A Google side project evolved into a $4B company | Hacker News Reader

A Google side project evolved into a $4B company

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16 pointssahin6 comments

I first heard of Niantic when a friend mentioned in 2010 that they were thinking of transferring to them to become their ~3rd employee. They didn't end up doing it (went to Chrome instead). I went to the launch party for their first product (Field Trip, early 2012) and still wear the T-shirt from it.

I think what many people don't understand is how many base-hits you typically need to pull before getting a home run. Field Trip was a bust; it was mildly interesting, but ultimately more annoying (basically, it would pop up notifications on your phone detailing the history of various landmarks you were walking past). Field Trip begat the location-aware game Ingress, which was wildly popular within Google (though I never played - was wary of addictions) but largely a niche success outside. Ingress begat Pokemon Go, which is basically Ingress re-skinned with Pokemon characters and with some extra AR features. Everybody knows Pokemon Go.

That's 3 major pivots from a guy who was already an experienced founder - Intrinsic Graphics to Keyhole to a VP in Geo.

The story of many other recent hits is similar. Fortnite came out of nowhere - except it didn't, their founder has been making games since 1991 and had a string of base hits like Gears of War and Unreal Tournament. Bitcoin came out of nowhere - except it didn't, [assuming Satoshi is Hal Finney] he'd previously developed the first reusable proof-of-work system, was the second developer at PGP, and had been working on crypto his whole life. Medium's the culmination of Evan Williams's 4 startups (Blogger, Odeo, Twitter, Medium) to bring publishing to the masses.

Well ya the more times you roll the dice the more likely you are to land on the numbers you want. But lets not pretend its about just rolling the dice as much as possible...

Be a tenured serial entrepreneur with rubber stamps from popular VCs and tech firms that will set you up on easy street to get funding, hire, or acquired. From there not only is it easier to exit, but you can just use the funding to buy some (or all) of the success you're after. Finally your risk tolerance is massive because you can just stumble into a very well-payed engineering/executive position even if you shit the bed.

There's no doubt been a lot of note-worthy tech created by Niantic BUT how much of Pokemon GO's success is attributable to its ability to purchase and/or network-into via Google connections the Pokemon IP? You know that internationally viral brand that was already itching for a new game?

I think its disingenuous to push entrepreneurs to burnout BEFORE they learn the inner-workings of a heavily slanted system. Arguably suffering is the best way to learn it, but having gone through it myself I think there should be a better way.

It's neither entirely about rolling the dice nor about connections & rubber stamps, though those are part of the story.

Rather, the lesson I got from watching Niantic's story unfold is the importance of uncovering and correcting errors. You don't know the shape of the problem you're solving when you first venture off to become an entrepreneur. You'll discover that a lot of your assumptions were wrong. But when you discover that, if you're resourceful enough, you'll figure out an avenue for overcoming them.

In Niantic's case - the problem with Field Trip was that there wasn't really a point to it. The landmark histories were mildly interesting, but they didn't fit into what I was doing with my phone at any given time. So Ingress created a point by adding teams and game mechanics; they made the landmarks interesting by making visiting them the whole point of the game. And then the big problem with Ingress was the lack of that branding, and so they partnered with Nintendo to get the needed IP to make it a success.

Money certainly helps, but money alone doesn't create a successful startup unless deployed in an area that's preventing you from attaining success.

My comment was a little cynical I just want to say thank you for the interesting context on Niantic and agree that the ability to repeatedly overcome obstacles and pivot/adapt a product is critical to most successful start-ups.

Only the first couple pages are visible, the rest is hidden behind the "Extra Crunch" paywall.

And, it's only available in a few countries (US, Canada, UK, France, Germany and Spain). People from other countries can't pay even if they want to.

This is not how I imagined the web would end up :(

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