

The Next Big Thing is Sitting Right in Front of You - timf
http://cdixon.org/2011/07/02/the-next-big-thing-is-sitting-right-in-front-of-you/

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loumf
I made an offer to a guy for a job in the late nineties and he said that he
was going to work on his startup instead. It was called "Grouper" and it let
you find other people to negotiate group discounts with. He actually had some
working code he showed me.

Might have been a better idea to get him to hire me, but I see no evidence
that this went anywhere (by him, anyway)

~~~
erikstarck
This was tried in Sweden/Europe with a company called Letsbuyit.

It all failed miserably. The most epic fail of all was running a campaign to
group-buy christmas trees and failing to deliver them before christmas.

A story that's in many ways is just sooo 1999. Here's an article from 2001,
after the crash: <http://tinyurl.com/6zr3pq8>

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dkrich
I don't get the point of this post. You liked stalking people's class cards,
so that leads you to believe that the next logical step is to create Facebook?
There is so much fallacy in that logic I don't know where to begin.

First you have to recognize that people enjoy doing it and that there is a
potential market for the same idea extended elsewhere (in other words you can
build one that is better than what already exists). Then you have to both know
how to build a website and have the wherewithal to spend hours, days, and
weeks, building an initial working version with proper execution.

That's almost like saying to yourself in 1920 that you always recognized
people enjoyed getting from one place to another as fast as they could, and
while you were contemplating cool business ideas Henry Ford was in a shed
building the Model T.

I know it's been said a billion times, but ideas are fucking worthless. There
are an infinite number of brilliant businesses in every industry waiting to be
built, but unless you are smart enough to build them, you aren't doing
anything worthwhile. Just about everything you use every day could be built
better, and not just incrementally better, but revolutionarily better in a way
that would promote mass-adoption. But simply knowing that isn't enough to
build a billion dollar business. It requires genius to have the vision for the
starting point of what that product actually looks like in practice and then
knowing how to set it into motion.

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maurycy
Even if it does, so what?

There is a potentially infinite number of actions one has to do right, in
order to succeed with the next big thing. Facebook have had, and still have,
some competitors.

It might be that it is actually harder to create a company that way. By
definition, the next big thing is not fully understood, what increases the
probability of screwing up badly.

And, it's not that obvious whether such model yields the highest returns, to
put aside the risk reward equation. We still don't know whether Groupon or
Facebook will become long-term profitable companies.

Also, in so fuzzy environment, it's extremely hard to get the timing, and
assets, right. The idea of consumer cloud, as syncing the data automatically
between many dummy clients, was obvious since 70s, and it actually took
enormous efforts from Apple, like iPhone and iPad.

On a much broader perspective, I remain unconvinced that the next big thing is
what gives the society the most innovative fruits. The idea of tablet was so
cliche everyone gave up, and I'd say that iPad itself is worth much more than
the Apple's cloud.

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dpcan
This reminds me of when I was about 13 and the web was just starting to get
noticed. I was saving all my bookmarks, categorizing them, and I put them on a
free hosting account provided by my dialup ISP and shared the page with
friends and family so they could easily find all the great stuff I came across
on the new web.

Then Yahoo showed up...

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dmoney
If you kept saving them anyway it could have been del.icio.us.

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narag
Yes, I know what it is, but I won't tell :-)

Twenty years ago, I was sitting in front of a 386-SX. Most of the Moore's Law
since then has been eaten by the bigger screen and faster net. Isn't it
incredible?

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wensing
By what metric is fb the best internet business of the decade?

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robryan
Valuation, growth and active users I would guess?

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dkrich
I believe Google has them beat on two of those three.

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ahlatimer
But Google started in '98, making them two years too early to be "of the
decade."

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Nemisis7654
I think this is true...to an extent. Facebook is possibly "the best internet
business of the decade", but not just because of the idea, but also because of
the way it was executed. At least, that's how I see it.

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espadagroup
Little known fact about Zuckerberg and Facebook; the idea and the name came
from his high school, Phillips Exeter Academy. Exeter has always had a
physical handbook of everyone's photo and names that was handed out to all
students each year called, "The Exeter Facebook". I would know since I was in
the same dorm as Zuckerberg around that time (it was a boarding school).

~~~
smanek
From my understanding, most schools used to have hard copy facebooks. I've
read Harvard definitely had a (per house) online facebook back when Zuckerberg
was a freshman (and, interestingly, still did as of at least ~2008).

