"I'm a VP at so and so company."
"What do you do?"
"I'm into Murders and Executions."
"Oh, how do you like it?"
"Like what?"
"Like the work, a lot of my friends in Mergers and Acquisitions hate it..."
In my humble view, startups do a lot of M&E, we murder ideas and execute on the ones that escape our grasp. At least that's how it is at KaZuum. It's a sort of natural selection process to find good ideas, kill them off with small prototype tests, basic common sense, convenience surveys, simple market tests, or user stickiness, before attempting to execute on them.
Let's face it, with a 3 guy shop, there's only 504 hours a week available for us to really execute on any particular idea. It's in our best interest to try to give any idea that crosses our way a dirt nap.
Sure we might be overreacting, sure we might not be working on full 100% complete definite knowledge, and we might kill something that would have been awesome if we had let it grow a bit, but it's a high velocity environment out there, we don't really have that option.
We're lucky the idea of Craigslist + Ebay + (Insert Social Network of your Choice) = KaZuum is easy to wrap your brain around. It's easy to explain, and people get it. Which is great to sell, but it's sorta like...having your first baby.
Everyone who has their first baby is bombarded with advice from everyone else who believe they're qualified to give advice - they were at one point a baby, and obviously know exactly what to do.
Take this eagerness to expound on idea, and add Founders Fanaticism to it, where you think your idea is the greatest thing since sliced bread (actually we believe KaZuum to be BETTER than sliced bread). We know this because we have actual focus group data confirming this. That we commissioned. With pizza and beer. Lots of beer. But add that zeal to take your idea and make it super-cool, L33T, with LOLCATZ dancing on the boxes, and a satellite uplink to a moon-base uplink. (Think Dilberty Pointy Haired)
We have a ton of ideas that we come up with all the time, most of which end up being shot in the head. Of course you can't be thin skinned about these things, and I think it's one of the greatest assets any founder can have - the ability to tap into iterative creativity like a fire hose and keep those ideas coming. And it's not with a callous brutality that we kill ideas here, we foster an environment that encourages new ideas, no matter how outlandish, strange, or weird. Every idea gets its chance in the Octagon, so to speak, to make its validity and relevance known to us through analysis and decision processing.
In the galaxy of entrepreneurial ideas out there, you're going to find many that will be the same or along the same lines. The differing factors are whether or not they've murdered the same ideas that you have, and how they're executing on the ones they've allowed to live.
My thoughts on executions are for another post.
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