Tony Wright

There has been some interesting discussion of late about the relationship between youth and successful entrepreneurship. It started with a from-the-hip post by Fred Wilson (which he later elaborated on).

After looking at the chart posted on Valleywag, it got me wondering about how old a fella has to be before he ought to get out of the business of startups.

After reading Fred’s musings and the (damn insightful) blog entry by Clay Shirky, I feel (at the ripe ol’ age of 35) less anxious about the whole thing. Of course, I might just be feeling young because I took the last couple of days off to pal around with my 70 year old father.

Clay states:

I’m old enough to know a lot of things, just from life experience. I know that music comes from stores. I know that you have to try on pants before you buy them. I know that newspapers are where you get your political news and how you look for a job. I know that if you want to have a conversation with someone, you call them on the phone. I know that the library is the most important building on a college campus. I know that if you need to take a trip, you visit a travel agent.

In the last 15 years or so, I’ve had to unlearn every one of those things and a million others. This makes me a not-bad analyst, because I have to explain new technology to myself first — I’m too old to understand it natively. But it makes me a lousy entrepreneur.

“A Lot of Knowledge Is A Dangerous Thing”

One thing that struck me about the “unlearnings” that Clay brings up is that they are pretty idea-centric. That is to say, these are the sort of learnings that could keep you, as an entrepreneur, from hitting upon the “big idea”. As I’ve mentioned before (liberally quoting from folks who are smarter than I am), ideas aren’t necessarily in short supply. While I’m sure many startups fail for lack of a good idea, I’d wager the majority fail from poor execution. Methodologies, strategies, and staffing levels that work at Fortune 500 companies simply don’t fly in a small company. The careful modeling, planning, and PowerPoint wrangling that you learn in business school really isn’t a great way to invest your time when your business model might need to change dramatically in a month or two. And I’d wager that the more experienced you are (and the more confident you are in your hard-won wisdom), the less likely you’re going to be able to adapt to working in a small business environment.

I want to explore this a bit more, but (given that I’m buried under a pile of email) it’ll have to wait for another blog post.

(apologies for the lack of gender neutrality in this entry– idea girls exist too…)

I had a colleague the other day refer to me as an “idea guy”. I’m sure they meant it as a compliment, but I winced when I heard it. As a guy who tends to lurk in entrepreneurial circles, I often run into self-identified “idea guys” (usually, they are in “stealth mode”, which I generally find similarly ridiculous)– and virtually every time I do, I tend to walk away shaking my head. Here are 5 quick reasons why your startup doesn’t need an “idea guy”:

1. Everyone is an idea guy. Well, strictly speaking, that’s not the case. I’ve met plenty of folks who aren’t interested (or aren’t good at) the strategy and tactics of software/product development. There are plenty of engineers out there who just want interested technology to fiddle with and couldn’t care less what the grand plan is. There are plenty of designers who just want a good set of design specs so they can make pretty pictures or highly usable prototypes. There are plenty of salesfolks who don’t give a darn what they are selling. So what makes an idea guy an idea guy? Usually it’s the simple fact that they don’t have any other skills to bring to the startup.

2. By virtue of the fact that they consider themselves an idea guy, it quite likely means that they are convinced that their ideas are better than yours (or anyone elses). Of course they are! They are an idea guy! The big problem with this is that startup ideas need to change… Very few startups stick with the exact same idea. How excited is an idea guy going to be about shifting to a new idea that he didn’t generate? Not very exited, as it turns out.

3. Ideas are relatively valueless… because smart people say so. Don’t believe me? Here’s what Paul Graham has to say (though I think the argument about the “sellability” of ideas is pretty weak). Don’t believe Paul? How about Guy Kawasaki? One one my favorite quotes from Guy when he was asked how an entrepreneur could keep their idea from being stolen. His response was “”You could discuss it with no investors, show it to no customers and never hire employees….” (see it in context).

As a test, approach a dozen venture capitalists. Explain that your primary skillset is “idea generation”. Do your best to defend this and give copious examples of your genius. Go home and wait for the phone to ring.

4. Ideas aren’t defensible. Google “First Mover advantage” and you can find all sorts of people debunking that particular myth. Google moved into an established market and clobbered it. Ipods certainly weren’t the first MP3 player. Dodgeball lost out to Twitter. Friendster was sucker-punched by Facebook and MySpace. The first movers spend tremendous amounts of money educating the market and making all sorts of stupid mistakes and the second movers come in when the market is primed and make it look easy.

5. In startup businesses, idea guys run out of things to do pretty quickly. There’s no room in a startup organization for someone to sit around and spew out ideas. Startups need builders, whether you’re building software, hardware, visual interfaces, teams, bank accounts, or audiences. If you’re a founder, you probably need to be good at more than one of these things.

Despite the evidence to the contrary, I feel like every day I run into founder and consultants who think having a million dollar idea is enough to bring to the table. Most of the time, I think this is because they haven’t the faintest clue how hard it is to turn a great idea into a great product or service.