Get Out of Thoughtland

Gmail. How many people here have Gmail account? Good. How many people here had a Google Wave account? Just fewer hands. Yes, sir. How many Google Waves did you write? None. None. Right. So usually actually you're better than people said two. Right. So Google Wave was supposed to be the follow up to email. A new paradigm, lots of marketing, developed by the same people that did Google Maps. Great team. And yet it failed. And yet you see it as the same Google call, or the same Google great engineer, the free massager, the free lunches, or all the Google benefits. And yet it failed. Ford Mustang, success. Ford Edsel, not so much. Right, so all of these examples, what they have in common is that these are companies that are successful with other products and they're launching products that are exactly what they do, like cars, electronic things, movies. And yet they fail. Because you cannot fight the law of failure. If you take competent execution plus an idea that is the wrong git, you're guaranteed failure 100% of the time. The law of failure is blind. So you don't want to bring out an idea that is the wrong it. And you ask yourself, well, how do I know if an idea is the right it? Well, do not ask. And what I mean by that is that if all you have is an idea and you tell other people your idea, the most you can get back are questions. And this is a very dangerous thing to do. Why? Because ideas live in a place I call Thoughtland. So in Thoughtland, you have an idea, hey, here's my brilliant idea. You tell it to other people and what do you get back? Just a bunch of opinions. Whoops. I over clicked a bunch of opinions. And opinions are subjective, they're biased. You know, you filter them through your own preferences and beliefs. I, for example, I thought that Uber was a terrible idea. Strangers picking up strangers from strange places and driving them to spend the night at the stranger's house on the couch. That's another startup idea, Airbnb, which I thought was terrible. Right? So you need to filter these ideas. Two horrible things happen in Thoughtland. The first one is if you have an idea and people think it's the greatest thing ever. One of my favorite example is the Segway Transporter. Those little scooters that you used to see a few years ago when this was about to be launched. Everybody talked about it, right? Everybody thought, best idea ever. It was in the COVID of magazines that some of the best VCs in the valley architects said cities will be redesigned. So everybody's going around in a scooter. Right. And then they launched it. And who do you see riding Segways, Mall cops and lazy tourists. That's about it. Right? And clearly it's not because a failure due to marketing. People knew about it. In fact, it was talked all over. Is not a failure due to operation because it worked. Well, I don't know why things fail, right? I just know that most of them fail. So, and these are called an example of a false positive. People tell you, best idea ever, you launch it, and it fails. How common are false positive? The most common thing that people launch. So everything in the Google graveyard, in the Microsoft morgue, in the Amazon ambulance, et cetera, et cetera, all of these are ideas that at some point people thought, best ideas ever, and then they launched it and it failed. Why? Because you know what doesn't fail? The law of market failure. Right. Most new ideas will fail even in market if competently executed. So first bad thing that happens, people give you the thumbs up, you spend a lot of money, you launch idea, it fails miserably. The opposite can happen. You have an idea and people think it's the worst idea ever. Honestly, I felt that way about Twitter the first time I heard about it. Well, 140 characters. People can follow. Everyone can follow anyone. Sounds terrible. And yet, for better or worse, we know that Twitter has changed the way that we converse as a species. So this is an example of a false negative. People tell you it's a terrible idea, and then it succeeds. So here's your dilemma, right? If all you have is an idea, you cannot depend on people's opinion. You cannot just ask them, would you want it? Would you buy? What would you do with it? So what can you depend on? Any ideas? Okay, well, I'll tell you, I'll jump ahead because we don't have a lot of time. You depend on data, and as you can see, you trust, not opinion, trust data. And not just any data, your own data. Right? Because when I tell people, you know, you need data, bits, opinion, and you need to collect your data, people think, okay, yeah, well, this looks like data. I mean, it's in the spreadsheet, so it must be data. No. Right. There's two types of data. Opd. And OPD stands for other people's data. Can you guess what Yoda stands for? You guys are smart, okay? You're great. Yes. Your own data. And these two are as different in my book, literally, as apples and oranges. In fact, rotten apples and fresh oranges. OPD is the worst possible thing you can collect, Right? So OPD is market data collected by other people at other times for other products with other methods, with other filters, et cetera, et cetera. It may or may not apply to you and most of the time it does not apply to you. It's dangerous because just because other ideas similar to yours have failed doesn't mean that yours will fail. Imagine if Elon Musk, thinking of Tesla, thought, well let me see how other car companies did with electric cars. Zero of them succeeded. Said, well okay, forget this Tesla. I think I'm going to go and do something else. Right, so just because other companies fail with an idea doesn't mean that you will fail. The opposite is true. Just because others have succeeded in the past with your idea doesn't mean that yours will succeed. Apple succeeded with the iPhone, Google succeeded with Android, and Samsung did Amazon succeed with the Fire phone? No. Right. So OPD is very dangerous. So I urge all my entrepreneurs to collect your own market data.