The "Maze of Thinking" in Entrepreneurship
The popular culture view of start-ups is that they come up with a brilliant product idea and then, after a moment of inspiration, the outcome is doomed. Such a view ignores years of hard work by founders and the fact that most startups change over time, often dramatically.
In response to this pop culture misconception, there is a saying in the startup world:"and"and"Ideas don't matter"。
But the reality is that ideas matter, but not in the narrow sense that pop culture makes them out to be. Good startup ideas are carefully crafted, planned over many years, and consider many possible paths as the world changes. Balaji Srinivasan calls this a mind maze.
"A good founder can foresee which turning points will bring wealth and which will lead to death. A bad founder will only run to the entrance of a certain industry (such as movies/music/P2P, etc.), but does not have any Learn about the history of the industry, the players in it, and the "casualties" of the industry as a whole, without even understanding the technology involved."
For example, imagine if you were trying to start Netflix in 1997, how would content providers, distribution channels, and competitors react at the time? How soon will technology develop to open that hidden door and allow you to distribute your product on the web instead of by mail? Or imagine Dropbox in 2007, after dozens of cloud storage companies had launched before it. What mistakes did they all make? How will industry giants like Amazon and Google respond? How will new platforms such as Mobile affect you?
When you're starting a business, it's impossible to fully explore the maze of thought. But you can take help from the following suggestions:
1. Lessons learned from the past. If your idea has been tried before (and almost all good ideas are), you should analyze the mistakes and successes of previous attempts. Much of this knowledge exists only in the minds of practitioners, which is why"incognito mode"is a bad idea. The benefits of learning in a "maze" often outweigh the risk of idea theft.
2. Analogy. You can also build mazes by analogy with similar businesses. If you are building a"peer economy"(peer economy) companies, you can refer to the practice of Airbnb. If you're thinking about starting a marketplace, you need to do a good job of learning about companies like eBay.
3. Theory. Now there are decades of historical data on tech startups, and smart observers have sifted through the data to come up with theories. Some of these theories come from academia (like Clay Christensen), but more and more come from investors and entrepreneurs on blogs.
4. Direct experience. The founders of many excellent start-up companies have figured out the maze situation through direct experience at work. The key is to put yourself in an interesting maze and give yourself time to figure it out.
The maze metaphor also helps you think about competition. Competition from other startups is often a distraction. In all likelihood, they won't be following the same path, and the presence of others in your maze means that what you do might actually make sense. Your real competition -- and what you should really be worried about -- is the time you might be wasting on the wrong path.
