OPW - Goal-seeking is the surest way to create nothing interesting. By executing a 5-year plan to pursue a fixed, innovative goal, the chance of success becomes near zero. 600m years ago, humans shared an ancestor with an octopus. Evolution got from a worm to a human and from the same worm to an octopus. If evolution had a "goal," the diversity of such forms could never have emerged. Evolution optimizes to escape competition through novelty. Successful species avoid reproductive competition and fill a niche. That's what life does and what businesses try to do. Facebook didn't try to outcompete Myspace. It established itself as a closed network for college students. The smart entrepreneur does not run toward an established player, she runs away from it. A novelty search can take years, where one interesting idea is a stepping stone to another, none of which is commercially viable, until, voila, it is. Innovation is a combination of features at the right time, connections made across disciplines and arranged in some novel way, which creates something different AND that could only have been arrived at by the failure of all previous incarnations.
My siblings and I started myYearbook, then a live video gaming platform which failed, and mobile apps, all of which failed. Critically, our team earned the right to keep building the next thing, because we had built myYearbook / MeetMe. I saw livestreaming video on YY and MOMO in 2016, and we built it for a Western audience, and bet the company on it, an all-in bet. We acquired Tagged, Skout, & Growlr, adding our video solution, it grew there too. We built livestreaming for the video & creator economy in a box, vPaaS, on rev share, and signed up 6 of the top 50 social apps in the world and a dozen others. Follow the novelty and keep following it, and eventually, you'll arrive in a unique place. You'll know it by the large moat surrounding it, because all those stepping stones you crossed, they're now covered by the tide. And to all of you goal seekers: the future does not turn out as you plan. - Geoff Cook
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