Ask HN: Why is my innovative IDEA is always behind the others? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Why is my innovative IDEA is always behind the others?

3 pointsjuntz7 comments

When I have a innovative IDEA, I always find that there is others that implemented it faster than me. So in the fast deveploping tech these days, how to work to keep up with the times.

Anyone with the same feelings?

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You know this curve

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffusion_of_innovations

by definition if you are at the beginning you are in a tiny minority and will be struggling to explain what you're up to. You're describing the experience of people up at the top of the curve who are not innovators at all -- trouble is there is so much talk about innovation from people who are just following the herd these days.

Got it. Real innovation have almost no audience. Any things that seems to be innovation may be not real yet. So there is much people to do the same things, I'm just one person among them.

Also some things take a long time to develop. One of my great heroes is

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konstantin_Tsiolkovsky

who knew that man would set foot on the moon based on some assumptions about conservation of momentum and the kinetic theory of gases.

Myself I was involved in several projects in the 2010s, both working for other people and myself, that were going in the direction of today's chatbots. The technology was not ready!

I thought this talk was up to the minute when I gave it

https://www.slideshare.net/slideshow/chatbots-in-2017-ithaca...

and three years later felt time had passed it by, and today it seems prophetic.

Weren’t startups like Cresta (founded 2017) already doing stuff like that commercially before your talk?

I remember being very impressed back then by their chat bots, how conversational they were, even though now it’s obsoleted by LLMs.

It's the one who understands the universe and how it works wins. Not who got the first idea Not who built it first Not even in the middle

Any doubt? check Nikola Tesla's life.

I believe this aligns with what Peter Thiel said: "It’s much better to be the last mover—that is, to make the last great development in a specific market and enjoy years or even decades of monopoly profits."

My Take? If you are small like me, you have a bigger advantage way more than you think..

Agreed. Everyone seems to be making the same things with AI. I think typically the innovation is not in just the idea, but also in the timing. Harvey and Legora are doing well not because the idea is revolutionary, but because they were early to be kingmade. That doesn't mean they are undisruptable, if we see private market valuations crash and a huge architectural disruption that makes fine tuning extremely cheap and commoditized, then all of their edge is for nought, and the KKRs of the world might as well build custom stuff using an army of consultants hosted on their vanilla cloud ala good old transformation projects. So it's not just the idea, but also the timing that matters IMO, and timing determines execution strategy.

Yes. But first to market is just 1 battle of the war.

Myspace beat facebook to the market, but lost the war.

Some guy in the stone age invented wheels. But modern companies reinventing better wheels dominate the market today.

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