
Does the "Entrepreneurship Subculture" prevent big ideas? - marklabedz
http://noahpinionblog.blogspot.com/2012/10/does-entrepreneurship-subculture.html
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omegant
I would say that in Spain(at least before the crisis), we have a very good
"great ideas" detector, but with inverted polarity. People usually goes around
saying "this sucks, that sucks". But they can not think in fixing anything.
That´s why I love the SV way of thinking, every thing is possible, just stand
up and DO IT. Also being 35, I realize that now I have more experience than
when I was 23 (obviously), and that experience allows me to take distance from
the group thinking the OP mentions (and now a days is oppressive here in
Spain. People can´t think there is an end to the crisis, as there was an end
to the crazy bubble). I think is a good idea to change for a time, and immerse
yourself on another ambient, job, place, whatever. There are thousands of
things broken that need smart energetic people to fix them, and they are not
another social network.

edit: some typos and punctuation.

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redwood
The other thing this article doesn't mention, but related to the article the
other day about going to the moon: when we work only in small teams, and
dislike the massive ordered military-like hierarchical companies, we make it
harder to do things as big as going to the moon.

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enjo
Sure, but that really hits on the "big thing" about the moon Mercury/Apollo
missions. They had a funding model that allowed them to spend incredible
amounts of money with absolutely no expectation of return on that investment.

If you put 10000 really smart people to the task of solving big problems while
giving them nearly unlimited resources, they could get a lot done.

Of course that's not how entrepreneurial funding actually works. For better or
for worse it takes a really unique financier (like the government) to make
that happen. The moon landing was the product of a really unique time in our
history, I wish we'd stop using it as an example I guess.

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saraid216
We could use Zheng He or Christopher Columbus instead, I guess? Though one has
the disadvantage of no one having a clue who he was and the other is
problematic to anyone who is bothered by the stuff he did.

But _why_ was it unique? Why couldn't it be duplicated? Why shouldn't it?

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confluence
I seriously hate people who keep saying we need to chase 'big ideas'.

Why?

Because big things have small beginnings c.f. the universe, earth
agglomeration, the sun, galaxies, life, humans, civilisations, businesses,
technologies and AI. Everything snowballs - nothing just magically appears
from nowhere - it's all just a combination of incremental past states.

People who don't understand how things are made feel as though all we need is
more "eureka moments", geniuses, "innovation plans" and "big all encompassing
goals" when this is not how innovation works at all.

Innovation is directed evolution of the adjacent possible via the convergence
of many secondary composable technologies and ideas and hence is messy,
arduous, long and always incremental. Chasing big ideas is like building
extremely complex software using the Waterfall method - it just doesn't work
too well.

What people should be saying is that we should "reduce the cost of failure",
"speed up the iteration cycle" so that a bunch of small trivial composable
ideas can quickly be assembled into something extraordinary - like the
repurposed cells that create a human, or the combination of engines and wheels
that make our cars.

People who chase 'big ideas' miss the DNA for the forests.

You have to work on making DNA before you can build the trees.

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ippisl
I think you're diminishing the role of a big "good" vision in the process of
innovation.

What's the guiding vision of the internet community ? as far as i can tell is
mostly there's no valuable guiding vision. It's all about rapid trial and
error to appeal to as many people as possible with whatever idea that will
work.

So we end with most of the web development community working on creating junk-
food sites, optimizing ads and new ways to sell stuff. This way you get
McDonalds and TV advertising invented. Big inventions indeed , mostly with
negative value.

Of course there are some clusters of the web with a big guiding vision:
collaborative consumption, using the power of the web to reduce prices, better
ways to share important knowledge, new labor marketplaces, democratizing
innovation.

And you see a qualitative difference between both sorts of companies.

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confluence
Get off your high horse - the market dictates usefulness within the bounds of
negative externality regulation and human rights.

The internet has produced more value over the preceding 10 years than
essentially any other industry. "Purists" irritate me for the very reason that
they don't work in the real messy world.

People like McDonalds. People like watching TV. Just because you don't like it
doesn't matter.

Crass consumerism is the saving grace of the United States - it's what allows
companies to thrive and grow and build wealth.

"Important" things are overrated by those who don't do.

Google's Ads and YouTube's cat videos have done more for the web than
Wikipedia.

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nickpinkston
The issue here is all wrapped up in "bounds of negative externality
regulation". I'd hate to 4Step my way into being Zygna - I don't think it's
useful for the end users and is nearly 100% parasitic. The market isn't
perfect due to there being no "digital-heroin regulations" to prevent this
drag on human progress. I think we can say with confidence that we're in a
local optimum in current market conditions, and some us - myself included -
wish to select ourselves out of doing such companies.

"Wealth creation" is a byword for justifying rent seeking as if that was an
end in itself - "job creators" at least has some positive end in sight.

The argument you make "cat videos, etc." being beneficial is a valid one. The
90% of shit is why we have much of our infrastructure from AWS to FedEx.
However, it's dangerous to assume that this is the only, or best, path to
increasing our standard of living, and moreover to not see why we shouldn't
try, in our own activities, to try to rise above it.

Any concerted effort on solving a problem produces the effects you speak of -
it's not just crap. Pure end-user numbers, vis-a-vis "crass consumerism", are
not what dictate these positive externalities (AWS, etc.) that we experience.
It's likely the challenge of the problem with respect to having a product-
market fit. In other words - a hard problem solved for a small market is
likely to produce outsized spillover effects - like why Rails powers
productivity software and now tons of things.

There is a middle ground between the dreamers and the rent seekers where the
biggest impact to society can be gained. Rent seeking hoping for spillover is
not the optimum path. Instead, if you really do want to make an impact first,
find a real problem that benefits humanity and solve it - don't dream about
it, and don't whitewash what's black.

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Eduardo3rd
I've been told that one way to come up with ideas for startups is to put a
timer on your watch/phone that goes off every 30 minutes. When that alarm goes
off, stop what you are doing and ask yourself "Why does this suck, and how
could I fix it?". Keep a journal of the ideas and see what you come up with
over time.

I think that if you are a 25 year old guy living in San Francisco/Chicago/NYC/
_insert your favorite major US city_ it is really likely that you are going to
come with ideas that solve a common set of problems. Are those business worth
building? Maybe so. Are they going to make an impact on a global scale? Maybe
not.

Perhaps if you combined an entrepreneurial spirit with travel to
emerging/developing nations and put yourself in uncomfortable or unusual
situations you could come up with something that had the potential to change
the world.

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0003
The approach described in the first paragraph led to the invention of the
snooze button.

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rayiner
I think the current entererpenural culture centered around silicon valley
encourages people to think small. There's so much you can do with a big team
and real resources, but that doesn't really jives with the culture in the
Valley nowadays.

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rumcajz
There's a LOT of engineers in SV. If everyone get as little as one great idea
each 10 years it's a lot of great ideas. The cognitive bias described in the
article doesn't really matter because of the statistical nature of the
process.

The problem with enterpreneurs is that they are focused on getting funding.
The investors that provide the funding tend to prefer proved solutions, so the
enterpreneurs dump great ideas as too weird or too unproven or having no clear
business model to possibly get the funding.

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vitek
Great points about how groupthink can limit creativity, but I suspect it can
also impede execution which may be even more important. As good as lean
startup is, it certainly causes many to groupthink the best execution
strategy. This may increase competition for ideas well suited for it, and
prematurely kill (or pivot away from) ideas best pursued with a different
approach.

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nancyhua
What are some of the biggest ideas solved by small startups? Maybe large
organizations or established industries are needed to develop some of the
biggest ideas and startups are not solving big ideas because that's not their
purpose.

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saraid216
"What material to use in making a transistor".

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Valley#Silicon_transist...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Valley#Silicon_transistor_and_birth_of_the_Silicon_Valley)

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j45
Too often, the bigger the idea lust, the bigger the insecurity.

You will find many more successful businesses that started small with the idea
that really resonated with customers.

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mikeriess
I agree with many of the points you raise, but I think you're trying to unite
tangential concerns around a single issue.

The excerpt from your father's paper suggests that our problem solving can be
inhibited by our initial impulses about a solution. I agree that this is often
the case- most people seem to have a natural resistance against reversing out
of a train of thought in order to choose a different branch. Our natural
inertia tends to carry us forward. Even when we drive, think how awkward it
feels to make a wrong turn and have to reverse down the street in order to
correct your error. Obviously on the road this act puts your physical health
at risk, so it's not a perfectly sound analogy, but the feeling is similarly
uncomfortable with our problem solving tendencies. Most people would prefer to
continue to drive and hope/wait to find a turn that will bring them back to
the road they know or suspect they should be on.

Considering this tendency in the context of entrepreneurship, I agree that it
would be inhibitory, but I also would suggest that the capacity to recognize a
wrong turn and act appropriately to correct it is a necessary characteristic
of a successful entrepreneur.

After the citations of your father's papers, you move into a sequence about
how a self-contained entrepreneurship subculture might result in
'collaborative fixation'. I would argue that a central tenet of the culture,
and something that makes it what it is, is that those individuals who self-
select into that group de facto bring their own unique personality and
background toward working on solutions to problems. If anything, the
entrepreneurial subculture puts a premium on thinking differently than your
peers, even if those peers also happen to consider themselves entrepreneurs.

Regarding the mini-terrier social network (dibs on that idea, by the way),
there are always going to be individuals who copycat models and try and apply
them to specified contexts. But, at least in my opinion, that kind of business
doesn't exist in the same context as trying to address a Big Problem (then
again, I don't have a mini terrier- maybe for some people it is).

I agree with you, again, about your last point regarding context. If a problem
is really a Big Problem, it exists across multiple contexts, affecting a
number of different people in different ways. That's why it's a Big Problem.
As such, it's critical to be able to conceptualize approaching that problem
from and through a variety of different contexts, and once again, that's a
critical trait for an entrepreneur trying to address a Big Problem.

tl;dr:

After writing this, I'm wondering if it's not so much that the
entrepreneurship subculture is inhibiting our capacity to address Big Problems
as much as the problems themselves. That's why they're big in the first place
right? In order to solve them, a person or group has to be agile enough to
abandon their wrong answers, self-aware enough to stay true to the solutions
they believe to be tenable, and diverse enough to consider a solution across
diverse contexts. I think if anything, the entrepreneurship subculture
encourages all these things, and if it were easy to uphold all three
characteristics at any time in the face of any problem, entrepreneurship
wouldn't be the art that it is.

