sad fact, but there is a lot of it.

Fellipe Eduardo is complaining about too much work, and clients who do not pay:

I’m really busy. I have a BIG TODO list, many things to study, and less time. Well, you can include some clients that not had paid me (normal here, NORMAL!?! well, that’s comum, person that use and not pay, it’s boring, time doesn’t is money always, sometimes your time is trash to some people). One month without surf, sixmonths without soccer, really this last weeks was being hard.

Time? Watch Lost? Study english? Nope, only work, work, work…

I relate to this. I faced several months of this earlier this year, when the financial crisis hit and suddenly all of my clients were broke.

Robert Hoekman is writing about the death of “Tyler”, a pit bull dog. I find it unusual, and uncomfortable, to see this much anger in a public forum:

We were all so confident that Rachel, his would-be new owner, was the right person for him. We couldn’t have been more wrong.

Less than nine hours after leaving him in her care, she did the exact thing we explicitly told her not to do, the one thing that most blatantly defies common sense: she let him off of his leash. In less than nine hours, she took away everything we did, everything we hoped for, and every chance Tyler would ever have at living the life he deserved.

Tyler was depending on Rachel. We were depending on her. She failed at her commitment to love and support this wonderful, sweet, and loyal dog so miserably and so quickly that it has absolutely stunned each and every one of the amazing people that have volunteered their time and energy to bring Tyler home safely. Even worse, Rachel opted out of continuing to aid in the search, citing her outrageously absurd belief that Tyler would simply go back to doing what nature designed him to do best: be one with the Earth through his nomadic and migratory instincts.

People who never met Tyler, my wife, nor myself came to the area night after night, morning after morning. They hiked through the preserve. They walked neighborhoods. They posted flyers. They talked to everyone they came across. Every last one of them did so much more than Rachel could be bothered to do. Every one of them cared so much more than she ever could.

I wish more than words can say that last Saturday had never happened — that we had decided to keep Tyler ourselves and not brought him to his new owner’s apartment and said goodbye. I wish we had been able to see her naivete and arrogance before it was too late. I wish so many things were just slightly different than they were.

I will never forgive Rachel for her foolish and fatal decision. Tyler will never have the chance.

Even if “Rachel” is a fictional name, I assume that if I made an effort, I could find out this woman’s real name.

I’m curious if it is ever wise to express this much anger in a public setting? I’d be angry as hell if someone’s lack of responsibility lead to the death of an animal that I cared about, and I might even vent about the incident in public, but I don’t think I’d give enough details that other’s could figure out who I am talking about.