As I watched this video, parallel between it and the environment that we create on the StartupBus was stark. In this beautifully illustrated video, Steve Johnson asks a question you see in the title and specifically drills down on the impact that our surroundings have on our ideas. Breakthrough ideas are a result of rinse-and-lather process of perfecting a hunch. Hunches are unpredictable, but it’s clear that when one hunch collides with another, often something greater than the sum of their parts is created. On the StartupBus we’ll have people from different walks of life, but all interested in technology and creating something great. I am confident that many of them already have hunches that need to collide with another tiny hunch that can make a big difference and result in something great. Though there’s no short-cut to greatness, the constrained environment of the bus is exactly the type of “space” that encourages collisions of ideas, as discussed in the video.
Being on this subject begs a couple more additions that have been on my mind in recent months. I’ve been wondering if breakthrough ideas come completely unpredictably, a sort of big-bang in someone’s head, or do they grow out of the process of continuous improvement. Last November world-class chess champion visited this cool company, Palantir, in Palo Alto and spilled his beans saying that “America’s innovation engine is slowing to a grinding halt” and that Apple II was the last revolutionary technology. To add on top of his statements, Peter Thiel (high profile investor known as “Don” of the Paypal Mafia) spoke at Stanford a few weeks later and drilled into idea of “extensive” vs “intensive” innovation. He believes that currently we’re seeing too much extensive innovation, which is the type of innovation where new companies simply copy or slight modify existing ideas and don’t really add to the greater picture of technology landscape. He backed it up with a great example of car industry, when in 1920s there were more than 40 car companies and instead of joining one a smart businessman would have created his own company, just like entrepreneurs are doing today. So both Gary and Peter think that we’ve really slowed down innovation process and that now is the time to wake up and go big.
On the opposite side we’ve got Steve Blank who quotes Ralph Waldo Emerson with his essay titled “When it’s darkest, men see stars”. Steve is very optimistic about the future and lists a number of constraints that served as barriers to entrepreneurship and then goes about showing how each one of those have been or slowly are being removed.
Something to think about, definitely. Personally I think that big-bangs that Gary Kasparov and Peter Thiel are hinting at, come as a result of long and continuous process of improvement and refinement. Yes there are thousands of startups that can barely be distinguished from one another, but there were dozens of companies that were trying to build a better computer before Apple II came out and got it right. It takes many failed businesses and many iterations of a business to produce something great and that’s what’s happening right now. Granted we just went through a recession, Steve Blank is spot-on that men begin to look at the stars when it’s darkest.
Last February my friend Julie brought to my attention this article on TechCrunch about this 48-hour hackathon on a bus, known as StartupBus. Of course I signed up, as the idea passed my personal threshold of “crazy enough to fly across the country”. Within just a couple of weeks from signing up for the StartupBus 2010 I flew to San Francisco and joined a bunch of cool people. They came from across the United States, including NYC, Cleveland, Florida and… of course Chicago. What’s more - people hailed from across continents, some from UK, others from Australia. They marched with all kinds of skills: hackers, designers, community managers and non-techies like me who like startups and can do numbers and marketing. The experience was surreal and here’s a really good story plot of what happened (thanks to Justin Wilden who also participated last year).
(Crunching numbers on a bus at 60mph in the Texas dessert)
Aside from having a really good time on the bus and at the SXSW conference we witnessed a network of entrepreneurs emerge. Some of them went on to found startups, like Whereoscope and Opzi, others quit their jobs and joined various startups. All of us are involved in a number of different cool projects and the value of the network only keeps expanding over time. I moved from Chicago to the Silicon Valley party because I was now in a group of like-minded individuals who were willing to help each other.
That was with 25 people last year. This year we’re doing it again but this time it’s going to be 150 people! I cannot tell you what ideas will be born at 60mph on a bus, but I can guarantee you that an amazing network of buspreneurs will emerge.
I am also stoked about the rivalry that will light up among the US tech regions this time around. Five buses (SF, NYC, Miami, Chicago and Cleveland) will compete to produce the best ideas and implement the best prototypes in time for SxSW, where a panel of VCs and a team from a local incubator, Capital Factory, will judge to determine the best businesses. I will not be surprised if some teams will come home with real investments to take their 48-hour-bus-born-babies to market.
You think you’ve got what it takes? Apply: StartupBus 2011
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As a gesture of apology for their big outage, Skype sent me a $1 coupon for their service. Come on Skype - you can do better than that!