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I think it's useful to think of ideas you could pursue in kind of a 2x2 matrix. You have revolutionary ideas and evolutionary ideas. You have high-capital ideas and low-capital ideas.

If you're Elon Musk, have virtually unlimited resources, and an incredible creative passion, you can inspire a lot of people (me included) by pursuing revolutionary, high-capital ideas.

That's not to discredit, however, the many many successful businesses that are low-capital evolutions on existing ideas. For many entrepreneurs, especially early in their careers, it's vastly more rational to join an existing market, or resegment an existing market, rather than try to create something revolutionary. You can criticize them all you want, but many of those companies will have success, validate their markets early on, and have lots of potential acquirers in the existing market participants.



Further, I think typically there is a 'ramp up' over time from the low-capital evolution => high capital revolutionary ideas.

Elon's first major success Zip2 was a company that provided "Internet platform solutions for media companies and local e-commerce merchants"[1]

1 - http://news.cnet.com/Compaq-buys-Zip2/2100-1023_3-221675.htm...


That's a pretty nice way to think about these things, Kudos!

A visualization of the concept, would make a great blog post.




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