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Ten Geek Business Myths
hpcanswers writes "Venture capitalist Ron Garret has posted a list of eleven (despite the title) common mistakes entrepreneurs with a technology background make. A common theme is that good ideas sell; in reality, what a customer wants sells. By extension, having a Ph.D. and holding a patent are not particularly helpful if the intended end-user does not have the same level of understanding of the widget as the creator does."
In case of a /.ing
Myth #1: A brilliant idea will make you rich.
Myth #2: If you build it they will come.
Myth #3: Someone will steal your idea if you don't protect it.
Myth #4: What you think matters.
Myth #5: Financial models are bogus.
Myth #6: What you know matters more than who you know.
Myth #7: A Ph.D. means something.
Myth #7: I need $5 million to start my business
Myth #8: The idea is the most important part of my business plan.
Myth #9: Having no competition is a good thing.
Myth #10: After the IPO I'll be happy.
No, he resigned from GOOG (his last employer, afaik) some time ago.
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You left out the second part of what the article says about a PhD, which, in a nutshell, embodies why not many businesses are rushing to hire PhDs, and why getting a CS PhD almost always means you've forever commited yourself to academic jobs: For a PhD, what your peers think of you matters, while in business, what the customers think of you matters, and your customers in 99.9% of the cases aren't your peers.
And yes, I've met one or two morons in PhD programs out there... some others who are brilliant but wouldn't endure a week in a "normal" office...
Microsoft thrives on crushing the competition, hence they are always dealing with competition. Even if competition is scarce in the spaces they operate in, having no competition usually means a lack of a potential market.
..... I'm not saying they are easy to find one but there are a few lucrative market niches that have been left completely unexploited and the funny part is that most of them are so bloody obvious that most people manage to overlook them."
"Two words: iPod and iTunes
Both of those markets already existed. Apple was the only company that decided that having the most user-friendly interface was the most important idea. The Rio was out years before the iPod, it just had a difficult to use interface. MP3's being sold was also an existing idea, actually working out a deal with the music industry was the key to their success.
"Two words: iPod and iTunes ..... I'm not saying they are easy to find one but there are a few lucrative market niches that have been left completely unexploited"
Actually those are really bad examples.
the Ipod wasn't close to the first music player. ITunes wasn't the first online music store.
Apple just really did a great job of taking two existing ideas and implementing them well.
What the guy missed was.
"Great ideas will not make you rich. Great implementation of great ideas will make you rich."
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Sucess in school is merit based. It's not like that in real life. If anything, success in kindergarten is a better predictor of sucess in post school life, before they brainwashed you with all that merit based nonsense.
He should take a look at a company called Microsoft. Creating a no-competition environment seems to have worked out well for them.
Microsoft had many early competitors. They have competitors now.
iPod and iTunes were not new ideas. There were other MP3 players, there were other music managing applications, and there were other music download services. What Apple did was deliver a product that simply better than what the competition was offering at the time. Apple had competition when the introduced these things, they also have competition now.
Avoid Missing Ball for High Score
At least your third point is mood. TCP/IP was bundled with a lot of other operating systems way before Microsoft Windows. For instance UNIX V3 was basicly build around TCP/IP.
The network connectivity of choice according to Microsoft should have been Pathworks/LANmanager (a.k.a. SMB), but it caught never on really. Windows for Workgroups 3.1 and 3.11 came with SMB, not with TCP/IP, and you had to install Trumpet Winsock to get to the Internet, while at the same time UNIX, TOS and Kickstart already had IP-Stacks. And even with Windows 95 the TCP/IP support was rather halfhearty, and only with Windows 98 IP was the network language of choice for Microsoft's OS.
Come play Heroes of Might and Magic Mini online.
You are wrong. You are confusing copyright protection with patent protection. As an author, you automatically receive copyright protection for any work that you create. However, you can file for a registered copyright that will give you greater teeth to enforce your copyright. Copyrights, however, only protect the artistic embodiment of an idea (say the source code for a program) and not the idea itself. The cost of getting a registered copyright is minimal ($40). Patent protection only comes from filing a patent application and having it granted. There is no automatic patent protection based solely upon inventing something. Patents protect inventions themselves, not just a particular implementation of an invention. The fees for getting a patent run about $1000, but patents are generally not something you can do yourself, and the attorney fees for writing a patent tend to be in the $10,000 range.
Come play Heroes of Might and Magic Mini online.
Well, in the sense they were available, yes, but the guy was talking about Microsoft going one step further and bundling it. I never owned an Atari ST, but I can tell you that none of the TCP/IP stacks for the Amiga were ever bundled with it in Commodore's lifetime.
AS225, Commodore's own stack, was never even released outside of a handful of developers. Amiga users had to rely upon AmiTCP or KA9Q (renamed "AmigaNOS") to get it to work. AmiTCP was free software (BSD license, IIRC) up until the 3.0 betas, but controvertially went shareware with version 4. KA9Q was... uh... yeah. You didn't want to use it.
To go on to other mainstream platforms of the time: So far as I'm aware, it wasn't until the late nineties that MacOS had a stack bundled with it. Stacks were available before 1990, largely due to the Mac's entrenchment in academia, but they weren't bundled with the system. OS/2 Warp 3 "came with" a TCP/IP "stack", but for consumer versions it was close to useless. It only supported SLIP, and wasn't modular, so you couldn't just add a device driver for your Ethernet card (or just PPP) and it'd work, you'd have to throw the entire stack out and buy the premium version from IBM.
So really, other than Unix, no mainstream operating systems came bundled with a full TCP/IP stack until Windows 95 did. I hate to say it, and maybe it'd have happened anyway, but Microsoft did pioneer there.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Clearly, you've never worked in technology marketing. It is very difficult to find out what customers want - even when you ask them, they don't give you correct answers. And if your Shiny New Thing is really revolutionary - well, then it gets even more difficult as consumers can't figure out how to integrate it into their lives. I worked with one of the first companies to sell voice mail, and one common response was "But why would I want a machine to answer my phone?".
I had a business plan for a product that would intercept calls to your home, ask the caller to ID himself, and then announce the call. It would hang up on telemarketers. I thought it was a fairly simple concept, but when I tried to explain it to non-technical people, they would ask "What does it do?" (after the explanation), and "Why would I want one?" (after they had just agreed that they found telemarketing calls very annoying).
What was once true, is no longer so