Where do good ideas come from?

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. 

StartupBus community is about to get much larger

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

Related articles

• Looking for a Ride to SXSW? Get on the Startup Bus (readwriteweb.com)

Things to Watch in 2011

A 100-item laundry list of predictions of what will be popular in tech for the year 2011. There are some interesting trends emerging. Many items in that list are predicting a significant trend of technologies merging and going mainstream. Take for example Facebook’s growing ability to provide value to retail/e-commerce industry (big reason for Facebook enormous valuation at $50billion), e-book/tablet industry branching out to deliver education content and smarter (adaptive) learning environment, combination of growth in mobile devices and dead-simple blogging platforms increasing number of people blogging/journaling, growing area of physical goods being connected to each other and tracked…. etc. 

I am especially fascinated by the acceleration of interaction among different platforms that are taking advantage of each other’s strengths (Facebook + Bing + NYT + JCPenney + Foursquare + Groupon + Hunch). Slowly everything online is becoming personal and even the good ol’ offline world is becoming simpler to navigate and decide via technologies that connect people to their peers who are not there physically but have left a digital mark (ie review, check-in). We’re already seeing a ton of things changing how we experience them: from what articles you read online, to what music you listen to, what t-shirt or book you decide to buy in-store or online, which restaurant you pick for dinner and even how you research/browse information online.

Emergence of these hybrid services will make our world look more and more like a futuristic movie. A word of caution: while I have a fairly open view on privacy, the possibility that at some point the government will command ability to monitor every single step you take in this blurred universe of physical and virtual worlds, can make crime almost impossible - a clear hint at Minority Report. Not that crime is a good thing, but wouldn’t trying to prevent 100% of it results in death of free will? Even in George Orwell’s 1984 there was a way to avoid being constantly tracked by the “big brother”.  

Overall, I see two interesting themes starting to really take off: 

1. Technology will accelerate the speed at which it allows us to modify real-world experience (ie. virtual mirrors that let you preview items that may not even be there in the physical world) and it will be done with unimaginable levels of personalization, which leads to the second point ->
2. The gap between physical and digital is narrowing - 3D printing will allow to make physical goods faster, easier and cheaper. Also, we buy physical world experiences and goods through digital marketplaces like Amazon and Groupon. Or alternatively we use real world money to buy virtual good on domains like SecondeLife and Zynga’s games. 

Closing thought: when many think that all has been discovered, invented and achieved, we’re only beginning to see the possibilities, the tip of the iceberg. 

Arcade Fire - Ready to Start

Skype is cheap

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!