Work on Good Ideas

Despite what some people might want to believe, there is such a thing as bad ideas. In the context of building valuable ventures, bad ideas are typically bad in a few ways:

• they’re trivial to implement — ideas that are easy rarely become valuable. Peter Thiel presents this argument as “Competition is For Losers”.
• they’re wrong, either because they’re built on a misunderstanding of reality or faulty logic. For example, most recent ideas to use blockchain are based on a grossly oversimplified understanding of its benefits without understanding its drawbacks. The early-internet mantra of making up losses on volume (apocryphal though it might’ve been) is an example of faulty logic. Regardless, in this case, humbly remember that you don’t know everything and you could, in fact, be wrong.
• they’re a marginal improvement in the best case. Even if successfully implemented, these ideas result in incremental improvements (measured in single- or low-double-digit percentages), often for a small audience (tech-literate knowledge workers and people with lots of disposable income are common examples). This is probably the most insidious and pervasive type of bad idea in the modern tech industry, especially because it’s often easy to hypothesize an ideal-although-unlikely world where the idea actually changes how something fundamentally works.

Last week, my team at work launched Disrupt Tech, a blog and community aimed at unsticking our industry from the allure of bad ideas. We see too much capital and talent wasted on incremental problems (like optimizing ad click-throughs) and also-ran products, while there exist big, real problems to be solved. While Trustwork is attempting to solve some of these problems, there are many more in the world, and we want to see more people working on them.

Disrupt Tech’s north star and manifesto is below:

Technology was supposed to make everyone more productive, unleash creativity, and bring abundance to the world. But at some point, we lost our way. As an industry, we’ve gotten caught up in our clichés and euphemisms and forgotten what it means to create real value.

The modern technology era began in the late 1960s, when popular culture collectively envisioned a future of space travel and valuable computation for everyone, and companies like Fairchild, Intel, and descendants kicked off the race to build that future. The subsequent decades ushered in a Cambrian explosion in hardware and software, unlocking world-changing innovations in communication, manufacturing, biology, and countless other fields.

The 90s saw the rise of the Internet, the foundation for an “information superhighway”, a nascent ideal that would’ve enriched the lives of every citizen. Instead, people decided it was more important to build warehouses to deliver pet food.

Since then, the internet has brought massive opportunity to more than 3 billion people, and fundamentally changed the lives for many of the 2 billion who carry access in their pockets. Yet we’ve seen massive amounts of capital and human talent directed towards incremental improvements, made-up problems, and tools for other techies. Our best talent isn’t working on real tech problems that could unlock massive value for most of those people — there is much more we can do with the internet than A/B test ad clickthroughs or build glorified chat apps.

We think our industry has gotten stuck in a rut. But we don’t think it has to be this way. Every day we talk to incredible workers who’ve figured out ways to work effectively and live abundantly. We see examples of human ingenuity, as well as people who want an outlet to express that creativity and build products for the rest of the world. We believe that technology can be a a life-changing tool for billions of people, and, in the hands of great people, we’ll figure out how to continue advancing humanity. And that is why we’re on a mission to disrupt tech.