3) It’ll Show You How Flexible Your Ideas Need to Be

In Dharmesh Shah’s recent essay on How To Kill Your Startup, he believes that startups often fail due to “death by determination”, or stubbornness. To quote Dharmesh,

“Dogged determinedness will likely keep you from building the business that you could have built.”

Along similar lines, a venture capitalist once told us that a startup’s final product usually contains very little of the original idea. Considering that we first tried to create an ASP content management system instead of a form builder, Flickr started off as a game for girls and Craig Newmark just wanted to help people find cool events, he might be on to something. Not only is it important to start now because your idea needs time to mature, but because oftentimes one idea will lead to other non-related ideas. Who knows if we would have or Microsoft if Joshua Schachter and Bill Gates hadn’t first bombed on Loaf and Traf-O-Data.

三、它会让你明白一个想法的灵活性究竟有多大

在Dharmesh Shah最近的一篇相关文章中，他认为创业失败的原因经常是“一条道走到黑”或者说执拗。用他的话说：

“顽固不化极可能妨碍你事业成功。即使你本能成功。”

同样的，有个风险投资商也告诉我们，一个创业公司的最终产品通常跟最初构想大相径庭。举例来说，我们开始是想做一个ASP的CMS而不是表单创建系统（htmlor注：Wufoo，作者三人后来创立的很成功的Web 2.0服务），Flickr最初是个给女孩子玩的游戏，Craig Newmark（htmlor注：Craigslist创始人）只不过想帮助人们找到有意思的活动。想到这些，他应该意识到了什么。现在就开始很重要，不仅因为想法需要时间才会变得成熟，而且一个想法也经常引发其他不相干的想法。假如Joshua Schachter的Loaf和Bill Gates的Traf-O-Data没有失败，我们会看到和Microsoft吗？天知道。（htmlor注：微软大佬Bill Gates与Paul Allen的初创公司Traf-O-Data无疾而终，创始人Joshua Schachter的首个项目Loaf也未能成功。）