Back in 2013 and 2014, I started what I call my “Ideas Doc,” in which I wrote down ideas for new tech products that I would want to create some day. This was geared towards an entrepreneurial purpose, of seeing what ideas I could potentially start a company on. I’ve kept that stored and have been continually updating it since, adding new thoughts and ideas while removing ones that I don’t think are as viable anymore.
At that time, I believed that outstanding ideas are what the best companies are built on. But later on, I got more experience in tech via internships, personal projects, and the like, and eventually I came to believe that ideas by themselves aren’t necessarily as pivotal as the experiences a user goes through. There are many reasons for this:
- The quick description of an idea is not enough to judge how exactly everything will play out when it is actually being built (e.g., the code is being written and executed.) It is practically impossible during the planning/ideation stage to see all the things you would encounter in the execution of an idea.
- Even if an idea is already out there, users will gravitate to products that offer them better ways of experiencing that idea.
I see Zoom as a great example of the second point, compared to a product like Cisco WebEx which arguably did a similar thing many years before.
Thus, execution of an idea matters, and it is enough to differentiate success.
This had some implications for my Ideas Doc, which affected how that document evolved over time. Importantly, it made sense to separate out ideas that I wanted to work on, into (1) just personal projects to gain practice and (2) ideas that are most suitable for entrepreneurship, since the ideas that could power companies would be best described and differentiated at a high level. (There’s no point trying to plan everything out for an idea in an initial stage before any code is even written.)
Furthermore, I came to believe that there isn’t really a great “mathematical formula” for determining just how high-level differentiated a description should be (defining a certain “unit” of how “high-level” a description is); instead, the choice of whether or not a description is suitably high-level would have to incorporate some judgment.
Over time, as I continually revisited my ideas, I would find some of them to not be as viable, while some others were even more so. For the ideas that appeared more and more viable, I would often find them to become more simply describable too, as I started to discuss them at more and more of a higher level. This may align well with a maxim that seems to be common among Silicon Valley investors and commenters, that it should be relatively easy to express your idea simply and concisely (e.g., the “elevator pitch.”)
(However, as a caveat, I’d argue that this kind of maxim is applied too aggressively sometimes today, and there can still be value that is necessarily a bit more complicated to understand or more specialized in its intended audience. Nevertheless, the general point still stands.)
