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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 |
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.