[edmondlau]

For every person who rode a powerful technology wave, there are also many others who rode the wrong ones.

One of my favorite stories from Drew was that when he first started Dropbox, he created a 4-minute demo video showcasing the product that functioned as an MVP for the product. The video drove hundreds of thousands of people to their site and grew their beta mailing list from 5,000 to 75,000 people overnight.

On the outside looking in, skeptics might have thought that it was nothing new. But the MVP provided validation around what future customers actually thought.

My main takeaway from that story (and that I share in the book) has always been to validate your ideas early and often, so that you can get more signal on whether the assumptions you're using to shape your behavior are accurate.

More about the Dropbox story here: https://techcrunch.com/2011/10/19/dropbox-minimal-viable-pro...

[maxxxxx]

It's definitely a gamble. When the Apple Newton came up I thought pen computing would be the future, threw everything into it and was at the forefront for a few years. But by 2000 or earlier it was pretty clear that I had bet on the wrong horse. I guess my lesson is to jump ship sooner but then you also often hear that perseverance is the key. Tough equation. Now my belief is that you have to be persistent but also need a lot of luck to be at the right place at the right time.

[pjc50]

The Apple Newton was clearly what happened when Jobs had the idea for the iPad 20 years before the technology could actually deliver a usable experience for it. And even then you can see sketches of it all the way back to the 60s: https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=CEc1OOGmA5IC&pg=PA91&lpg...

[kayfox]

Jobs had nothing to do with the Newton and killed it when he came back to Apple.

[nostrademons]

That's true and part of the challenge. It's not always clear what's a powerful technology wave and what's the wrong one.

I've actually got a bit more of a personal connection to DropBox - Drew was active on HN before founding it, he posted it here before posting it on Digg [1], and he took me out to lunch right after they'd gotten their Sequoia seed round and asked if he could convince me to be employee #2. At the time, I was working on a casual game creation startup with a friend, and I declined, #1 because I felt I couldn't leave my cofounder and #2 because Drew had a startup, I had a startup, and at the time it wasn't clear which of us was actually more likely to be successful.

Before you laugh, consider the environment in Feb 2008 (when this occurred). My cofounder was a consultant at Monitor Group, where he'd been researching the casual gaming space and had run across multiple reports saying it would be a $200M, $1B, etc. space (market research reports never agree on market size, because they're largely bullshit). Kongregate had just raised a Series A from Reid Hoffman, Jeff Bezos, and other luminaries. Max Levchin had just raised $50M for Slide the month before. Zynga had just been founded but Farmville hadn't come out yet. The Web 2.0 bubble was in full swing, AJAX and Javascript were the new hot buzzwords (I had just ported Arc - PG's pet programming language, which HN is written in - to Javascript, which is what caught Drew's interest in the first place), and as you can see from the first comment on DropBox's "Show HN", anything that required installation of software was considered a non-starter. And our product concept let everyone, from teenagers to retirees, build their own games instead of being at the mercy of a studio & professional developers.

My lesson from how things evolved - learned much later, and I'm probably still grasping the implications - was to preference personal experience over industry zeitgeist and prestigious research reports. Drew's personal experience with the problem domain and his 75,000 beta signups were worth a lot more than the famous people and industry market research reports around the problem domain we were solving. And this insight has actually saved me a lot of time & aggrevation chasing fads that people realize are bad ideas 4 years in.

But this is not obvious to someone just starting their career, probably because they don't actually have all that much personal experience to draw upon, and because it takes a certain amount of chutzpah to hear about all these eminent people saying "This will be the next hot thing, you better get in now!" and think to yourself "Actually, sounds like bullshit to me." Personal experience is also inherently limited because you've only got your own and it takes years to build; it turns out that the set of problems you can viably solve is actually quite small.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863

[edmondlau]

Wow, that is an amazing story. Thanks for sharing.

It really hammers home how hard it is to disentangle good & bad advice and how easy it is for an outsider looking into to really underestimate the depth of someone else's expertise in a given domain.

[LrnByTeach]

>It really hammers home how hard it is to disentangle good & bad advice and

> how easy it is for an outsider looking into to really underestimate the depth of someone else's expertise in a given domain.

[andy_ppp]

Wow awesome - I love this comment in particular:

“For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software.” CVS!!!

[Cursuviam]

This is by far my favorite HN comment of all times.

[shubhamjain]

I learned a similar lesson when I was working on a product around two years back. I used to extrapolate current trends and predict why my idea could be important in the future. While those predictions sounded good in theory, in reality, it was just me trying to paint my assumptions as facts. None of what I predicted happened.

When you are working on any idea, there's a temptation to be a visionary about your product's impact. But nothing good comes out of this feel-good bullshit. It's better to focus on solving meaningful problems that exist today, rather than being hopeful that they will become relevant tomorrow.

[pjc50]

> it takes a certain amount of chutzpah to hear about all these eminent people saying "This will be the next hot thing, you better get in now!"

Really? If you don't have that filter you'll be prey for every investment scam that comes along.

[nostrademons]

Many people are.

[qznc]

> takes a certain amount of chutzpah to hear about all these eminent people saying "This will be the next hot thing, you better get in now!" and think to yourself "Actually, sounds like bullshit to me."

More of a personality thing. If you would pitch Dropbox or Facebook to me today, I would consider it bullshit just like back then. Nice little niche maybe but certainly no Unicorns. Who would put sensitive personal information into the cloud?! Obviously not much of a market.

[jedrek]

> there are also many others who rode the wrong ones.

My buddy wrote a book on VRML.