Helping or hurting?
Laurent Haug, founder of the great LIFT conference in Geneva, recently analyzed the European startup scene on his blog and came to one conclusion: There is not enough cruelty. Because we Europeans are too nice and not critical enough, startups with bad ideas are encouraged to continue. This, writes Laurent, has broad consequences: Less capital, less talent and less attention for the really good startups. And when the bad startups finally fail, it’s much harder on them, because they have been working on their ideas for longer.
I think Laurent has a point here. As Brad Gillespie notes in his comment, criticizing a startup idea that you think is bad will probably not make the entrepreneurs give up. But it will make them think harder about what they actually want, and how they are going to achieve it.
Over the last months, we had (and still have) our fair share of people criticizing the idea and the vision behind Sandbox, saying it is too blurry, or has been tried before, or is just a stupid idea anyway. None of these criticisms made us want to stop what we’re doing, but they always raised some doubts about whether our current plan would really work. The doubts then led to more thinking, and the thinking eventually led us to refine or adapt our plans. This process took a lot of time, and was at times also painful, but we believe that it helped turn Sandbox from a good idea into a project with great potential. Hurting someone’s feelings by heavily criticizing an idea can sometimes be really helpful in the long term.
On the 13. October 2008 at 11:07 o'Clock
I know a couple of people who gave us feedback who might recognise themselves in this post :-)
On the 17. October 2008 at 18:20 o'Clock
Since you start with the sandbox example, I assume you also reference to the sandbox project in the last sentence. At this very early stage of your project, how can you judge which feedback will really be useful in the long term and which won’t?
The point I’m missing in your post is that sometimes you’re just right and everyone around you is not. There are pioneers out there who successfully follow new, unimaginable pathways to their uncommon goal and who succeed. So yes, feedback can be useful but many times it’s just not and the process of thinking about it just costs a lot of time.
On the 20. October 2008 at 13:12 o'Clock
@Andi: I tend to agree with you that sometimes, you’re right and everybody else is not. What that means is that you have to stay true to your idea, you have to believe in it - even if everybody around you is skeptic. But my point is that this does not mean that you should refute the critics’ arguments altogether. They may point out a weak element in your idea or project, and listening to the critics gives you the opportunity to fix this weakness.
To give a concrete example: We presented our project a while back to somebody who used to be a consultant (and is now running a foundation). He asked some very critical questions, and above all, he criticized our idea of organizing a conference: In his opinion, conferences are an old concept and did not go well together with our promises of youth and innovation. He suggested to do an online-only conference.
This input did not convince us to skip the conference. We still want to do it. But it made us think harder about why we want it, and if there were alternative solutions.
On the 31. October 2008 at 16:16 o'Clock
It is a good point that blindly congratulating without criticism can be unhelpful, but this idea misses one important point: Success cannot be predicted, and things must be tried out. When history has proved that great successes often started as crazy ideas deemed bad, how can “startups with bad ideas” be judged so before they “are encouraged to continue”? I think it’s just the reality of the situation that “capital…talent and …attention” will always need to be risked, and stretched across the unknown landscape of potentially good and bad ideas.