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Anthony Whitford
Anthony Whitford
Chief Curator

You don’t need a big idea to get started. Small ideas that are common can impact a lot of people. Making $20 from 50,000 people is a million dollar idea. There are over 5 billion internet users worldwide, and it continues to get easier to access global markets.

I am often surprised at how small some products are. You often only need to do one thing in the beginning, and then see how the market reacts.

Statuspage

One of my favorite examples is Statuspage. This was a common problem that they turned into a commodity so that you could just buy it instead of build it. Atlassian acquired it for $360 million in 2016. Wow!

Paul Graham

Neither Bill Gates nor Mark Zuckerberg knew how big their companies were going to get. All they knew was that they were on to something. Maybe it is a bad idea to have really big ambitions initially, because the bigger the ambitions, the longer they’re going to take to realize, and the longer you’re projecting into the future, the more likley you’re going to be wrong.

So I think the best way to do these big ideas is not to try and identify a precise point in the future and say, “How do I get from here to there?” like the popular image of a visionary. I think a better model is Columbus who thought, “There’s something to the west. I’ll sail westward.”

Start with something that works. That you know works. That’s small. And then, when the opportunity comes to move, move westward, right?

The popular image of the visionary is someone with a very precise view of the future. But empirically, it’s probably better to have a blurry one.

Jeff Bezos

I would definitely advise a small startup company to be as narrow and as focused as is possible to be. If you look at the original Amazon business plan, there was no hint of anything other than books in it, and it was not on my radar. I was thinking I wanted to build an online bookstore. That was it.

And, you know it worked way better than I thought it would. And we launched music and that worked better than I thought it would. And we launched videos. I think, it’s so long ago I can’t really remember, I think it was actually VHS tapes. Is that possible? And that worked better than we thought it would.

And then I sent an email to customers. I picked about 1,000 customers and I said, “Besides the things we sell today, books, music, and video, what would you like us to sell?” And the list came back incredibly long tailed. It was almost like whatever was on their mind at the moment. It was like, I wish you sold windshield wipers for my car. And I was like, really windshield wipers? That wasn’t in the business plan, but that’s an interesting idea. So it’s been kind of one foot in front of the other.

We expand into new areas in two ways. One is from a customer need. We will work from a customer need to the skills that we need. And the other one is skills forward from a skillset we have to a new set of customers.

So Kindle is an example of a customer need. If you go back 10 years, we had no hardware team. We had to hire somebody to lead our hardware group and then build a hardware team and build some institutional competence at it and so on. That’s a customer need backwards approach.

And skills forward, a great example of that is Amazon Web Services. We had the skills to do AWS. We had probably more distributed computing expertise than anybody else in the world, because of the transactions. Transaction systems are so complicated and hard to build, and we had a service oriented architecture of great complexity, probably before anybody else. Because we were doing that, we could kind of see the future a little bit and decided to build AWS, which has turned into, you know, a huge business in its own right.

Business is very situational. Rules of thumb are good, but they have to be applied to the right situation. So sometimes the old maxim that you should stick to the knitting is correct, but sometimes the adage that you should stick to the knitting is wrong. And a senior leader’s job is to figure out in which situation are you?

Stan Lee

If you have an idea that you genuinely think is good, don’t let some idiot talk you out of it.

If there is something that you feel is good, something that you want to do, something that means something to you, try to do it.

Because I think you can only do your best work if you’re doing what you want to do. And if you’re doing it the way you think it should be done.

Mike Strives

Simplify = WIN.

There’s a way to simplify everywhere.

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