The Last Laugh: Why Good Ideas Are Often Ridiculed at First

编者按: 在新的podcastMasters of Scale中，LinkedIn联合创始人兼Greylock合伙人里德·霍夫曼 (Reid Hoffman) 探索了他如何扩大业务规模的哲学-在Entrepreneur.com上，企业家们正在以自己的想法和经验回应ourhub。本周，我们将讨论霍夫曼的理论: 最具可扩展性的想法乍一看似乎很可笑。在此处收听本周的插曲。

There’s a meme floating around the internet that states: “The next time you’re afraid to share ideas, remember someone once said in a meeting, ‘Let’s make a film with a tornado full of sharks.’” The humor here is that the Sharknado film franchise, which sounds ridiculous on paper, has made millions of dollars and is currently working on its fifth entry.

This isn’t just a creative phenomenon, either; there are hundreds of businesses that, logically, sounded preposterous when they were first considered. There are the truly zany ideas, like the pet Rock, which enabled creator Gary Dahl to become a millionaire selling ordinary rocks at ridiculous profit margins. Then there are the breakout hits.

For example, it’s hard to imagine life without Google, but when it was first conceived, it sounded impossible. The idea of basing a business on a site that only sent traffic to other sites was bad enough -- and Google entered the market at a time when there were 20 other competing search engines. Twitter, which has seen better days but rocked the world with an initial $30 billion valuation, was thought to be a “stupid” idea by its engineers, and even one of its co-founders.

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The distinction factor

What makes something laughable in the first place?

For starters, it’s different than the norm. If you come to an investor with a business model for a company highly similar to dozens of successful businesses that came before you, you won’t raise any eyebrows; it’s a proven model. But, if you come to them with something completely unique -- a difficult feat -- you might be seen as naïve for the attempt.

However, in the business world, that distinction can be a huge advantage. It’s safe to build a business that follows the same model as a dozen others, but your customers won’t be able to distinguish you from your competitors. If you, instead, come up with something new, you’ll instantly be the thought leader -- the first and only person to specialize in this area -- and your competition won’t exist.

preparing for shifts

When Steve Jobs first started showing off the prototype for the modern iphone, critics were quick to point out the problem of a touchscreen keyboard, afraid that the public wouldn’t accept such a feature when physical key-based boards were the norm. His response? “They’ll get used to it.”

It’s a cocky reaction, but it illustrates an interesting concept that relates to the public acceptance of new technologies and new products. Generally, the spark that ignites a new trend isn’t the first product to hit the market; for this product, the timing is too early. But, sooner or later, there’s an explosive trend -- a tipping point -- that leads to the widespread adoption of some new feature that previously went unnoticed. Before the public is “ready” for an idea, and up to the point they “get used to it,” it seems ridiculous, but once it takes off, it’s undeniably brilliant. Everything new seems strange at first.

The many vs. the few

Scalability is an interesting quality because it isn’t inherently good for a new business. If you’re a one-person operation working with one or two big clients, you’re going to be using different strategies than a multi-million dollar corporation operating internationally. 58003

However, if you can manage to get past those early stages, the value of that scalable approach will kick in -- and suddenly, your abnormal small-scale model will seem brilliant now that it’s projected on a large-scale screen.

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So what can you learn from this, and how can you apply those lessons to your business?