Identifying the next big startup idea July 4, 2008
Posted by abheek in technology.trackback
In one of my meetings yesterday, I had an interesting conversation with an entrepreneur about how he started off on his ideas. Two things leapt out at me that are worth recording here:
1. Look for technology inflection points. Many successful innovators have used these inflection points to take on much larger incumbents successfully. NetApp took on the big storage guys with NAS+RAID, only to have Data Domain do the same to NetApp because of a combination of cheap and fast SATA drives and processors. Christensen talks about this in detail in his innovator series of books, but hearing about it from someone in the trenches reinforced this as an excellent way to identify opportunities.
2. Spend as much time with your IT department as you can. Its the single best way to identify pain points, or to apply your knowledge to solving existing problems in more effective ways. In fact, this was something I was planning to do when i came to Stanford, but in the heat of the school year it completely slipped my mind. Note for next year: spend time working with the Stanford IT setup, and see what that leads to.
wow..nice post..
abheek – Without going into the specifics of a change, I think business inflexion points are easier to identify, and work on; as opposed to technological inflexion points. My points
* tech. inflexion points are far few than business inflexion points
* even with a tech. inflexion point, you have to churn out a business change along with it to make full utilization of the changes in the technology.
I would give some example – take forth riya.com/like.com ’s visual search – the technical achivements these guys have done are great, much above the norm – still they were/are unable to create a business out of it .
On the other side, a change like bangalore airport moving out of the city is creating new business models for taxi/cab/shuttle services. I think these type of changes are far more often than the first type, they are also more actionable.
Standard disclaimer :
PS1 ) I dont have much insights into the super-hi tech world, and also it looks like you could create something really big if you mix technical changes with a proper business one (Vmware IPO ? ). Business ones would probably be smaller in value.
PS2) Not sure what do yo mean by inflexion, I just took it as fundamental change :)
@soumyadeb: thanks!
@nitin: Agree in general there are multiple types of inflection points that can be exploited by entrepreneurs. I was only referring to one way to search for a high-impact technology startup idea. The bulk of the work, and the difference between a successful business and the many dead ones that fall by the wayside, is often (if not always) going to be execution.