While waiting for a meeting at the University of Central Florida, a kid runs over to me and says, "Hi Kyle! Do you have some time to talk with me?" Immediately I began trying to figure out how we knew each other but after a few second, I put those investigative thoughts to the back of my head and said, "sure." The kid wanted to talk about his big idea and based on his body language and tone, he was super excited about it. He starts by telling me how original his idea was but the more I listened, the more unoriginal his idea became.
The kid tells me he wants to build a location-based social network and asked if I knew of any similar products. I told him yes because my company and other groups in California, New York, Singapore and some other place tried to build that product 4 years ago. I could see the kid deflate a little bit and when he asked me if the product worked, I felt a wrench in my gut because I knew what was coming next. I'd already dazed the kid with a right uppercut but to answer this question, I would have to take him to the top rope, jump off and power-drive him into the mat. The power-driving commence with the following statement:
"Listen up kid, conceptually, the idea is awesome but it does not work. Admittedly, myself and the 4 other individual groups could be stupid people, so let's not take that potential reality off the table. Location+Social is one of the holy grail's of technology because everybody has been trying to understand it for the last 9 years. After my group spent $40k and the other groups spent 30x more developing and proving out this idea, 7 billion people told us the product sucked. Ultimately, people didn't find any value in going through the effort of socializing online with a bunch of complete strangers around them. None of us could solve how to keep people from freaking out with location-based public social networking or the huge chicken-and-egg problem."
After telling him this, I wondered if this kid was going to get up off the mat but he did and immediately went into "idea upgrade mode." It's always fun to watch people go into "idea upgrade mode" because they're trying to salvage pride and more important, their brilliant idea. For the next five minutes he kept upgrading his idea and each time, I would sling him back over my shoulder, carry him to the top rope, jump off and power-drive him into the mat.
This kid tried hard but every upgrade he came up with was an upgrade that myself and the four other groups had tried. By the end of the conversation, the kid laid exhausted and in a puddle of sweat on the mat. As I stepped out the ring and headed back to the locker room, I turned around and said:
"Hey kid, good fight. I know you feel like you just lost but in fact, you won. The goal of entrepreneurship is to get from point A to point B faster than the other guy by straightening out the curves in the journey. Because of your fight, your journey just got straighter. By the way, I just saved you 4 years and $40k worth of heartache and pain."
Kyle Christian Steele
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