How Ideas And Things Spread

Last week someone told me to listen to a new episode from the Ted Radio Hour podcast called "How Things Spread". After listening to Cognitive Neuroscientist Sophie Scott, marketing genius Seth Godin, President Bill Clinton, and more weigh in on the various ways ideas and things spread throughout the world I felt it was worth sharing it was so interesting. By looking at how laughter, viruses, products, death, and the human species itself has spread throughout the world you can start to see the profound and hidden ways all humans are connected. At the basis of all economic, religion, or political systems you will find a powerful and convincing story that enables flexible cooperation of humans beings in large numbers. Tapping into that understanding with your own life and business can be a powerful tool to have. Here is the link to check out "How Things Spread": 

Spotify Playlist: The Come Up, Music to Motivate

The Come Up: Music to Motivate by Kevin Siskar

is my continually growing motivational Spotify playlist with the intention of boosting entrepreneurial motivation when people need it most.

Over 7 hours of motivational Spotify music to help you grind through whatever dream you are pursuing. That means if you listen to "The Come Up" only a mere 1,282 times while working toward your goals you will have achieved that epic perfection milestone of 10,000 hours.

Peter Diamandis On The Power Of Thinking Exponentially

James Cameron, Peter Diamandis, Elon Musk, and others experiencing weightlessness on a Zero G flight. 

I saw Peter Diamandis speak recently at the 2015 Founder Showcase.  In case you didn't know Peter started the X Prize, has backed Tesla, and created the Singularity University to name a few achievements. He starts his talk with the foundation that "an entrepreneur today can touch the lives of a billion people". Peter talks about how in just 30 doublings of something you can reach the number billion. 

"If you want to become a billionaire then help a billion people" - Peter Diamandis

The power of thinking exponentially and not linear has the ability to unlock a whole new world of technology and science. Peter shows this by tracking the success trajectories of companies like Kodak to Instagram across various decades. If we look at how that trajectory predicts the future ahead of us we are in for some unfathomable achievements in the world. Somebody has to start these dreams and companies. It might as well be you. So take some time and learn how to think exponentially. Watch this exclusive video below and don't forget to also subscribe to my Youtube Channel here:

Make It Count

This is a brief post but I still feel it is worth sharing. I am a big fan of Casey Neistat and all things motivational. Both of which are in this video. Take a few minutes and watch the "Make It Count" video Casey produced for Nike below. Surprisingly you can see a lot of the world when you blow an entire marketing budget in 10 days. And you have to love the "Do More" tattoo.

The Single Biggest Reason Why Startups Succeed

I was recently watching Charlie Kim, founder and CEO of Next Jump, presenting at the Founder Institute. During his talk he cited a TED talk by Bill Gross titled "The Single Biggest Reason Why Startups Succeed".  I found the talk and enjoyed it so much I thought I would share it. You can find the link to it by clicking here.

Bill wanted to find out what is the single biggest reason startups succeed. He analyzed 200 companies. For each company he looked at the business traits of Funding, Business Model, Idea, Team, and Timing to determine which traits correlated most to its success. The quick synopsis is that the Bill Gross study showed that Timing (42%) is the single most important factor in a why a startup succeeds. Followed by Team (32%), Idea (28%), Business Model (24%), and lastly Funding at (14%).

What do you think? Agree? Disagree? Let me know in the comments below. 

Why You Should Tell Everyone Your Startup Idea

Entrepreneurship is hard. Really hard. But with countless tales of how entrepreneurs made it big with almost nothing, it's easy for a budding founder to jump into the startup world full of unbridled enthusiasm and some startup misconceptions.

As Director of the Founder Institute in New York one of the more common misconceptions I encounter with a lot aspiring entrepreneurs is that they are afraid of telling others their idea. There are numerous reasons though why entrepreneurs should share their startup ideas. While it is common among founders to be hesitant about divulging their startup secrets, the truth of the matter is that your company can benefit greatly from telling people what your idea is about and what you hope to achieve.

Myth #1: "I Should Save My Startup Idea Until It's Refined"
Reality: You should share your idea with everyone you meet. If you plan on pitching your idea to potential investors, why not practice beforehand? By sharing your idea with as many people as possible, you can get feedback early on to prevent wasting time on an idea that won't sell. In a Courtney Seiter-penned article titled Why No One Will Steal Your Startup Idea, Buffer CEO and Co-Founder Joel Gascoigne says:

"When you build a startup, you're basically creating something that doesn't exist already. In order to figure out if your idea is actually going to work, it's essential that you share it with people. You're going to have to do it sooner or later. The longer you leave it, the more risk there is that you spend a long time working on it, and then eventually you put it out there and find out it's not something that resonates."

Myth #2: "My Startup Idea Is Too Unique To Be Shared"
Reality: No, it's not. Just look at the countless companies that offer the same product. If you have an idea for a startup, there's a very good chance that there are a multitude of other entrepreneurs working on the exact same concept. But don't let that deter you, as you should focus less on the idea itself and more on how you plan to execute it. Here's what Cory Levy, Co-Founder at One, Inc., had to say in a Linkedin article titled Startup Secrets: Should I Hide My Business Idea?:

"Ideas are a dime a dozen; it's the execution that will set you apart from the rest. Chances are that there are people developing the same thing that you're working on now. We plan to compete not by keeping our idea secret, but by building the best possible team and by creating the best solution to the problem we are solving."

Myth #3: "People Will Steal My Startup Idea If I Tell Them What It Is"
Reality: Most likely not. The chances of someone stealing your idea are pretty slim. In fact, sharing your idea with others is a great way to drum up interest in your company and makes getting help easier. Still not convinced? Here's what serial entrepreneur Alexander Muse has to say in a Startup Muse article titled Should you share your idea?:

"If you keep your ideas a secret it will be impossible for anyone to actually help you. Could someone steal your idea? Of course, but as I've said before your potential competitors are more likely to become partners. You're far more passionate about your idea that anyone else - and most people want to partner with people with passion."

If you're still reticent about sharing your idea with others, take into account the multitude of opportunities that your company can benefit from by simply divulging what it is you do and how you're going to do it. And remember:

"If someone does take your idea, they will never have the passion you have for it because they didn't come up with it." - Joel Gascoigne

10 Rules for a Great Startup Idea

Even though it’s trendy in startups to say that ideas mean nothing and execution means everything, the reality is much less binary and much more nuanced. For example, even the world’s best entrepreneur with incredible execution will fail if their idea is fundamentally flawed, or if their market is too small. This list of 10 rules put together by the Founder Institute aims to provide a great starting point for people who want to evaluate their startup ideas at the very first stage.

What we have found is that if an early-stage founder can check off the ten items below, they have a solid foundation by which to start a company. You are absolutely not assured success if you can check off these items (nor are you assured failure if you can’t), but your chances of success are much, much higher if you can.

1. You are a Passionate About It
Money is no substitute for passion, so every entrepreneurial journey should start with a passion. In fact, every aspiring founder who comes into the Founder Institute with a goal to just “flip” their company is advised to drop out during the first week for a full refund. There are two reasons for this;

In order to power through the hard times of being an entrepreneur, founders need to be working on ideas that they can see themselves still working on in 5, 10, or even 20 years. As Elon Musk famously said, “Being an entrepreneur is like eating glass and staring into the abyss of death.” If you don’t have the requisite passion, your chances of seeing a project through are minimal.

Other people will easily be able to see through your lack of passion, like customers, investors, and press. For example, investors are typically concerned more about the “why you”, then they are about the “why” of your idea.

2. It’s Simple
“Think big” is a common mantra for entrepreneurs. And it is true — every entrepreneur should think big, because in most cases, starting a company with small ambitions can be just as much work as one with big ambitions. However, most people confuse the “think big” mentality into meaning they have to try and “boil the ocean” from the outset.

Big ideas are raised, not born, and they are most often raised by simple pain points. For example, Mark Zuckerberg didn’t wake up one morning and say, “I’m am going to create the social graph.” Instead, he set out to build a simple utility for Harvard students to see who was in their classes.

All the great businesses of our time have started with an incredibly simple idea, and then expanded upon that. If you can start by solving one problem, with one product, for one customer, you will be sufficiently focused and can have a great foundation for success.

3. One Revenue Stream
For some reason, the majority of early-stage entrepreneurs think that the more revenue streams their idea can support, the better. In the early stage, you need to be laser-focused on one revenue stream, and your idea needs to have a clear, singular revenue stream that can conceivably be large enough to support the entire business. If not, then its time to go back to the drawing board.

Also, it’s a common misconception that companies who focused on early user growth (ex. Google) didn’t have a revenue model in mind when they started. In reality, these businesses saw incredible early traction, and then the founders made a tactical decision to shift their focus to growth.

Can someone build a great company with a zero revenue mentality from the outset? Sure. But building a business with no revenue stream in the hopes of becoming the next Instagram is like buying a lottery ticket — except that lottery ticket costs a lot more time and effort than $3.

4. Few Steps to Revenue
The more steps there are to revenue, the more complex an idea is to build out and execute.

This is a very important step during the ideation process: what are the things that need to happen before you make a dollar? If you have to provide a service in order to collect data that will then be sold to advertisers, for example, you have a very complex business. That would be 5+ steps to revenue. Try to limit the number of steps to revenue to around three from the beginning.

5. You Know the Customer
You need to understand very clearly who you are helping, what exactly they need, why they need it, how they would be willing to solve their problem, what they spend their money on, what goals they have in life… in other words, you need to have a very specific archetype.

A common mistake we encounter is that people don’t go nearly deep enough in their customer definition, or customer development. For example, many people will stop at “I am helping large companies hire.” In reality, they need to be able to say something like; “I am helping senior hiring managers at enterprise software companies in the United States with 400–800 employees. They are typically female, age 29–34, making an average of $58,000 per year. They report to the company HR lead, and their KPIs are X, Y, and Z, measured quarterly. They spend the majority of their day doing A, B, and C, and the biggest impediments to them hitting their KPIs include X, Y, and Z. Currently they are using products from companies A, B, and C, but those products don’t allow them to do these three critical things…”

Also, there’s nobody you know more intimately than yourself. That is why so many great businesses have been formed from personal need.

6. You know the market
In almost all cases, there are several people already devoting their lives to your idea. In order to win, you need to engulf yourself into your market in order to have the requisite insight and vision needed to win. Chris Dixon (Andreessen Horowitz) has said that you need to devote at least 10,000 hours on your market to get this insight — whether by working in the market, living the problem (ex. being a social media addict who then starts a social media company), and/or devoting that time towards research.

If you are not an expert on your market, then it’s time to get to work. There are no shortcuts here.

7. Sufficiently large market
Large and fast growing markets have the power to pull mediocre companies into greatness, and conversely, dying markets can pull otherwise solid companies into the ground. If you are going to devote your life to an idea, the market where you operate better be big enough (or growing at such a fast rate) to support a meaningful and enduring company.

Any market with less than 10 million people or multiple billions in annual revenue that is not growing at a very fast rate will be very hard to address, and is probably not worth your time. For example, even if you were lucky enough to be moderately successful in a $500 million market, you would likely still only have around a $50 million business.

You will die winning a small market, so be smart and don’t start your company in a graveyard.

8. Original secret sauce
Every great business has a secret sauce. Given, not every company starts out with that secret sauce, but building a company without a plan for how you will differentiate and win from the outset is simply foolish.

Also, your secret sauce needs to be original. If it’s obvious, that is almost always a bad sign. The best ideas have a secret sauce that is transformational, not incremental.

What secret do you know that will help you win? For example, Tony Hsieh started Zappos with a very distinct insight and secret sauce — customer service. His transformational insight was that buying shoes online was really a customer service problem, and not a retail problem.

9. You have tried to kill your idea
It is very easy to fall in love with your idea — after all, it’s your baby, and almost nobody will tell you your baby is ugly. Positive reinforcements are very easy to find.

Your job in the idea stage is to find the things that make your idea bad. Try to kill your idea, and then, one-by-one, iterate and eliminate the negative aspects of the idea. The result will be a much more defensible foundation by which to start.

10. You are sharing your idea!
Nobody is going to steal your idea. Think about it — do you really think your idea is so great, so original, that somebody who hears it is going to go home, quit their job, and devote their entire lives to it? And be successful? The chances are near zero.

You need to be pitching your idea all day long to anybody who will listen, and incorporating all the feedback you receive into improving the idea. Feedback is an entrepreneur’s best friend, and Silicon Valley entrepreneurs understand this better than anybody else. For example, on any given night, you can find 20 different events in Silicon Valley where people are openly sharing their ideas, and it is this collaborative, teamwork-oriented culture that leads to innovation.

Is Idea, Execution or Timing Most Important for Success?

Years before I started getting involved in entrepreneurship and before I even knew that entrepreneurship was its own sort of niche industry, I thought that simply great ideas defined a successful entrepreneur. I know today that I was wrong, well sort of.

In college I had a lot of great ideas. I even kept a notebook of them and overtime it grew to several pages. The ideas seemed to just keep coming. Everywhere I looked I saw problems and sometimes shortly after I would see a solution in my mind. As time went on, I started following the technology industry very closely and discovered how fast the industry could generate very viable solutions in the market. From the outside looking in it seemed that people were having an idea today and had a product out on the market within the next month.

What I didn’t know at that time was just how much it took to get from the idea stage to something real and tangible. I underestimated the challenge of creating something from nothing. Now that years have gone by, I recently took the time to read back through that list of ideas I had created. I was surprised to see that since then most of the ideas on that list have actually come to market and that they now exist due to the hustle of other people in the world. I realized two things from re-reading my old list:

• My old ideas were on average about three to seven years ahead of the time they came to market.
• About 80 percent of them now exist in the world.

These two realizations led me to realize how important some of the lessons I have learned over the years are.

Lesson one: The idea. A great idea is important. You have to constantly fall in love with problems you see around the world. Once you fully understand the problem and the users it impacts you can begin to work out solutions to test. You also have to follow the market you want to make the biggest impact in. This means really understanding where it is going, as well as where it has been so you can lead your idea in the right direction. Does this idea make sense and has it been done before? Other important factors are due diligence and constant refinement from user feedback. Make sure you love the idea and everything around it or you will struggle down the road. A great idea is important, but as you will see it is not the only thing that matters.

Lesson two is timing. Ideas can come too early or too late. Having an idea early can be advantageous as it gives you first mover advantage. Getting the timing right of when to bring an idea to market is truly underestimated. Being too early can be the kiss of death, ask Myspace or Google Glass. In the case of Myspace we have the luxury of hindsight and know Facebook was better timed. In the case of Google Glass we are in the midst of seeing what happens in real time when an idea is too early. Google Glass and other wearable technology are going to come to the masses in the next 10 years. The wearable device industry right now could be compared to where the mobile phone industry was with the pre-iPhone Palm Treo about ten years ago. The counter to being too early is obviously being too late with an idea. In this case you will most likely struggle to steal market share from the preexisting big players. Lesson two is to get the timing of your idea right. You have to find the right time of when your idea can make the biggest splash in the market as a product.

Lesson three: Execute. Just go for it! Timing and great ideas are completely useless if you never do anything with them. The ability to execute is what separates great entrepreneurs from people with good ideas. Odds are that you’re not the only one with great ideas too. As stated above about 80 percent of some of my best ideas got developed and it was not by me. Other people executed on their ideas. Even though I was able to guess what was potentially coming to the market three to seven years in the future because I followed the technology industry news very closely it didn’t matter. This is where the competition heats up. Whether or not you can beat the competition will depend on your ability to time the first mover advantage while you put forth an overall commitment and passion for the idea you are building.

It appears that execution can be just spinning your tires without a great idea or timing. Timing is useless if you don’t have a great idea and don’t do the work. An idea is worthless without working to bring it to the world at the right time. So in this complex version game of “Rock, Paper, Scissors” that’s more “Idea, Timing, or Execution” what is the right ratio? In my current opinion the perfect recipe for a successful entrepreneur would be the following:

• 15 percent timing
• 20 percent intelligent, high quality and excellent ideas
• 65 percent ability to fully execute on ideas

Imagine not just the idea, but ask yourself if it is the right time and then make your plan to execute on it. You need the right blend of idea, timing and execution to make a successful idea manifest itself in the world. All three skills are a requirement for success. I am not saying this is the only ratio that will enable success, but this is what I would want to see to most confidently know success is around the corner. What do you think is the most important factor in determining a successful entrepreneur? Let me know on Twitter @TheSiskar.