Tuesday, October 15, 2013

Startups - is it all about execution... or timing?

Mistake stories are amazing resources because you can easily get 30 minutes of valuable dialogue out of a 3-minute story. They are that full of information and insight. One reason is their complexity - they defy easy conclusions or snap judgments. Here's an example - two stories that seem to demonstrate exact opposite truths!

The first is from Dilbert cartoonist Scott Adams, from his upcoming book, "How To Fail At Almost Everything and Still Win Big." The excerpt is from the Wall Street Journal:

In the 1970s, tennis players sometimes used rosin bags to keep their racket hands less sweaty. In college, I built a prototype of a rosin bag that attached to a Velcro strip on tennis shorts so it would always be available when needed. My lawyer told me it wasn't patentworthy because it was simply a combination of two existing products. I approached some sporting-goods companies and got nothing but form-letter rejections. I dropped the idea.

But in the process I learned a valuable lesson: Good ideas have no value because the world already has too many of them. The market rewards execution, not ideas. From that point on, I concentrated on ideas that I could execute. I was already failing toward success, but I didn't yet know it.

The second is the high-drama depiction of the Twitter founding story as excerpted in the New York Times magazine. Albert Wenger, a venture capitalist and early investor in the company reacted to the Times excerpt:

So why does the Twitter story remind me [that life is unfair]? Because it demonstrates the relative importance of hitting upon the right thing at the right time over early execution. This goes a bit against one of the historic ideas held dear in venture capital that execution matters more than ideas. And yes it remains true that an idea alone is worthless, you have to build something. But beyond that it turns out that building the right thing at the right time will let you get away with all sorts of mistakes. Conversely, hypothetically perfect execution but too early or too late or on the wrong variant will not get you very far.

Who's right? It may depend on your own situation. Certainly, if you're involved in a startup, you could do worse than invest a half-hour discussing these stories and the relative impacts of idea quality, timing, luck and execution with your co-founder. But you may also consider these additional words from Wenger: "Somewhere somebody right now is building the next big thing and most likely it is not you. Just accept that and you’ll be happier."

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