Comment by mlboss
4 days ago
You can always go big after starting small. The most important thing is to start. There are 1000s of small things which are not visible unless you start.
The effort to do something small is definitely less than when you try something big. And my little experience even hitting small is exponentially difficult.
Agreed on the first point, but I'm once walked with a VC who told me the the owner of this restaurant (him pointing at a restaurant) works harder than Mark Zuckerberg .. I found to be likely true.
So the concern here is that it may be as hard (or very similar) to start something small vs trying for something big .. I will note that going for something big also likely means starting small (so again same effort)
Ah, the struggle of life: finding the lowest gradient slope to climb that results in the largest maxima. A slope where you're not too early, not too late, where you can build a moat, and where you hopefully enjoy the journey.
You used a few ordinary words but you described my dream
There are hundreds of thousands of restaurants across the US, ranging in size from a food truck to McDonald's.
You can have a big idea that makes no money (like Quibi, a streaming service that raised 1.75 billion and shut down after 6 months). You can also start as a door to door salesman selling baking powder and accidentally create Wrigley's gum. You can also assemble custom computers as a side hustle and then scale the business to become Dell.
You have no clue what's going to become a big business. You have no clue what idea will require a lot of work, and what idea will just go viral. Candy Crush makes more money than No Man's Sky.
The thought that you can predict what idea will make it big is laughable. VC's invest in hundreds of companies because while they're pretty good at picking companies, they know it's largely a crapshoot.
I think this is mistaken, there are ideas that obviously have the potential to be big .. and ones that have hidden potential to be big. Some people's entire jobs is to find a track them (whole VC industry). But yea, it's not easy.. it's tricky.
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I don't have the insights of a VC, but I always liked Peter Thiel's approach of "You want to be the last mover, the last company in a category".
Not in the sense that everyone should always aim for it, but simply as a "reality check". You won't be able to directly compete with large established players - so don't.
The problem with that argument is that it will have you waiting forever for a gig as cushy at Mark Zuckerberg's.
If you wanted to start a company like Zuckerberg's you had one place (Silicon Valley) and a time period of less than ten years in which things like that were getting funded (or alternately, a similar window in China that may or may not still be open)
You'll always be able to find people who want to be partners in a restaurant, whether or not they are out of their mind is another question.
You don't need to be waiting tho .. the question is whether to deliberately go after big ideas .. Marc Randolph, founder of Netflix, specifically went after Netflix as an idea to be really big and make him a lot of money .. So did @pg with ViaWeb
No offense but you sound quite immature.
If there was a recipe for Mark Zuckerberg's wealth there would be many of them. There's is no tried and true set of instructions that makes someone a billionaire, it feels dumb to even have to type that.
Only an extremely naive individual, perhaps an 8 yo kid, would believe such thing exists; particularly if it's on a book that costs $19.99, lmao.