Incremental progress is very marginal

I recently read a book from a guy who I have a lot of respect for.  Kevin Kelly has a great blog  and his book "what technology wants" is fantastic.  

In this book he tells the story of a missionary who is working in china.  In the village that he works with all the people gather crops manually without the use of any tools.   Of course the missionary saw how inefficient this was and wanted to help so he ordered a Sickle from his home country and had it sent.  Of course the villagers at first thought the technology was great.  The sickle was going to save them so much time and labor.   But that evening the villagers had a meeting among themselves.  The next morning the chief told the missionary the sickle must be destroyed.  Why the missionary asked?  The Chief explained that the tribe was concerned that a thief would get a hold of the tool and be able to steal all of their crops in a single night.  

This is the plight of technology, all technology has some good points and and some bad points.  Many people will tell you your idea is bad or that technology is the demise of our culture. However, all imaginable technology is neither 100% good or 100% bad.  Technology and ideas are some combination of both good and bad.  So the question that really must be ask is, does this technology's good points outweigh the bad.  As long as the idea is 49% bad and 51% good then we are making progress.  That means we are helping society.  Today cars kill 40,000 people a year.  What if we built "robot" cars that drove themselves and took people places but accidentally killed 20,000 people would be clamoring to say that we needed to remove the robot cars despite less people were being killed.  Progress comes in incremental levels 1% at a time. 

Only the best survive- Founder Institute Houston

Here are the latest from my founder institute class.  We've lost a lot of members between the first night and the third session.  If you are thinking you are ready for a startup incubator you better make sure that you've thought a lot about your idea, and you know what you're made of.   This program isn't for people who think they sort of kind of might want to start something someday and wow look cool the Mint guy is a mentor so I'll join.  If that's you don't waste your time or your peers and mentors, there's a good chance you'll not make it.

It's also not for people with thin skin in the third session not one person who pitched their idea was told "hey that sounded great let's tweak it just a little".  No you were pushed hard on the how and why of your idea? Is the market big enough?  What problem are you solving and one of the main questions is always "What are you building again?"   While that seems easy I think founders are "cursed with knowledge" to borrow a line from Chip and Dan Heath's Made to stick  .   They've thought about their idea so long it seems to them like everyone should just naturally understand it, guess what THEY DON'T. You better get to the point you can explain it in one sentence in a way your mom knows what you're talking about.  Simple, Simple, Simple

Founder Institute is really a challenge and I find it stretching my abilities in a good way.   It's rough traveling from Oklahoma once a week but as they say what doesn't kill you.   Here are some of my takeaway's from the 3rd session.

1. You aren't going to be the first person with this idea and if you are it probably sucks or is too early.  This goes right in line with what I remember reading from Steve Blank's blog a few weeks ago, which talks about the first to market fallacy.
2. While you need to be lean and flexible (see lean startup) but you can also rule out a lot of ideas with research. and lots of it.   You need to know how big your market is?  Who are your competitors (yes there are some) and what kind of market are you in (again you think this part is easy but it's not) 
3. You can find a lot of this using competitor's blogs, press releases, twitter, delicious, etc, there's a good chance they've done a lot of the research for you
4. Figure out how to get to $100 million in revenue in 5 years if you expect to build an enduring company.
5. Know your value proposition as Dave McClure says "Your solution is not my problem" if it isn't a pain point for people you are going to have a tough time convincing people to use it.

In summary, Be flexible with a very simple idea with a great value prop, in a big market (greater than 1Billion) by doing a lot of research and interviews.