Slashdotter on the value of ideas versus execution

http://ask.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1082003&cid=26346961

by alex_c • 18 years ago

100 70 18 years ago

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DenisM7• 18 years ago

Remarkably poor writing for someone who has invented a good half of modern technology.

brandnewlow• 18 years ago

I don't get that criticism at all.

It's a Slashdot comment. He's going to spellcheck it?

Either he did the stuff he says he did, or he didn't. The people reading his post can figure out what he's trying to say.

DenisM7• 18 years ago

I think you are reading too much into my comment.

thras• 18 years ago

No. The first thing that I noticed about him was that he had bad grammar, even for Slashdot. The poster responded to a questioner and blamed it on learning disabilities.

Chances are, if this guy is unable to present himself in an articulate manner on Slashdot, he can't in front of a VC either.

Yes, this is exactly the sort of thing that can prevent success. As can dressing badly. As can being short and fat. Or ugly, if you're a woman. Fair? No. But intelligence isn't distributed fairly either.

If you want to sell yourself, then you have to fix as many of these problems as you can. There's no way around that. If you can't spell, then use Microsoft Word and its grammar checker on everything you ever write. Go on a diet. Get someone else to pick out your clothes. Etc.

lisp_padawan• 18 years ago

That's rather unfair I feel since being good at technical creation doesn't necessarily mean good at communication. How many novelists are going to write you a version of VOIP in 1987?? Come on, there's genuine discussion to be had here but it doesn't revolve around his rather flaky prose style - it's not as though we couldn't UNDERSTAND him!

gommm• 18 years ago

It's not a problem if he works with someone else who has the social skills and prose style to look good to VCs... The impression you give of yourself when looking for funding is as important as your idea.

lionheart• 18 years ago

Can anybody confirm any of his claims?

I would think that somebody who came up with that many new products could get something to market.

On the other hand, he could be one of those stereotypical tech geniuses who completely suck at business.

whacked_new• 18 years ago

http://www.dnull.com/~sokol/jres.html

He seems to be in the mad scientist category. Apparently he didn't go to college. It could be that he was so far beyond normal schooling that he decided it wasn't worth the time. But as do many exceptional people, it becomes hard to communicate and appeal to normal folk.

snprbob86• 18 years ago

Judging from his home page, he doesn't have any taste. I know that I am preaching to the choir, but success in business is about making something people want.

I think that if he found himself a designer to partner with, he would have been far more successful.

Disclaimer: Yes, I know my own homepage is hideous, so I am a hypocrite. At least my blog has a standard Blogger theme and my resume is attractive (currently Facebook-style because I was considering applying last year).

jhancock• 18 years ago

its hard to know the right answers here. life-ling entrepreneurs have lots of stories to tell.

I do feel that "access to capital" is the thing that makes or breaks most. I think this is a good part of the OP's opinion.

davi2• 18 years ago

That's right. For me the new idea in this post is that after you realize that "ideas are cheap", you can continue on to see that "execution is cheap". What's not cheap is money, which you use to polish, scale up, and market whatever you're building.

With modern web startups, money probably matters less, and execution, more, than in domains where you manufacture and distribute physical objects.

thinkcomp• 18 years ago

Perhaps I'm the only one who thinks so, but running a sustainable business is rarely accomplished by relying upon a popular aphorism that is itself a false dichotomy, which, were it even true, would still not shine very much light on the many complexities of "success."

I find this saying particularly irksome because "execution" is a catch-all term that people use to place blame where it often doesn't belong. (The biotech company Fluidigm had to cancel its IPO recently. Did its executives "fail to execute" a plan to guard against declining economic conditions? Really now.)

There are far better ways to analyze successes and failures in business.

alex_c2• 18 years ago

I agree, and I think the author of that comment agrees as well. If anything, he's arguing that even waving a magical "execution" wand around isn't enough for success, let alone just having a valuable idea. I wrote that title because the context of the discussion is a student worried about having his ideas stolen.

mbreese• 18 years ago

I think that he missed one big problem he had... timing. All of the ideas that he listed, based upon the dates he gives, were well ahead of their time. Meaning, while they were technically possible, there was no market for them, or the scale wasn't there.

For example, he lists a CCTV DVR in 1997. There simply wasn't a market for DVRs in 1997. DVDs were just coming out then, and most people had VCRs. If you wanted to break into the video recording market, you had to unseat the VCR. Good luck with that. Then on top of that, hard drives cost many times more than they do now ($/GB), so in order to have any sort of usable hard drive space, you would effectively price yourself out of the consumer market. Now, fast forward a couple of years, and you suddenly have a lot of people without VCRs who would like to record shows and lower hard drive costs. The market was primed for a TiVo to show up (actually, I'd argue that TiVo was still a little early and just barely survived, but that's my unfounded opinion).

Of course, the other major problem that he alludes to was that a lot of his technology was designed for the adult industry, which may be somewhat difficult to put on a resume or get investors to take seriously.

m0nty3• 18 years ago

Also, wearable computers with VR goggles in 1984? I find that hard to believe, unless it was so primitive as to be almost useless. I suppose you could have used a TRS-80 with a B&W LCD display, but the resolution would have been really poor, and functionality limited. I'm not saying he didn't do it (who knows?) but it's hard to believe he had a practical product.

nailer• 18 years ago

Patent filings require a proper grasp of language. He's apparently self-filed quite a few. Surely he should be able to understand basic English?

delano• 18 years ago

You're not a Tron fan?

russell• 18 years ago

I tried VR goggles in a driving simulation at a show in SF around that time. They were indeed as bad as you might imagine. The resolution was so low that I could barely make out the scene.

wallflower• 18 years ago

"The American dream is that if the average American invents something novel and worthy of patenting, he'll find someone to license it. However for most contemporary inventors, it hasn't worked out that way. The independent inventor today had an extremely difficult time convincing corporations."

Not timing per se but maybe not the stomach and/or resources for litigation.

For example, Jerome Lemelson, who was arguably the most successful American inventor (in terms of money received, not brilliance - some of his 600 patents are questionable) in decades, was a patent-holder of many key patents relating to magnetic recording. And stuff like the flexible track used by Mattel's Matchbox cars.

He spent years in court sueing the big players like Sony to pay him licensing fees. He ultimately prevailed in many cases and now his foundation helps support patent rights for inventors and helps bootstrap and reward promising inventors.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerome_H._Lemelson

"You cannot develop a reputation for somebody who gives up. You have to be known as a fighter for your rights. Otherwise, you'll never license anything...Even Thomas Edison had a tough time supporting and protecting his patents. He spent about $1.4 million [to defend his inventions], and this was around the turn of the century, when beer was a nickel." -J. Lemelson

notaddicted• 18 years ago

Plus a lot of the ideas he cites are good examples of applying technology, but there is nothing intellectually stunning about them that makes them hard to think of.

Mostly its carrying voice/video over ip. There isn't much to "invent" here. It happened as soon as the pipes could handle it. A CDN is an obvious concept if you understand how the internet is structured.

    It's always boiled down to one thing, lack marketing 
    budget. Lack of money to manufacture. Lack of the "right 
    connections" to raise money or make large sales because I 
    wasn't part of the good old boys/rich kids club. There is a 
    class system in this country whether you believe it or not.
     ... As soon as Microsoft or Real Video or some other big 
   company with deep pockets took notice, that was the end for
     me.

There is plenty of money for all that stuff, they just didn't need him to tell them how to do it.

The fact that two people invented Calculus at the same time (when global population was under a billion and children worked in factories) should clue him in that other people can have the same ideas he can. Calculus is a lot more novel than a CDN.

Anyway, everyone underestimates the importance of timing.

chaostheory• 18 years ago

his post is reminiscent of captain crunch

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Draper

iankt68• 18 years ago

What this guy REALLY REALLY needs is a "Steve Jobs" friend. I think he is technically brilliant, but so was Steve Wozniak, and Apple was really built through the marketing/business/social skills of Steve Jobs.

Ultimately, for a successful technology company you need both kinds of personality. Those who can schmooze AND play hardball and those who can invent brilliant things.

Just my 1.44346 cents (US)

11ren• 18 years ago

"Technical success needs technical skills; business success needs business skills."

davi2• 18 years ago

From what I've read, Jobs was the hard-charging, demanding, hard-to-get-along-with type, whereas Wozniak was a mellow, easy-going, just-let-me-solder-in-peace type.

But imagine if Wozniak had also been a hard-charging alpha dog type. We might not have an Apple, because Jobs and Wozniak would have broken up as a technology 'couple' early on in their work.

Maybe something like this contributed to the original poster's failure to hit a home run in his decades of work.

This jibes with something it's taken me a long time to learn: sometimes, "going along to get along" really is the optimal path.

biohacker422• 18 years ago

What you is say is probably true, but I also absolutely agree with the original poster.

Having access to resources, that mostly means funding, is a HUGE deal.

And often that access is a function of seemingly random things like your physical location and who your friends/business associates are.

jemmons2• 18 years ago

Umm... How do you think you get funding? This is the primary difference between the technically-minded and the business-minded. The technical think wealth is who you know or what you're born to -- it's firmly outside their domain. The business-savvy create wealth. That's their job.

cookiecaper2• 18 years ago

I somewhat agree, but I'm frustrated that that's required. I get more and more disappointed in where our society is at as a whole as I get older. People shouldn't need a professional brown-noser to flatter them continuously for weeks until they recognize the verity and feasibility of a product and decide to purchase it. It's really sad that that's where we're at, I think, sad that people don't just instantly see through that crap and choose not to waste time on companies that aren't straight shooters.

I think I have good executive and business sense, but I don't play with most of these social "norms" that involve constant BS and ass-kissing so it makes some parts of business hard for me. In fact, I'm in the interview process for a job right now, and I sent the company letters about why they're having trouble securing good candidates, and whether I'll get hired anyway is iffy, but only possible because of the open-mindedness of the owner; if this was corporate drone company, like another company I applied with and had to provide programmer-recruitment advice to, I would just be summarily ignored thereafter. How can people be so vacant, so self-absorbed and oblivious to basic and sensical things, like being a normal human instead of living to suck up after your boss and/or potential buyers? It's really upsetting.

This probably doesn't make much sense. My frustration has been pent-up. I have so much frustration that there's still a lot of it pent now. Thanks for the outlet though dudes, outlet appreciated.

blader• 18 years ago

You can get frustrated or you can get better at the skill. Human emotion has played a part in our decision making since the dawn of time and I don't think it's going to go out of fashion any time soon. We are predictably irrational beings and like anything else these social interactions can be figured out if you apply some effort to it.

cmos3• 18 years ago

Your sending letters critiquing a company you are trying to get a job from? And more than one?! You will not get that job, no matter how 'open minded' the owner is. Right now the owner is hoping someone else applies, and is mulling over how disruptive you would be to the office.

It's like critiquing someone about their online matchmaking profile on your first date with them. It's our first date, and I'm quite a catch, but you keep talking about how my online profile is flawed? Is that really the most important thing to be discussing right now?

There is a fine line between 'sucking up' and 'being polite'.

The owner doesn't want to hire someone who is going to send him letters every week about how his company isn't doing things right. That's being judgmental and condescending.

If you get hired, bring it up the next time they are looking to hire someone. If you don't get hired, then why do you care?

donw• 18 years ago

I suggest taking up a sport. It's a much healthier way to vent frustration, and it has the nice side-effect of making you healthier. Plus, if it's a team sport, it should help you with those 'dealing with crap' skills that are pretty vital... well, everywhere, really.

Even the smartest people in the world can be incredibly self-absorbed, vacant, and non-sensible, because they're people. People are emotional, and irrational, and that likely isn't going to change in the near future.

azanar3• 18 years ago

You're not entirely wrong to be frustrated, and I'm under the impression that most people here would agree with you that you shouldn't have to be a emotion-pandering brown-noser to get ahead. The difference I see in the comments to this article, and a number of other comments that touch on this, is how resigned people are to that fate. I am not yet, and it doesn't appear that you are either.

The more resigned someone is, the less reasonable being frustrated about broken philosophy or practice seems to be. The solution then becomes either forcing oneself to become numb, or finding some other outlet for the frustration that doesn't solve the problem. I don't think either of these are particularly effective. They've tended in my experience and those of the people around me to become positive feedback loops; bottling or channeling it just doesn't do enough, it comes back and often with greater intensity. In an odd way, it strikes me as being passive-aggressive with oneself.

Frustration is a sign that something is wrong, and, although it is out of fashion to do so when politically imprudent, I'm an advocate of dealing with the root cause. If something is frustrating you, either change it, or become an advocate for change if it requires more than just your effort. Just advocating for the change can be a frustration reliever; you aren't constantly trying to expend energy forcing yourself to be ok with something anymore.

As for the letter, depending on the response, take it as a sign of whether you'd want to work at that organization. I'm undecided on whether you should've sent it; it depends on your goals. If you were just looking for whatever company would hire you, the letter was a mistake. If you're looking for people who are on the lookout for people with ideas and desire to share them, it might not be such a suicidal move. Just imagining myself as a hiring manager, if you had good points, it certainly wouldn't hurt your chances.

a8w9f• 18 years ago

This is the first guy I've come across since reading P.T. Barnum's The Art of Money Getting (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=310056) who seems to fit the description of the "unlucky man":

  The Rothschilds have another maxim: "Never have anything to
  do with an unlucky man or place." That is to say, never
  have anything to do with a man or place which never
  succeeds, because, although a man may appear to be honest and
  intelligent, yet if he tries this or that thing and always
  fails, it is on account of some fault or infirmity that you
  may not be able to discover but nevertheless which must exist.

The actual (?) Rothschild quote. More mercenary and off-topic:

  Never have anything to do with an unlucky place, or an
  unlucky man. I have seen many clever men, very clever men,
  who had not shoes to their feet. I never act with them.
  Their advice sounds very well, but they cannot get on
  themselves; and if they cannot do good to themselves, how
  can they do good to me?

sethg• 18 years ago

I'm reminded of the story that one of our VPs told, of a manager who had received far more applications for a certain job than he had time to look through. So he took half of the resumes that had piled up on his desk and said: "These people are unlucky. We do not want to hire unlucky people." And he threw those resumes in the trash, unread.

Locke• 18 years ago

IIRC, that was a scene in the British version of The Office.

time_management• 18 years ago

As soon as Microsoft or Real Video or some other big company with deep pockets took notice, that was the end for me.

Sad. Copyrights were designed to protect small authors from the massive publishing houses, with whose distribution the small author could never compete. Patents were founded on the same principle. It's pretty upsetting that these are now being used by the large corporations to establish hegemony, whereas the "little guy" almost certainly doesn't have the money necessary to hold his own ground.

Retric• 18 years ago

I don't think patents should protect people when the solution is obvious. Take a DVR 20,000+ people probably thought up the idea of using HDD to store tv programs it was just a question of when a cheep HDD would become large enough. Push / Pull email to hand held devices is a stupid patent.

What should be protected is novel solutions to problems. Take a product that's in production and make it better by changing it's shape slightly so you get more leverage and that's worthy of a patent.

ph0rque• 18 years ago

Maybe he should open-source some of his ground-breaking inventions, and earn fame (if not money) that way...

fallentimes• 18 years ago

It takes two, baby.

noonespecial• 18 years ago

I think, conversely, this proves its about execution. Assuming that at least some of his claims are a bit exaggerated (with respect to how far along his products were).

Executing an idea "almost" just invites a person with better execution and followthru tho come along and "finish" your product in a way that better suits the markets.

The rest of the article is just an example of learning the lesson about trademarks and patents over and over. If you intend to sell a product, there is a certain amount of homework that you're going to have to do establish yourself. Even if you don't outright trademark (cheap and easy) or patent (more expensive and difficult), at least take some steps to prove that you got there first. This arguably falls into the "execution" category as well.

Its also interesting to me that I've actually heard this story several times before. I think most geeks who travel well have met a "tech Forrest Gump" who's story inserts himself in some way into nearly all of the important technical developments of the last decade, always with an "if only" attached. An amusing listen for an evening at the bar.. but you don't want one for a cube-mate!

cmos3• 18 years ago

We've all been cornered by Mr. (or Mrs) Unfortunate, where they start by saying how they invented blah product years before it's time and then Big Company stole it. I had the great-uncle Jimmy who invented the backlit buttons on a telephone, only to have it 'stolen' by AT&T years later. Ideas are cheap. We all have them.

Looking through his resume it would appear he had a lot of fun, doing what he enjoyed. Yet today all he can muster up is some post blaming everyone else for his apparent failures and disappointments. I would think he's made a good living doing all this impressive work. How lucky is he that he can make a living doing what he, hopefully still, is passionate about?

If he really wants it, he'll find his "Jobs" or "Cuban" to help make it a reality, though chances are they couldn't stand to be around him. Rule number one is don't blame others, no matter how obvious or right you may be. Rule number two is avoid assholes.

My Unkle Jimmy never had another great invention. He was too bitter.

tptacek• 18 years ago

I dunno, everyone. I buy that he had the first audio hardware for PCs and got killed by Creative. But:

* Anycast dates back to 1993, a year before he claims to have "invented" Hopscotch and Digital Island, both of which failed, and neither of which were as technically sophisticated as FastForward or even Akamai.

* Webcams: at least 1995.

* Enumera looks nothing like a "blade server", and it was P4-based, so I'm not seeing how he invented the Cell Processor.

* His "ECIP" protocol is not the first use of FEC codes on the Internet; you could have gotten Reed-Solomon out of the comp.compression FAQ before then. And I feel like maybe Raj Jain "invented" selective acknowledgement. Also: why do you even use SACK in an FEC protocol?

* You can find HTTP cache servers on Google Groups from 1995, a year before he claims to have invented them, and you can find discussions of them dating back to '93.

* "Streaming MP3" wasn't so much invented (streaming video and audio dates back further than the mbone and Internet Talk Radio in 1992) as it was popularized by Shoutcast. The fact that you once hooked an MP3 up to a socket does not make you the inventor of podcasting.

You all think his problem is he needed a Steve Jobs (funny, I think that's Steve Ballmer's problem right now too). Can I gingerly suggest that his problem is that he's a crackpot?

aaronblohowiak2• 18 years ago

Perhaps not gingerly, but thoroughly and convincingly? yes.

Thanks. I love me some tech history, especially in rebuffing egotistical claims.

jacobolus• 18 years ago

> You can find HTTP cache servers on Google Groups from 1995, a year before he claims to have invented them, and you can find discussions of them dating back to '93.

The CERN httpd did caching in 1993 or maybe even before. And the Harvest Cache (now called Squid) was started at least by 1994.

> [...] As a result, FTP and HTTP servers find themselves swamped with requests for the same popular files, like the demand for images of the Shoemaker-Levy 9 comet which saturated NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory's wide-area network links in July 1994. As a result, there has been an attempt to retrofit caches for internet information system servers like the popular CERN proxy-http cache. One recently developed cache which deserves further examination is the Harvest cache, which boasts improved performance of an order of magnitude over the CERN cache and even over popular http daemons like Netscape's Netsite and NCSA's 1.4 httpd.

abstractbill• 18 years ago

It looks to me like this guy is attempting to create waves, rather than just riding them.

Creating a technology wave, before the world is ready for it, doesn't appear to work.

mrtron• 18 years ago

In about 1990, when I was very young I had a great idea. I had just read a book 'How Things Work', which was a huge hardcover book with great pictures showing how many things work. I came across the generator page and since my father was a mechanic I figured it would be a good idea to put one on the axle of a car. So, I took this idea to my father and we made a quick little proof of concept model, but he explained to me that generators create resistance and it would result in a net energy loss. But, being a bright young kid I figured it could be used just during braking so it would help slow the car down AND produce power!

I never made any money on the idea, and regenerative braking is being used by most hybrids now.

zmimon• 18 years ago

His post reads like an advertisement for the E-Myth book ...

(http://www.e-myth.com/pub/htdocs/emr_ch1)

Slashdotter on the value of ideas versus execution

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