

Sarah, We Got Your Memo - jmtame
http://graffitigeo.posterous.com/sarah-we-got-your-memo

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callmeed
I can think of 100 things a startup founder should be doing _before_ writing a
public reply to something Sarah Lacey said.

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mrkurt
You mean "before writing a blog post that garners them publicity"?

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callmeed
How much publicity and what kind? There's 3 comments on the post. Unless
you're actually selling things to the hacker/TC crowd, does it have any value?
Graffiti is a consumer app, is it not?

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gcheong
Even Google didn't become Google until they hit upon the whole adwords/adsense
idea which wasn't even an original idea of theirs. In the early stages, world
changing ideas are probably more found by intuition than logic.

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billswift
World changing ideas in the early stages are more found by LUCK than logic or
intuition, I mean, if something could be reasonably (logically or intuitively)
known to be world-changing, it wouldn't be so unexpected or valuable when it
happens. I doubt any of those founders, even intuitively, expected their ideas
or companies to be world changing when they founded them.

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wheels
The reality is that the trailblazers tend to take it in the shins. Google just
got search right. They were about the zillionth company to try. Facebook seems
to have gotten social networking right, also at the zillionth variation on the
theme. Nobody talks wistfully about becoming the next WebCrawler or
Friendster.

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skolor
Really? I would certainly say Google and Dell were revolutionary. Now, they
may not have been the first to do it, but they were early, and they were the
best (at that time). Facebook and twitter, get a little bit of a "meh" from
me, they more or less took an existing concept, spun it their way, and got
lucky. Microsoft, paypal and Youtube (if the article is correct about the last
two, I had never heard that before) apparently significantly altered what they
started out doing. While not revolutionary, it certainly is a very impressive
thing, to completely shift your focus as a business.

Now, my idea for a startup is really just a twinkle in my eye, and some big
talk around the water cooler, but I can tell you this: I don't just want to
make it into the next computer security company, I want to change the way
computer security is run as a business. I've been working on it in my spare
time for almost a year now, and am bordering on having a working model of
stage one, which I know will be revolutionary, but won't shock anybody. That's
what I look for when I see a new start-up, someone who isn't just trying to
start a business, but someone who is trying to change the very rules that type
of business runs by.

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netsp
Dell & Google would not have seemed revolutionary to the writer of that
"memo." Facebook and twitter have had a profound effect on the way people
interact with each other. Microsoft & Paypal happened upon revolution or took
the opportunity when they saw it, not in their first 6 months.

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jasonlbaptiste
heh, Yahoo did try to acquire Google early on actually. Trying to find exact
link.

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jeroen
<http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/15.02/yahoo.html>

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rokhayakebe
You can look at, or create, innovation all day long and not even see,
recognize it.

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jrwoodruff
Alternately, you can try with all your might to innovate and create brilliant
new concepts all day long and fail miserably.

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dkersten
Meh. Who cares what Sarah Lacey says. I don't see _her_ changing the world.

