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For the first time throughout his series of blog posts, I respectfully disagree.
Thinking big seems to be the favourite pastime and recommendation based on hindsight bias of people who have already made it. It's not the reason why projects are successful and it's very likely not something that will get you taken seriously by a VC investor or startup angel (too much delusion of grandeur does not befit people who don't even have a working prototype).
It's much more important to try to solve real problems (that hopefully affect many people). If your solution a) works and b) turns out to scale to something huge, then you've made it. If it doesn't scale, you might still end up with a successful und useful, albeit smaller company. Would that be such a bad outcome?
Exactly. Take Facebook, Zuckerberg wasn't trying to be the next Zuckerberg at the beginning.
Take a look at this very early interview with him: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aQ5otpv6kTw
Skip to 3:57, he is saying "doesn't have to be more" after being at 29 schools. He is worried about quality over quantity. If Facebook started with this mentality and landed a billion users, why anyone would think that think big has any relation with becoming big?
"I'm pretty sure that, given those instructions, young Boz would build a social network and make it immediately available to everyone. It would obviously seem like a mistake to him to limit membership to a small subset of the population. Some other social network might come along and just open its doors to everyone and he would never overtake them!
As you probably already know, the situation I describe actually happened; there was one social network that grew incrementally while another opened its doors to the world. Fast forward five years and things haven't turned out the way young Boz might have expected. As it turns out, the path Facebook took to connecting everyone in the world was not the shortest and that has made all the difference. By starting small and expanding outward we built a community. By integrating networks that had originally been separate we had to focus on privacy. By throwing open the floodgates of growth in increments rather than all at once we were able to focus on keeping a consistent design and building scalable infrastructure. These things are now part of the DNA of our company and they affect everything we build." - Boz
IMO, Facebook won because it uses real names. It's a lot faster to find people (especially people you've lost touch with) when you can see their names.
I have lots of facebook friends without real names.
Zuckerberg was a developer, who was trying to make it big by using ideas and theory that he was hired to implement; He understood that the requiring of a university email address curated for people of a certain demographic.
There's usually a misconception between size and importance as well.
Thinking big and small are not mutually exclusive and I was trying to suggest doing both well.
I agree with you that you should try to solve real problems. However, big thinking is already leaking into your advice with your parenthetical that hopefully affect many people.
There is no reason to hope. Instead you can choose an area that you are passionate about, where you can solve real problems AND that is in a big market or could create one (thinking big). I try to answer this in Why you should choose an ambitious startup idea: http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2012/03/why-you-should-c...
Are you saying focus on root cause solutions rather than side effects? Often a lack of specificity kills a project, the generic solution withers while the targeted one flourishes.
I often "think big" but target a specific, ready to pivot to a new specific while retaining the same architecture and philosophy.
I agree. Thinking big means "How can I develop a product that will solve a pain for many many people". If you're thinking small, you're by definition trying to solve a small pain for a small audience. Why not try and solve a bigger pain?
This thread looks like a confusion of what "thinking big" means.
It looks like half of you define it as "think of a problem lots of people have" and the other camp defines it as "think of a big idea" (i.e. "Lets get the human race to mars" or "I'll build a social network for the whole planet to do all of this stuff on).
The people who oppose "thinking big" see it as thinking of big problems that require impossible to complete (with a small group, small budget, and reasonable amount of time) solutions. The people who are for "thinking big" seem to be defining it as thinking of problems with solutions that will impact a large amount of people, regardless of the size of the solution required.
I'll speak using my experience as a musician and a writer. "Songs about life" have a huge audience. "Hillbilly flamenco" has a relatively smaller audience. Yet it's much, much harder to be successful as "the person who sings songs about life", because there's so much competition, and many established figures who do it better than you. Even if you can do it better than them, the average listener isn't interested in you, isn't invested in you.
Sit down and try to write the Great American Novel and you're pretty much screwed. Try to write the truest thing you know, though, and there's a chance that people will pick it up and share it.
The problem when trying to solve a pain for many many people, whether you're a writer or an entrepreneur, is that it's hard to start big and good. You can start small and good, and grow big, or start big and not-so-good, and try to get good. There are many instances of the former, almost no examples of the latter.
I suppose "thinking big" really means "always be open to the idea of scaling up", or "pick markets/conditions that allow for scaling up". But you almost always have to start small to do something really, really well.
I agree. If you want to create change, focusing on size is the wrong thing. There are many opportunities to achieve huge change , that don't look like huge money makers.
For those of you who are interested in such opportunities, http://www.reddit.com/r/realproblemsolvers is a new community for sharing and discussing such problems and solutions. please join and participate and help us create a strong community that will help solve real problems.
At least Gabriel is upfront about it: investing contributed a big part to the changing of his world view. Here is how a cynic may see it:
(1) Risk of time (and other things, including money) => go safe.
(2) Risk of money (only) => go big.
I am genuinely not sure[1], but it does occur to me that this could be the underlying difference in approach between an investor and a founder (more specifically: a founder still looking for his safety net.)
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[1] To tell you the truth, I find myself leaning towards "going big" of late. But until I found something tangible, it's just an exercise in vanity.
It would help to define what "changing the world" means to the author (and whether it's a good thing; not every change is desirable; 9/11 changed the world for the worse).
It could be argued that only two tech companies actually changed the world since 1980: Microsoft and Google. Amazon, maybe.
But for example, I don't think Apple, Sun, Oracle, Yahoo, Facebook, Twitter... "changed the world". They are very big, wildly successful companies, they make products and software that people enjoy (me included), but they didn't turn the world into a different place than it was before.
Yudkowsky Ambition Scale (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4510702)
1) We're going to build the next Facebook! 2) We're going to found the next Apple! 3) Our product will create sweeping political change! This will produce a major economic revolution in at least one country! (Seasteading would be change on this level if it worked; creating a new country successfully is around the same level of change as this.) 4) Our product is the next nuclear weapon. You wouldn't want that in the wrong hands, would you? 5) This is going to be the equivalent of the invention of electricity if it works out. 6) We're going to make an IQ-enhancing drug and produce basic change in the human condition. 7) We're going to build serious Drexler-class molecular nanotechnology. 8) We're going to upload a human brain into a computer. 9) We're going to build a recursively self-improving Artificial Intelligence. 10) We think we've figured out how to hack into the computer our universe is running on
Hmm... Not a FB fan at all, but when a billion people in the world open FB for at least a few minutes every single day.. that's gotta count for something right?
Likewise, when a billion people are using the iPhone to call their loved ones, that's changing the world. I mean, that's as good as it's gonna get, short of inventing the cure to cancer, or blowing the Earth up.
Interesting that you suggest the iPhone changed the world because 'a billion people are using the iPhone to all their loved ones'. You realize they would have just used a phone before the iPhone, and therefore, the iPhone hasn't changed that process.
This is the point where I suggest the iPhone didn't REALLY change that much for most of us. Sure, it's easier to get maps and directions now (though old Blackberrys had that too). But the massively world changing innovations of smartphones are really minor conveniences wrapped in nice packaging.
Unless, of course, you live in less-developed countries, where a smart-phone may be your first computer, or even your first phone, and offers a connection to information and the rest of the world that you didn't have before.
> This is the point where I suggest the iPhone didn't REALLY change that much for most of us. Sure, it's easier to get maps and directions now (though old Blackberrys had that too)
For me it was when my parents (without any prompts from myself) got an iPhone and started emailing / Facetiming me from it.
If you had told me 6 years ago that my parents would be able to send me email from their phone, or be sophisticated enough to look up movie times while I'm out having dinner with them I would have laughed.
I think what the iPhone did was make it easy for everyday people to use technology that was only available to a select few. Not just with their technology (which made it easy to use) but also their advertising / marketing which made everyone aware of it.
Watch people out in public sometime. Probably over half of them are absorbed in something on their smartphone. We're constantly processing information now. It's a huge change, and I'm not convinced it's for the better.
When we just had dumb-phones, we were "always available", but now we're "always connected".
It's what technology is leveraged for that determines the value of something. Planes were used by individuals to crash into a building. What lead to that hate existing? Could technology have been used proactively and prevented it- and in a non-violent, kind way?
I would posit that nature is incredibly violent, and humans as a subset of nature are incredibly violent too, yet "technology" (in the loosest sense- rule of law, trade, etc) has allowed us to be remarkably less violent than our ancestors, and we're headed down the right path.
Investors want the big ideas, though they don't want to pay for them. Tesla Motors and SpaceX would have never of started if Elon Musk didn't have money from PayPal being sold. This is why unless you know you'll have the funds to work on the big ideas yourself, it could be time and energy invested that will leave you not benefitting from it. Really it comes down to learning to enjoy what you're doing in the moment, and be working towards something bigger. It helps knowing what that bigger thing is, though I imagine not always necessary.
And consider how even Tesla started with the Roadster, and then the Model S- targeted at small demographics. Consider how SpaceX is working on reusability of rockets.
They might be "thinking big", but they're also "working small". They have to.
Good stuff. The one validator of thinking big is when people constantly detract your ideas - OR - equally detract you from your pursuit to tackle those ideas.
Can you imagine someone coming up to you in a Twitterless world and saying "Hey, do you want to invest $10k into my startup that allows people to communicate with each other in 140 characters or less, in an online open forum?"
He had some small successes and decided to swing for the fences. That's not the right strategy for everyone.
Startups are a high risk endeavour. There are much better odds in having a small success than a large one.
Sometimes how you decide to tackle the problem matters more than the size of the idea.
Well if you have talent, experience, connections, and a proven and/or good team, then yes you should consider thinking big.