Sandy Jen: Let Your Ideas Run Naked

A lot of folks are always interested in, well, okay, I have an idea. I want to do a startup. Like, what do I do? And the thing I want to emphasize is that ideas are really cheap. If you think you have a brilliant idea, 30 people have already had the same idea, 20 people are thinking about working on it, 10 people have already started working on it, and 5 people probably launched variations of it. So no one's special. And there is no successful entrepreneur who's been really successful because they had an idea. They're successful because they've been able to execute on the idea. So a lot of young entrepreneurs I've talked to are really nervous about sharing their ideas because they're like, oh, my God, I have this really cool idea. I don't want to share it. Some of us might steal it. And they treat it like this really fragile baby, and they wrap it in winter clothes and fleeces and no one can see my baby. But like all babies, babies love running around naked. That's all they want to do. And so your idea needs to run around naked. And the reason I say this is because ideas don't grow in a vacuum. Ideas only improve if you get feedback. And so when we had the idea for Meebo, it was through a long series of failures, and I'll go over that, but we asked everybody what they thought, because if you don't ask, you're never going to find out. And so, like I said, the idea is not unique because many people have had that idea, but it's how you craft the idea, how you improve upon it, how you work on it, how you grow it that's really important.