If it took you an hour to come up with the truth that’s likely. If you however needed thousands of hours of thinking to discover it, the case for you knowing something that other people don’t know is much better.
Especially if you read various experts that connect to the topic and understand the state of the field, you can make a reasonable argument that you have something that qualifies.
Peter Thiel talks about this being a foundation for successful startups. When Mark Zuckerberg being social network he had the insight to the truth that “real identify is really important for a social network” that few other people believed.
I’d say Zuckerberg’s crucial insight was “people will still use a social website even if you don’t let them customise the look of their page”.
Or “the right seed population for a social network is young rich sexually-active people — e.g. Harvard students, then other college students, then whoever they drag in.”
Yeah, I think the initial exclusivity of Facebook really helped. I went to a school near Harvard at the time Facebook launched, and we were all vaguely aware of the site when it first launched as a Harvard-only site. It then expanded to include our school and a few others—maybe ten or so, all quite prestigious—and there was widespread adoption almost instantaneously on our campus. I think the sense of being invited to join an exclusive club had a lot to do with that. I don’t know if Zuckerberg intended it, but playing on the elitism of college students was a very effective strategy to achieve rapid adoption at the early stage, and of course once that was achieved, there was enough momentum to ensure success once the site steadily opened up to larger and larger populations.
Peter Thiel who is on Facebook board of directors and who invested in Facebook very early argues that’s the critical insight.
The fact that you can’t see from the outside that’s what drove Facebook is only more evidence for it being a nonobvious insight where few outside people agree.
Google+ did more real identity than Facebook.
Google+ was released a lot later. With Google+ it’s also quite easy to register an account under a fake name which wasn’t true with facebook in the initial days.
With Google+ it’s also quite easy to register an account under a fake name which wasn’t true with facebook in the initial days.
That’s simply wrong, at least if we’re talking about the early days of Google+. I was on both in their early days and there were more fake names for longer on Facebook.
In the early days of Facebook you needed to have a university address to make an account. Most university students don’t have fake email addresses under different names in the domain of their university.
In most cases Google+ didn’t do anything to verify that an account holder used their real name. They just filtered for things that looked like real names.
They didn’t check your name against your email. You needed a university email but you could, and people did, use a fake name with it, even an obviously fake one.
In the early days Google+ was insisting on something that looked like a real name, but they came to their senses and I believe that by now you are not officially required to use your actual name on Google+.
I’d still bet that the majority of people who have a belief that meets all the criteria you suggest are probably wrong about that belief. For example, I think there’s a reasonable case that most priests’ religious beliefs would met your criteria, and it’s clear that most priests are wrong (as long you you take priest to include holy men from all of the world’s religions, it must be true).
I won’t speak to the usefulness of the quote as a means for generating useful entrepreneurial ideas.
If it took you an hour to come up with the truth that’s likely. If you however needed thousands of hours of thinking to discover it, the case for you knowing something that other people don’t know is much better.
Especially if you read various experts that connect to the topic and understand the state of the field, you can make a reasonable argument that you have something that qualifies.
Peter Thiel talks about this being a foundation for successful startups. When Mark Zuckerberg being social network he had the insight to the truth that “real identify is really important for a social network” that few other people believed.
Thousands of hours of thinking and no experiment sounds dangerously close to philosophy :)
I said nothing about the absence of experiment.
Ideally you want a mix of careful reflection, scholarship, discussing it with others and empirical investigation.
That wasn’t the insight. Google+ did more real identity than Facebook.
I’d say Zuckerberg’s crucial insight was “people will still use a social website even if you don’t let them customise the look of their page”.
Or “the right seed population for a social network is young rich sexually-active people — e.g. Harvard students, then other college students, then whoever they drag in.”
Yeah, I think the initial exclusivity of Facebook really helped. I went to a school near Harvard at the time Facebook launched, and we were all vaguely aware of the site when it first launched as a Harvard-only site. It then expanded to include our school and a few others—maybe ten or so, all quite prestigious—and there was widespread adoption almost instantaneously on our campus. I think the sense of being invited to join an exclusive club had a lot to do with that. I don’t know if Zuckerberg intended it, but playing on the elitism of college students was a very effective strategy to achieve rapid adoption at the early stage, and of course once that was achieved, there was enough momentum to ensure success once the site steadily opened up to larger and larger populations.
Peter Thiel who is on Facebook board of directors and who invested in Facebook very early argues that’s the critical insight.
The fact that you can’t see from the outside that’s what drove Facebook is only more evidence for it being a nonobvious insight where few outside people agree.
Google+ was released a lot later. With Google+ it’s also quite easy to register an account under a fake name which wasn’t true with facebook in the initial days.
That’s simply wrong, at least if we’re talking about the early days of Google+. I was on both in their early days and there were more fake names for longer on Facebook.
In the early days of Facebook you needed to have a university address to make an account. Most university students don’t have fake email addresses under different names in the domain of their university.
In most cases Google+ didn’t do anything to verify that an account holder used their real name. They just filtered for things that looked like real names.
They didn’t check your name against your email. You needed a university email but you could, and people did, use a fake name with it, even an obviously fake one.
In the early days Google+ was insisting on something that looked like a real name, but they came to their senses and I believe that by now you are not officially required to use your actual name on Google+.
I’d still bet that the majority of people who have a belief that meets all the criteria you suggest are probably wrong about that belief. For example, I think there’s a reasonable case that most priests’ religious beliefs would met your criteria, and it’s clear that most priests are wrong (as long you you take priest to include holy men from all of the world’s religions, it must be true).
I won’t speak to the usefulness of the quote as a means for generating useful entrepreneurial ideas.
I think most priests believed that their God is right before the became priests. That’s not an idea that took them a lot of time to discover.
meh, scratch that, I misremembered the quote as “most people disagree with you”…