December 9, 2008
Posted by Ryan Graves
Re-Post from the nextNY discussion board 11/25
This is a re-post from the nextNY discussion board. The comment is from Charlie O’Donnell founder of nextNY and CEO or Path 101. As nextNY is a open community I saw no issue w/ re-blogging this thought…it’s a good one.
“Ratio of available programmers to “idea people” is awful in NY” Actually, the ratio of available programmers to good ideas in NYC is just right.
Most ideas are absolute crap and shouldn’t waste the valuable time of a skilled programmer.
If anything, there are too many people working on particularly useless things (how many Monster.com employees are there still?) because there aren’t enough really interesting things out there to go work on.
Message to idea people: Don’t overestimate how good your idea is. If
it was really that good, it would be easier for you to find money and
talent willing to back it. Here’s a quick way to tell if your idea is
good: Has it changed? No? Still working off the same version of the idea you started with? Then it’s probably not good. I see too many people waking up one day saying, “I’m going to build X for Y” and not testing it or kicking the tires at all… never visiting customers and asking them if they’d buy it.
There’s nothing more powerful you can say to an investor (other than “The servers are melting!”) than “We have people willing to buy this if we build it.”
This is coming from my 2 years experience manning the
i…@unionsquareventures.com inbox.
There is an extreme shortage of good ideas–not just in NYC, but in the world. Oh, and the idea that the most interesting projects are on the west coast is kind of laughable. The most interesting TECHNICAL projects (how to make twitter scale, etc) might be out there, but I can’t honestly say that any geography really dominates my radar screen for “Wow, that’s really amazing/fascinating /interesting”.
