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- Tony Fadell on how you will know it’s the right time to go full-time on a startup idea
Tony Fadell on how you will know it’s the right time to go full-time on a startup idea
Tony Fadell is the co-creator of the iPod, iPhone, and Nest. As he puts it in the clip below:
“Great ideas chase you.”
He continues:
“In this world, there are so many people who have more ideas than they have time to implement… I used to be like that. But the best ideas are the ones that you can really focus on… Now I try to run away from a great idea. And then it stalks me. It hunts you down because you’re like: ‘Ah, that’s going to have this problem, I’m going to put it aside.’ And then a few days later, you’re like: ‘Actually I think I know how to solve that problem.’ At some point it just becomes this black hole that sucks you in and you can’t think about anything else but this.”
Mark Zuckerberg gave similar advice in a previous Startup Archive answer:
“I always think the most important thing entrepreneurs should do is pick something they care about and work on it, but don’t actually commit to turning it into a company until it’s working. If you look at the data of the very best companies, I think a tremendous percentage of them have been built that way and not from people who decided upfront that they wanted to start a company because you just get locked into a local maxima a lot of the time.”
Let great ideas chase you and don’t turn it into a company until it’s working. There’s almost always a ton of work you you can do upfront to de-risk an idea before turning it into a company. And perhaps just as important: you want to make sure you’re still excited about the idea after a few months and the novelty has worn off—it should be all you can think about.
Companies are almost always a 10 year project if they work and a 2-3 year project if they fail. It’s worth it to be patient before jumping in with two feet.