re: Hank Williams' How Much Is an Idea Worth, and the Tech Market

Hank-

Replying to:

http://whydoeseverythingsuck.com/2008/10/what-is-idea-worth.html

and


http://whydoeseverythingsuck.com/2008/10/tech-market-failure-of-ideas-not.html

I believe what I said on-list was that success is "1% idea 90% team/connections 9% luck", and that 9% luck figure is important in putting context around my perspective.

A crappy CEO can take a crappy idea, and with a lot of luck hits 10%. 10% gets you prototyped, gets you seed funding, maybe gets you a Series A. It gets you users, it gets you news coverage, it gets you hype and buzz, but none of that constitutes success -- not in real world business terms.

Success is sustainable profitability. Success is a high-value exit. A brilliant CEO can take a crappy idea, mature it, and turn it into a hundreds of millions of dollars acquisition in under five years.

A crappy CEO can take a brilliant idea and get further than 10%, but a crappy CEO is going to result in a low-value exit, or is going to end up replaced, probably after a lot of pain and wasted investment.

The strongest indicator of success is the team, not the idea. Obviously, however, the right idea, a matured idea, a well thought through idea, carries more weight, vastly improves chances of success.

I think we're saying a lot of the same thing here, but I will insist that a subpar CEO can easily ruin the most brilliant, bound-for-success idea, whereas it's much more likely that a killer CEO can make a success out of a subpar idea, or one that needs massaging, maturation, etc. And yes, a slick CEO can BS their way to a limited degree of success -- but not sustainable success, which I think we're in agreement on. My definition of a killer CEO isn't the sales guy with the biggest shovel, but the one with the greatest ability to do the most with the least, make the right moves, and please stakeholders along the way.

"idea = 1%" isn't an exact figure, but it's highly demonstrative of proportionate value.

And yes, the market the past few years has made for some fat and lazy management teams and backers with a plethora of redundancy getting funded. That's inevitable, it happens with every peak. It's those who can stay lean and agile even in fat and happy times that will of course have the greatest chance of sustainable success over the long term.

--Andy Badera

Note: you can, and perhaps should, substitute "management team" or "founders" for "CEO" throughout this piece.

Republishing, crawling and linking in 2008

There's an ongoing conversation on the nextNY mailing list regarding linking and republishing of RSS feeds.

An interesting discussion on robots.txt has sprouted as well. Ed Costello wrote a post well worth reading. A few highlights:

"Why might a site owner block a crawler?

• on analysis of the site's server logs they realize that a section of their site has been crawled that they had no intention of making crawlable (this doesn't mean that the content is supposed to be "private", but perhaps it's the output of their inventory control system and they just don't want it in the world's search engine caches)
• abusive behaviour by crawlers, pounding away at CGI scripts for example, or systematically posting content to forms found in retrieved pages
• misrepresentation of a site's content
• pretty much any reason at the discretion of the site's owners. It's their site, they set the rules."

"A spider is not one spider on its own, it's one of potentially thousands hitting popular sites, sucking up bandwidth and other resources away from other users of the site. "

"My advice:

• be absolutely certain you comply with robots.txt,
• make sure your spider is well behaved (take a breather between requests to a single site, or do a bunch of requests at a time, then move onto another site for awhile)
• make sure your spider responds to weird server behavior by backing off (the number of spiders which don't process redirects correctly is sadly high)
• include a URL to your spider's description/info page in the User-Agent field of the request (suggest using a tinyurl or something comparable to keep the number of bytes down, no need to waste bandwidth)
• make sure your spider's IP address(es) reverse resolve to your domain
• make sure someone's actually monitoring the spider as it runs, or gets alerted if something bad or strange happens. "

Finally, perhaps most importantly:
"If someone complains, don't quibble, stop crawling their site first then work with them to address their concerns"

Long story short: don't be abusive. Crawl others as you would wish to be crawled. Respect published instructions. In this internetworked world populated by an ever increasing amount of content and plumbed by an ever wider variety of open APIs, simple rules of etiquette still apply.