Does such an idea really exist? One that would truly survive this approach? It's a bit of a Hackernews meme, but just look at the infamous comment about Dropbox (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224).

Right. You can come up with a million excuses why any idea won't work. Then you look at things like spacex and realize that it took someone trying an idea that by all means should have failed.

I mean you gotta have some insight and rationality to avoid making another pet rock, but it's not hard to find potential flaws. The op above sounds like an engineer commenting on how to be a ceo.

> that by all means should have failed

Why should it have failed? What did the engineers and salespeople at SpaceX do about those reasons?

A) Throw their hands up and decide they weren’t worth investigating solutions to them

B) Plow forward and completely ignore them

C) Study the problems to understand the conditions that would make them irrelevant

D) Study the problems, decide the only way out of them was through solving them, and then apply their skills and time to doing so

E) both C and D

————

There is this idea I keep seeing. I’ll call it, “Impossible is Nothing”. Where you ignore roadblocks just plow forward blindly in spite of them and overcome them through force of will. But magic doesn’t exist. Things don’t get built because someone shouted loud enough. Things get built because people saw the potential problems and then

1) Exercised judgement to evaluate if the problems were real.

2) If so, applied skill to uncover their details and solve them.

If you decide to skip step #1 and just blindly have faith that the problem isn’t real, then it still stands in your way and still causes you to fail.

The top reply to that comment is Drew Houston explaining why the first two objections aren’t true and the third one will be fixed in an upcoming release.

Blind faith would have led Drew to ignore the comment out-of-hand and stay focused on plowing forward. (Or try to anyway. Some people don’t know how to avoid distraction when they’re trying to suppress suspicions that they are going down the wrong path.)

Ideas that survive this amount of scrutiny will have many competitors, because they are reasonable. This limits the magnitude of possible success. A foolish idea however, one where almost everybody finds a good reason not to do it will be exceptionally successful for that one blindly faithful fool if the reasons not to do it turn out wrong due to some unpredicted freak coincidence. Blind faith is the lottery approach, can't beat the ROI of a winning lottery ticket.

If Google's founders had done this, they would never have started the business, as at the time search was considered a poor market, already carved up between a few dominant players, and with no effective means of monetisation.

The Google founders kept trudging on because they had seen an anomaly that no one else had observed or no one else was willing to fix.

They had built PageRank for BackRub that proved to be superior in almost every way to the dominant way search engines were built. The dominant way also had a glaring flaw that skewed search accuracy — keyword spam.

In a way, they saw themselves as been on a mission to rectify the anomaly in how search results were currently being computed by demoing to investors just how better their search results were compared to the competition, and in the end, with their help, they managed to succeed.

It depends on how many domain experts (N) disagree with you and how much of an expert you are. If you're not an expert in the domain, you can forget about it. If you are, then the chance you should scrap the idea is proportional to N.

With technologies pushing the edge of research, N is typically very small, and being headstrong and willing to take risks and experiment is an essential skill. At some point, you alone are a large enough fraction of N that all of humanity is essentially depending on you to take the risk. If you don't then it might be a very long time until someone equally as capable will.

Aren't most of Elon Musks projects examples of blind f faith? Who would have agreed that starting a new auto manufacturer based solely on electric vehicles was a good idea? A new rocket company? Going up against some of the biggest most established companies with probably the "old boy network" working to prevent entry of newcomers. Seems like blind faith to me.

There is a saying that approximates to: "your solution is only as good as your understanding of a problem" and this is especially true of Elon Musk.

From your perspective, his projects might look like blind faith. But from Elon Musk's perspective, he felt he had a better understanding of the viability of those projects to undertake them -- he knew or had a vague idea of which levers to pull that hadn't been pulled in a certain way before, or perhaps new levers had appeared that hadn't been noticed by experts in the field.

This is why humans are different -- our life experiences shape our perspectives and our perspectives shape our understanding. Elon's confidence comes from his better grasp of the challenges to make EV a reality which is why he felt emboldened to tackle the problem anew, where others had failed.

Elon felt his understanding of EV and how they would evolve made him uniquely qualified to invest in an EV venture called Tesla when he was pitched by Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning in 2003.

And it goes both ways: bankrolling a EV startup at that time was considered crazy.

Elon's personal bankrolling of a rocket company back in 2002 gave off two crucial signals:

1. a money-bag that gets manufacturing (only a handful fit this criteria);

2. a money-bag with the right kind of crazy (an even smaller handful fit this criteria);

that assured Martin and Marc that Elon was the right person they should be speaking to to invest in Tesla, which he did.

Those two signals were necessary for the investor minority at that time to appreciate the value proposition of Tesla. The majority of investors actually laughed off such an investment as what Elon himself characterized as "idiocy squared".

Being aspirational does not imply lack of homework on Elon Musk's part. In fact I would respect Elon Musk a lot less if he did not do his due diligence before starting to work on all of his companies. Faith is tested deeply during most entrepreneurial journeys, which is all the more reason why one needs to do their homework before starting.

You seem to be missing everyone's point.

Virtually anyone who would consider Elon Musk's ideas using your approach would immediately throw them out, for many many reasons. So your approach is meaningless unless you can tell everyone exactly what criteria to use when deciding if something "would not work."

If your assertion is just that you have to be so smart that you can analyze all the variables and correctly predict the future, then that's not really useful to anyone is it?

Just because something is aspirational does not mean it is an exercise in blind faith. Plenty of aspirational things have happened in the past.

From Elon’s perspective, we live in a simulation, so it’s not faith, it’s understanding how the simulation works.

Sometimes this works but most times you don't know what you don't know. And because of that you end up discrediting an idea which if you had stayed at would have revealed a new direction that would become a success. In sense the idea becomes a stepping stone for you to see farther and higher.

Although not all the time.

So decision is still a big chance, either way

I would like to know if you’ve had a successful startup using that technique, or if you are speculating about the correct approach.

I run a successful business and have been trying to build nextcept for a while now on the side. I think it's just a needed area. Depth over superficial conversations to find solid people to work with.

Not speculating. Also, this is the strategy I have seen most experienced entrepreneurs around me use.

"Not speculating"

So just to be clear, you have had a idea, used your approach and succeded?

[Citation needed]

Ha. I agree. People these days just seem to respond to outlandish claims over something real like - I’m building a venture network that helps teams come together and here’s an article I wrote about everything I’ve learned so far.

That sounds like a horrible suggestion when considering the stories of most successful start ups. Look at Theranos, it would have died a quick death like this, but ended up being a hugely successful business right up to the point of collapse. And had someone with the tons money and resources solved the core issue a month before the collapse Theranos would be a gigantic success overall. The one mistake of Theranos was committing outright fraud instead of just doing legal bullshiting and being honest about potential critical failings.

The key to building and idea is to ensuring the resources are there to build it, not to kill it while it’s still in the idea phase. No one ever became the founder of a billion dollar company by being cynical early on.

And sure you might think that you save yourself from “wasting 5 years of your life”. It my experience is that founders who work 5 years on establishing a vc backed company that ultimately fail just walk straight on to another leadership role in another company, and they had a great sallery and job for those five years, so what is really wasted?

Oh wow, a Theranos apologist! I can't believe I actually saw one of those in the wild, I'll record it in my logbook.

There's a big difference between "fake it till you make it" and "crime it till you climb it". You can have blind faith in your product, but you can't lie just lie about your business constantly in the hope that maybe one day your lies will be true.

I’m in no way a Theranos apologist. What they did was evil and crimininal because they pushed far ahead of what any moral startup would do. But they weren’t evil solely because their leadership had blind faith in their product. And for all intents and purposes emulating everything at Theranos that made them Successfull, minus the criminal parts, is a good idea. No one was saying “I wouldn’t invest in them, they believe touch in their product” back in the early phases when they where booming forwards. At the same time, if you skip the blind faith, Bill Gates would just be a regular boring rich kid today, never having bought DOS after already sellling IBM, he would have just told them cynically that he weren’t even sure if it would work out and they would have passed him up.

>Look at Theranos, it would have died a quick death like this, but ended up being a hugely successful business right up to the point of collapse.

Your mistake is in conflating "successful business" and "fraud." It was not a successful business until the collapse, it was a successful fraud. In this way, I believe you're promoting a poor ethical standard, one that valorizes crime as long as you get away with it.

Well, consider the Catholic Church, it's been able to keep the story alive for 1500 years without ever, once, demoing a working product to it's investors. Sometimes people just want something to believe in, and old white guys Bill Clinton, Henry Kissinger and Rupert Murdoch weren't looking for a product, or an ROI, they were looking for a savior. While Holmes will never unlock the gates of heaven, she demonstrated clearly that she will fight at all costs to keep that dream alive, she made her value proposition and she delivers, she is still fighting.

You can declare that kind of religiosity unethical, but it comes off sounding slightly disingenuous when that kind of religiosity was instrumental in forming the ethical foundations of western civilization.

The traditional religions, of course, aren't super compatible with the modern world and we're moving away from them. Still, people need things to believe in as much as they ever did so it shouldn't be surprising that non-traditional religions such as Musk or Theranos will emerge.

With the most deeply held beliefs it's essential that they can never be proven true, because they'll stop being beliefs and become facts, which don't serve the intended purpose. For Theranos to fulfill it's mission, that blood testing device can never materialize.

For most startups it's about having blind faith that an idea can be turned into a meaningful service or product. With Theranos blind faith is the product, and it's the most meaningful product of all.

Have you or someone you know successfully ran a company for 5 years on an idea that you/they simply had a blind trust on? My goal is not to insult your intelligence. I merely want to point out that this is the strategy I have seen most experienced entrepreneurs around me use.

Steve Jobs and Apple is a much better example. Any blue ocean idea is easy to shoot down