It's true that many such quotes are bogus, but this one can be pinned down. It comes from an interview with Einstein published in LIFE magazine, May 2, 1955: "Never lose a holy curiosity. Try not to become a man of success but rather try to become a man of value. He is considered successful in our day who gets more out of life than he puts in. But a man of value will give more than he receives."
Huh? If LIFE from 1955 counts as reading something on the internet, then so does http://www.librarius.com/cantales/knigttl1.htm. (Also, please don't do the memester thing here. The natives don't like it.)
"There are only two kinds of quotes: Those that are ascribed to famous people, and those that aren't good enough to make their authors famous."
-- mechanical_fish
[Note that this doesn't rule out the existence of the many unfortunate authors whose sentences are so good that they get mis-ascribed to even more famous authors, rather than making the original authors themselves famous.]
[Zen practitioners will note the existence of a third type of quote: If a sentence is uttered in the woods but nobody is listening, it will never be attributed to anyone famous.]
whose sentences are so good that they get mis-ascribed to even more famous authors
There seems to be a bucketing algorithm that, over time, labels all the quotes in a bucket with the most famous approximately applicable name. For example, "First they laugh at you..." (early 20th century, subject: social activism) goes to Gandhi instead of Nicholas Klein (who? my point exactly); "Not everything that counts can be counted" (mid 20th century, subject: measuring shit) goes to Einstein instead of William Bruce Cameron. Often the quotes themselves get optimized along the way, so Eliot's "Immature
poets imitate, mature poets steal" (mid 20th century, subject: art) goes to Picasso, but as the snappier "Good artists copy, great artists steal".
It makes sense that this happens as time recedes, for the same reason that you see only the major landmarks at a distance. But it probably gives us a skewed idea of individual genius.
I watched the video and it was quite interesting. He says pretty explicitly that he thinks network effect businesses are in the most important ways the opposite of a Lean Startup(TM). Definitely helped me think about the topic in a clearer way. Thanks for the link.
Well that's not very helpful but it does sound honest. Unfortunately I think it means their advice wouldn't apply to a much larger class of startups than just the next Facebook.
Interesting question. My take would be that you need to toe the line between building something quick and dirty, and building something that can scale. If you can't get the features right then scaling is a non issue. If you do get them right, the nature of this type of business is that it will grow quickly - whether you like it or not. So you have to be able to add scale quickly or it can fall apart due to unavailability (people often attribute friendster with this outcome). These might be the hardest businesses to start, because in addition to cracking the chicken/egg problem, you have to steer a fine line between development speed and scalability.
I think Eric's point for a business like that would be given a choice between burning time and money scaling (ie. big launch and marketing on customer acquisition) spend it on a few more iterations of refining the product, AND seeing how a small number real customers react to it.
The biggest reason was Digg v4, which was buggy, didn't have features present in the previous version and basically sold the readership to tech news outlets. By the time they fixed it, everyone went to Reddit.
How about Twitter? They made a product that couldn't scale, and are still doing OK.
A DB server with 256GB of RAM, 2 sockets, and multiple SSD drives can serve a lot of queries. Use that for posts, and a few slaves for reads / caching. It will cost something like $60k plus hosting fees and maintenance. But it will certainly serve 99% of web businesses as a db.
As long as your basic queries scale linearly (or maybe log-linearly), you can buy your way out of the kind of trouble most web companies would kill for.
I really like that they are perpetuating this methodology as far as possible. Steve Blank and Eric Ries are developing a logic and ration driven scientific approach to entrepreneurship - very exciting indeed.
If you have infinite runway you don't need to listen to Eric Ries or anybody else. Build whatever you want. Take as long as you want. Give the stuff you built away in your will when you die. Or, have your executors burn it all in a massive bonfire.
Most of us do not have infinite runway, however.
And even if you do: There is an optimum pace at which to create any given work of art. Working on it too much can be just as bad as working on it too little. The momentum runs down. The zeitgeist changes. The authors become too familiar with the product to see it afresh. The fanbase gets bored and stops paying attention. And the stakes get higher: The longer you work on something, the more of your reputation is tied up with that thing.
Ideas are never truly unique. No matter how special they might seem to you, rest assure that at least a sufficient amount of people have been sensitive to the zeitgeist to pick up the same, seemingly weak, signals that lead you to that idea of yours. Ergo, you need to be agile, to iterate fast and competently to flesh out and develop the idea into a business.
"Strive not to be a success, but rather to be of value." - Albert Einstein.