Stephen Cohen talks about building products, from early wireless internet to augmented reality toolkits. He covers what it takes to launch something new and why most startups fail to find their market.
So kind of recognizing there was no single linear path that would lead to an entrepreneurial outcome, I immediately tried to jump to nonlinear paths, which for me meant working on products. I love working on products. Of course, since my last one was a K to 12 grade book. I don't exactly know if my choice of product at this age was particularly great, but I had some fun ones in those opening years. This was at the beginning of wireless Internet taking over. Everyone had these routers, no one had any idea where to place them. So I had this idea that I would hack the network cart in my laptop. And I got this old Krusty cart from my house in Fremont. I played on the varsity tennis team in high school. And I got an old tennis container and a tennis ball, put a laser mouse on top of it so I could track 2D coordinates with this cart. And. And then I hacked into the driver in this laptop so I could pull up the signal strength readouts and effectively build a 2D topological model of the signal strength in a room like this. Now what did this actually amount to? Well, I was this freshman a few months into Stanford, and I've got this cart that's roughly sized like this. And I'm walking all around, Tressiter and everywhere else with this tennis ball, duct tape contraption in rows, probably looking like a crazy person, just back and forth mapping out all this signal. Obviously that idea didn't exactly evolve into Palantir, But yeah, after that I started working on an augmented reality toolkit. It was actually part of my senior project work. What it did was it would take webcams and it would find these, these elements in a scene and basically project a 3D matrix onto that so it could determine the 3D coordinates of what it was seeing. Anyways, you could rig this thing up to build a 3D mouse. So I wrote a 3D mouse. I connected it to Quake 2, which was just recently open sourced, and there you have it. You have this new way of interacting with video games with your computer. You can just move around and move your hands to, to do things kind of Minority Report ish. And I figured that this could be next big thing. And I talked to a good venture capitalist friend of mine, Ashmeet Sidona, who I think now is a partner at Foundation Capital. And he said, stefan, it's a great idea, but it can't impact the real world. The entrenched players in this market, these console manufacturers, they're the ones who control the distribution. And because of this essential feature of the marketplace, it might be a good product, it might be a good idea, but it probably won't be a reality. And so, of course, this really bummed me out. This is not what you want to hear here, and any entrepreneur has plenty of stories like this where they get the bad news. But sure enough, years later, how many of you all have used a Kinect before? You've probably played with PlayStation 3's variant of it. You've we got that exact same technology, and sure enough, it came from the console manufacturers who controlled most of it. So he was right. But the story I'm trying to paint here is one of working outside the traditional bounds of the institution here at Stanford, while still leveraging the resources that were available, and still longing to find a way of connecting that world of ideas and products to the actual real world.
O processo de reconhecer limites, mesmo quando a vida parece exigir sempre mais.
Depois de tantas histórias, aprendizados e pausas necessárias, o @interior_iza está de volta
