1. It doesn’t have to be new. It just has to be fresh.
The toy brick was invented (and patented) by British toymaker, Hilary Fisher Page in the 1950s. But when LEGO released its own riff on the brick, they made some very important changes to ‘freshen up’ the idea for the Danish market. One of those important changes was the little tubes underneath... See more
A while back I got an email from a fellow who asked:
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"I’ve been trying to think about my next B2B play but everytime I think of an idea I stop myself due to how saturated the markets are. How do you still win in a packed category? I feel like it’s a lot harder to win now than it was 10 years... See more
One of the biggest reasons it gets harder to do new things as you get older is that new things are generally undignified at first (indeed, this is an excellent heuristic for discovering them) and the older you get, the more dignified you're expected to be.
Because big businesses aren’t built on gimmicks. You can blitz your way through Sand Hill Road and spike up the App Store charts on gimmicks, but you can’t actually use them to replace Gmail, or Salesforce, or Instagram, or Instagram, or Instagram, or Instagram. Even seemingly instant successes can’t become lasting companies without putting in the... See more
Figma acquisition shows how hard it is to turn money into software. You'd think for $20B you could build something as good as Figma yourself, but you can't. Software is art.