A Great Idea Is Never Enough
Entrepreneur and VC Eric Paley
explains why it takes a lot more than just a good idea to build a successful
company.
Back in 1995, I purchased a used Mac
laptop via auction on the Internet. The company that enabled that transaction
doesn't exist today. That same year, eBay was founded and today is worth $68
billion.
Amazon wasn't the first company to
sell goods online. Google didn't invent search, and Dropbox wasn't the first
server-based storage offering. Pick a successful company, and you can almost
always point to the sad story of a failed predecessor that had the same core
idea.
When the movie The Social Network
became a commercial success, many of my friends outside of the technology
industry asked me what I thought of Mark Zuckerberg stealing the idea for
Facebook from the Winklevoss twins. I told them that the technology community
thought the Winklevoss claim was laughable and opportunistic.
Facebook is far from an original
idea. Social networks had been around for nearly a decade, in companies such as
SixDegrees, Friendster, and Myspace. Facebook's success didn't come from the
idea but instead from countless ideas and iterations around product
implementation, go-to-market approach, and customer engagement.
In October 2002, my co-founders and
I started Brontes Technologies, a company based on an invention created at MIT
that used 3-D imaging to enable mass customization in the dental industry.
Numerous venture capitalists passed on Brontes after their technology advisers
told them that the idea behind the technology was highly risky and probably
wouldn't work.
They were right.
By late 2004, we had abandoned the
initial technical idea on which our business was created. But although those
VCs were right that our idea probably wouldn't work, they were wrong not to
invest. We made the necessary changes and eventually were acquired by 3M--which
provided a healthy return for our investors. Our doubters incorrectly assumed
that the company was built simply on our initial idea, rather than the problem
we were trying to solve and the people working to solve that problem.
I believe this is why the technology
community has so much disdain for our patent system, where nonpracticing
entities--otherwise known as patent trolls--that have never faced the
challenges of building a product or a business can make claims solely on the
basis of simplistic ideas. The system vastly overvalues ideas and undervalues
execution. (And it's still a pain to use; see "Patents: The Race Now Goes
to the Swiftest.")
Great entrepreneurship is in the
execution. Rarely does the initial idea dictate the outcome-;perhaps never.
Success is about the thousands of ideas and decisions that are made along the
way and the speed at which those insights are implemented according to customer
needs and feedback.
So are ideas worthless? I wouldn't
go that far.
Every company needs a starting
point. I encourage entrepreneurs to focus more on falling in love with the
problems they want to solve rather than their initial ideas. As founders dig
deeply into that original hypothesis, they will learn, adapt, hit walls, adapt
again, and build critical expertise that they never considered when starting
out.
In fact, in many cases the original
idea later seems humorous or at least incredibly naive compared with the
lengths to which the start-up needs to go to become successful. Like
scientists, entrepreneurs solve problems through a tremendous amount of work
validating and invalidating early ideas-;not from a single spark of
inspiration. Great entrepreneurs build their success over time, not in a single
moment. Ideas are static. Entrepreneurship is dynamic.
From the June 2013
issue of Inc. magazine
http://www.inc.com/magazine/201306/eric-paley/a-great-idea-is-never-enough.html?cid=em01014week23b
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