thank you, thank you, I've been wanting to write something similar for a while now, but have been advised not to, because of my tone.
I spent my last 6 months in london and the slogan of the Google campus there is "let's fill the city with startups". My immediate reaction was, let's not.
There is so much utter crap there. And even though being a complete techie, i've been wondering how these VC funds would throw their money at useless shit, with no value at all, when their ideas can be taken apart in three simple questions they all fail to answer:
1. where is the value?
2. what's your competitive advantage?
3. who's your target and how are you planning to make money.
just as i was telling the friend of my last contractee: "I don't think this is useful, but he can probably make some money with it.either way I don't really care, as i just need to build up some funds."
let me give you an example, I was sitting in a demo room with someone pitching their kid mmo, teaching young kids to train their brain with math puzzles in a way that actually makes them want to do it, sorry keeping it vague. and at least two other startups that both had real world value and had the potential to make a shitload of money.
But the ones that won the demo day by majority vote were some idiots making a chrome plugin adding yet another sidebar to aggregate their shitty facebook and twitter timeline into gmail so that they can get more distractions. Not only did they win, but they were also way ahead of the really valuable ones.
But theres also another twist to the story. Most people aren't really capable of building a product. That's I guess what the constant pivot refers to. They have no idea how to push out a product and then adjust it to their customers needs. Heroku did pivot a few times, but they pivoted when they got the customer feedback after understanding who their target group was.
I spent my last 6 months in london and the slogan of the Google campus there is "let's fill the city with startups". My immediate reaction was, let's not.
There is so much utter crap there. And even though being a complete techie, i've been wondering how these VC funds would throw their money at useless shit, with no value at all, when their ideas can be taken apart in three simple questions they all fail to answer:
1. where is the value? 2. what's your competitive advantage? 3. who's your target and how are you planning to make money.
just as i was telling the friend of my last contractee: "I don't think this is useful, but he can probably make some money with it.either way I don't really care, as i just need to build up some funds."
let me give you an example, I was sitting in a demo room with someone pitching their kid mmo, teaching young kids to train their brain with math puzzles in a way that actually makes them want to do it, sorry keeping it vague. and at least two other startups that both had real world value and had the potential to make a shitload of money.
But the ones that won the demo day by majority vote were some idiots making a chrome plugin adding yet another sidebar to aggregate their shitty facebook and twitter timeline into gmail so that they can get more distractions. Not only did they win, but they were also way ahead of the really valuable ones.
But theres also another twist to the story. Most people aren't really capable of building a product. That's I guess what the constant pivot refers to. They have no idea how to push out a product and then adjust it to their customers needs. Heroku did pivot a few times, but they pivoted when they got the customer feedback after understanding who their target group was.