
Note to entrepreneurs: Your idea is not special - turoczy
http://blogs.reuters.com/small-business/2011/06/14/note-to-entrepreneurs-your-idea-is-not-special/
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jdminhbg
This point has been beaten into the ground so hard that I don't even know
where in the backlast/forelash cycle we are with it anymore.

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wlievens
So true. That remark goes for so many other topics as well.

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sbov
Google's idea wasn't "search engine", it was "page rank", which gave damn good
query results. But some people have it in their best interest to trivialize
any idea, so I expect them to do this.

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6ren
True, but did it cause their success? Clean search-only website (not a
portal); _fast_ results; no pay-for-rank: their _idea_ was _to help_.

(BTW: I'd love it if the algorithm won the day)

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ippisl
In the book "in the plex" , the author says that the first demos of google
were really impressive both for vc's and users, and it went viral in stanford.
that was when they were fighting to get hardware to crawl the web , so their
speed wasn't that amazing back than.

So yes , the algorithm probably did won.

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6ren
In what way were the demos impressive? Not sure I follow: speed of crawling
wouldn't affect speed of response; and having few users would enable it to be
fast; not having enough hardware to index the entire web would only limit the
results.

Mind you, just making a search engine is impressive, esp back then.

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itswindy
"Note to entrepreneurs: Your idea is not special"

Note to author: what you said has been said before.

Now, so what?

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username3
Note to commenter...

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michaelperalta
This idea, like the other comments said, has been beaten to death so much I am
not sure why its still a discussion. I mean its common sense that the idea is
less important than the execution. If we created companies off ideas alone we
would have flying cars or time travel. Obviously this is an exaggeration and
on the far end but its true. Every idea is a branch of something else, every
idea is a combination of two other ideas. Every idea that you come up with may
not be unique but what the idea actually indicates, and this is something Paul
Graham said himself is the idea is a sign of the entrepreneurs intelligence. I
believe thats true the idea should be viewed just as that, a sign of the
thought process and the way they look at the work because I myself know that
the initial idea I create is not the idea that I have three days from now.
Idea's constantly evolve just organically in life and with different
interactions you have which give way to even better ideas. The idea is not
what wins its the ability to have a coherent and good idea and continue
evolving with it. "Your idea is not special" is true because we as humans are
for the most part not original creatures and our inspiration comes from other
things but what is special is the way you continue to evolve the idea and how
you take new ideas that you have and meld them into your original idea.
Pandora is a great example, they did not start out as a internet radio company
but as the music genome project and overtime changed focus to what they are
today.

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rick888
I beg to differ. My time tracking app is revolutionary.

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erikpukinskis
You should link to it in your profile.

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wccrawford
But that's okay, because entrepreneurs themselves are special. Otherwise,
everyone would be one.

But I don't believe this article anyhow. Sure, Google wasn't the first search
engine... But they sure did it better than the others at the time.

And likewise, every idea could be the same. Get all the little factors right
and you could be the next big tech thing.

Or you could fail miserably.

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RyanMcGreal
> But I don't believe this article anyhow. Sure, Google wasn't the first
> search engine... But they sure did it better than the others at the time.

Er, that's precisely the author's thesis.

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qq66
Brad Feld wants the next Facebook to send him an email saying "We're building
a social network that will eventually provide a social infrastructure to all
websites, and we're going to start by building a clean-looking MySpace with
photo sharing and flirting functionality, limited to colleges, and rolling out
starting with the most prestigious colleges."

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ataggart
As a reasonably competent programmer with no good ideas for a start-up, these
sorts of articles piss me off.

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nhangen
Linkbait title, but good post. He's right. Ideas only matter when moving
beyond the idea phase. Too many people sit on a "big idea" waiting for some
hidden force to propel them to action, while hackers find a way to get a
prototype built.

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wslh
It's statistically probable that the major part of the ideas are not special,
but there are special ideas. We can look at the past and see many great ideas
with excelent results. Try in science discoveries first.

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markbao
Oh, for goodness' sake. We know. Stories like this need to just go away.

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ig1
You might know, but there are plenty of people who don't, and that's who he's
trying to reach.

