Successful tech ideas are almost never genuinely novel or unique

Evidence

We put a lot of stock in the heroics of the entrepreneur and the genius of the idea or whatever. But if you actually look at it, it’s so rare, there [are] basically almost no examples of a great idea where there was just one team that figured it out magically. At the time, when we started Yelp, I was like, “We’re super stealthy, nobody has this idea, we’re such super geniuses.” Then literally, like, a couple of weeks before we launched, somebody announced that [he] was doing almost the same thing. And like a month after we launched, somebody else comes out of the closet, doing the same thing. And we were all clustered so close together, which meant a bunch of technology lined up that people knew could potentially solve this issue of how you find a great little business, how you bring word of mouth to the web. There are some nuances to how do you get that right and how do you nail it, and how do you actually win, but it just goes to show that the idea itself is very rarely truly novel. — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update, 680

Categorization

• SHARE: Send to a founder friend who believes in secrecy around product ideas — the Yelp co-founder confessing his ‘super stealthy genius’ myth got punctured within weeks is a grounding anecdote.