The emphasis of the startup business is moving away from great ideas to great capabilities.
The emphasis of the startup business is moving away from great ideas to great capabilities.
There's a saying becoming popular in the startup community lately that it’s important to ‘treat your ideas like cattle, not like pets’. It’s an expression that has its origins in the tech community, which is learning to treat servers like cattle.
The meaning of the words is obvious – work on lots of ideas and cull the weak ones, rather than having just one idea and spending a fortune on vet bills.
The outside perception of startups (and indeed all innovation) is that it’s all about the idea; that coming up with that one great idea is the important bit. I’ve discussed this before – that the idea is not so important, but rather is a starting point.
Every entrepreneur has a collection of ideas they’re working on to a greater or lesser degree. It’s easy to see the difference between a first-time entrepreneur who loves one thing completely and the veteran who sees some small potential in five things.
It’s notable that some of the most successful startups in the community are side projects – things that the founders were working on as well as their main idea. This is partly down to solving a real problem, with the side project solving a problem with the main project; and partly down to farming ideas – there were probably a few side projects to solve various problems with the main project, but only one of them turned out to be a business.
Survivour bias ensures we only hear about winning ideas. Even if a founder is willing to talk about their failures, we only really remember their successes. If they’ve tried a lot of ideas then it’s hard for them to talk about those failures in any meaningful way. With hindsight we can clearly see how the winning idea was ‘always going to work’, but trying to pick that idea out of the others as a clear winner at the start would have been difficult.
Investors often talk about investing in people, not ideas, because no idea survives contact with the market unscathed. It’s better to have an ‘A’ team working on a ‘B’ idea than a ‘B’ team working on a ‘A’ idea, because the idea could change at any time. There are stories of teams getting investment and then throwing away the original idea and working on something almost unrelated.
Instagram is one of those stories; the original concept was much bigger and the team pivoted down to just the photos as a result of learning from user interaction.
As the startup community matures and the people within it gain more experience, we’re starting to see ideas happen faster. Random conversations with founders are more likely to be discussions of how they killed their idea rather than what they plan for it. New founders are more encouraged to find the flaws within their ideas rather than protecting their flawed ideas.
The emphasis is slowly and surely moving away from great ideas to great capabilities. A founder with the ability to execute on a series of ideas is more likely to succeed than a founder with a single great idea. But this can be hard to communicate to people, especially new founders who love their single great idea but have no idea how to make it happen.
Some of the institutions we have are still based on cultivating ideas instead of capabilities. One of the challenges in the community is that as we grow we attract new institutions and members who don’t quite understand the concept.
Academic institutions especially can find it hard to let go of intellectual property as the source of all good things (for obvious reasons).
Killing an idea that has been worked on for months is hard. People come to identify with their idea, and be known for it. It feels like a very public shame to have failed, and there’s a large fear of what others will think and say about it.
But there’s also a huge satisfaction that comes from having seen it through, even if it failed. And pushing a failing idea is really hard. Just stopping doing that is blissful.
The next idea is always easier, the entrepreneur is more capable and knows how to do it better – maybe they can work on more than one …
