Good Ideas Bad Ideas
What is the value of an idea?
Many use the formula that idea x execution is a way to evaluate an idea. That a good idea, alone, without proper execution is meaningless.
However, great execution on a poor idea also can yield nothing.
How, then, does one discover a good idea?
I think back on Twitter -- how would anyone have known it's a good idea. In fact, during the early years, they put out a short "explainer" video to explain it because it was such an odd idea.
Yet, there were a handful of people who someone knew that it was a good idea.
What did they see that was different?
I think back my first idea that raised money, which was to create a way for small-businesses and freelancers to exchange goods and services using a barter-based currency.
It also ended up being a bad idea -- why not just use money was one VC's response.
I had shared that in recessions or for newer businesses, cash is not available, but time is. The problem was, during that period, cash was plentiful. The economy was booming.
So the timing was bad...but the idea still bad. Cash always remained king.
However, Bitcoin is based on a similar idea. Some of the concepts were what I had built the original business on, which was research into alternative currencies and applying it to the internet.
Bitcoin became a good idea -- not just better execution, but 10 levels more thoughtful than what I came up with.
Would there be a way to advise myself to come up with a similar Bitcoin concept?
Or was there a local maximum that I was orbiting already such that I would always stay in a bad idea?
Similarly, was Twitter's germ in orbit of a good idea sufficiently that it didn't take much hypothesis or deep thinking or massive pivot to become a big business?
What makes something a good idea, versus a bad idea?
One anecdotal litmus test in Silicon Valley is that good ideas start out by looking like bad ideas.
And bad ideas start out by looking like good ideas.
Paul Graham wrote about this, and then used his initial reaction to Airbnb as an example.
But what about similar ideas, where one succeeds and another goes horribly wrong?
Facebook succeeded where Friendster failed.
Was it in the details of the execution? Or was the vision behind the shared concept what made the difference?
I don't know if we'll ever know the real answer.
But from my memory of an article on the topic, it seemed like the failing technology in the beginning contributed to the problem, as did some of the executive management decisions by the VC's.
What about MySpace vs Facebook?
One article I read made the case that there were a few core attributes the made a difference:
- Facebook tried to depend on real identities, whereas MySpace often did, but didn't reinforce it;
- MySpace had a less consistent interface which hurt the experience; whereas Facebook enforced a cleaner UI;
- Facebook launched in college campuses, expanding after it achieved saturation in a given college and then colleges in total before going after a broader audience
I'm there were hundreds of other decisions over time which made the difference.
MySpace was large and acquired by a large media organization.
Yet it has become largely irrelevant.
How different were the ideas really?