Why isn't the title of this HN post "The Starbucks Theory"? The author doesn't mention their age at any point in the blog post, so I fail to see why it is in the title.
It's because you compared a niche product from a company with no track record and no production timeline to a mass market product, from a company with a CEO that has a history of goal completion, and that is in full production.
"Abraham Lincoln had a single-minded vision: Preserve the Union. Franklin Roosevelt didn’t really become great until he united America behind the cause of ending Fascism and Imperialism. John Kennedy asked us to put a man on the moon. Ronald Reagan was hell bent on winning the Cold War."
All of those examples are centered around war and/or homeland security and some of them don't have a lot to do with entrepreneurship. The beauty of the world we live in today is that we don't need a leader to supply us with a unified vision/direction; we have tons of companies simultaneously working very hard on innovating in a multitude of different areas.
There are a ton of problems to solve, so why focus on one?
There are a ton of problems to solve, so why focus on one?
The idea, I suppose, is that by focusing on a single "big problem", we could make very rapid progress (instead of making slower progress on a bigger set of problems). At its height, the US was spending almost 1% of its GDP on the Apollo program. Now imagine we could all agree on some other goal that we would spend that much money on. The hard part would be choosing a good goal, and then convincing enough people that it's the "right one".
Good point. Doesn't a unified vision/direction typically imply a huge problem to be solved? Even the space race was more a race against Communism than a common motivation to accomplish something great.
The ideal is to have no huge problems to solve. Humans being humans, without a common thing to scare us into working together, we'll all work on whatever we want.
That said, one might argue that we have huge problems we just haven't realized are huge problems yet. Climate change comes to mind.
I think you're downplaying the "pivot" aspect of Milk. It's not just a think tank, but an agile team that can switch up their tactics (revenue models, branding, priorities, etc.) at the drop of a hat. I'm excited to see what they can come up with in the next year.
It's easy to pivot when you don't have a product that people use. I'm sure many people on HN (myself included) have pivoted several times in the last year as well. Assuming one of their projects stick they'll become less agile. Unless they are just interested in being a flip factor.
As much as I hate buzzwords, I'll play along for the analogy:
You can't 'pivot' if you don't have any feet on the ground. If you have no real direction or dedication, moving to something new isn't 'pivoting', it's defining what you're doing in the first place.
