I’m a software engineer.
From time to time I have friends, or just associates, pitch me some idea for a startup that they want me to single-handedly develop for them.
Even though their ideas usually aren’t feasible, or particularly original, I’m always willing to give advice and I’ve developed some simple prototypes for people, for free, in the past.
But recently the trickle has become a flood. Everyone is convinced they have the next big thing. And if I tell them that no, actually I don’t have months or years of my life to spare trying to make their idea a reality, then I’m killing their dream.
What makes this pit-worthy is today I had two friends, on the same day, separately pitch me startup ideas that they want me to make.
And the first was fucking stupid. Seriously the conversation was like this:
Her: “I’m going to make a 3D game that will combine VR, AR, big data and deep learning! And it will process images so it can make photographs come to life!”
Me: “Erm…OK…That sounds very ambitious, and-”
Her: “So, how will the AI work?”
Me: “Huh? You haven’t actually told me a design yet, let alone requirements.”
Her: “The requirement is to make a smart game. So, how will the AI work?”
AAAAARGGGHHHHH!!
But of course I was too polite to shut down either “idea”. I’m supposedly “thinking about” whether I want to be on board. :smack:
I had a friend who considered him self a serious business man. In around 2003 he set up a serious private meeting to offer me a great business opportunity. He had basically come up with on-demand movie streaming and wanted me to completely implement it and finished with a cheesy stripmall basement business class"And don’t tell me no, tell me what you need to make it happen!!"
I told him around 20-30 billion to buy the rights to the movie libraries, 10 to 15 billion to build the network infrastructure to get a big enough distribution network to hit basic critical mass to make it profitable, and a 100000-1 time dilation device to allow me to get an EE degree and invent a high speed network and compression codec before the thousands of of teams spending billions of dollars for the last decade working on the same damn thing did.
He was so genuinely crushed I felt really bad about giving such a sarcastic jackass response, but… C’mon dude.:smack:
I get this all the time. I have more than a few friends in IT would want to make video games. So I get a lot of questions about or requests to build an AI. And no matter how many times I them tell that the AI I work on is not the kind of AI typically used in video games (which are usually state machines) it comes up again and again. It is very frustrating.
“Hey, you’re a doctor, right? I have a great business proposal for you. I’m the idea guy, right? So, here’s the deal. You develop a cure for cancer. And then I will market it for you. I’ll give you 20% of the profits. What do you say?”
“Developing a cure for cancer is not a trivial thing. Cancer is complex. And thousands of research teams are currently working on potential cures”
“Come on, you’re a smart guy, right? And I have the ideas! We’re a team! What’s it going to take for you to say “yes” to my business idea today? How about 25%?”
I found that when someone seeks my advice, they have already made up their mind already. They just want me to validate their decision no matter how stupid it may be.
Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
People think that ‘an idea’ is really extremely valuable, when almost everyone has vastly more ideas than they have time to develop. You’ll see this all the time in computer gaming, where someone comes up with the easy part (basic game concept, description of some cool areas and abilities) and thinks a game developer should hear it. But if you’re someone who works making games, you have dozens ideas of games that you’d like to make that you won’t ever have time to make, and the hard part of making a game is going from the base idea into actual rules and code, and creating the in-game art (not sketches of ideas) and making it work on actual hardware, plus of course getting someone to fund the game for the months or years it takes to do this.
I read an Asimov article where he would get this a lot. His usual response was “How about* I *give *you *an idea, *you *write the book, and we share the profits?”
I’m mostly a hardware guy (although I do a lot of embedded controller programming). I was introduced to someone who had an idea he wanted help with. It was a special purpose PDA-type device which was designed to track baseball stats when the user was at the game (I had no idea that was a ‘thing’). I listened carefully to what he wanted to do, and then I started to ask him questions, like what kind of display he wanted. He told me he wanted a VGA (or better) resolution touchscreen. I asked him how much this device was going to sell for (retail) and he said $20. I think I actually laughed at him. This was years before smartphones were ubiquitous, and at that time, the display alone was at least $50-$75 in production quantities (millions). I told him that I didn’t think it could be made for less than $100, and he got mad at me.
Well, to be fair, production companies will buy treatments. Sometimes that’s all they want, because they have a specific writer in mind whom they’ve worked with before & think said writer is a better investment than the unknown standing in front of them.
I’d think nothing of someone pitching a movie without a full script. In fact, I’d say they’re smart to not waste their time on something that the producer may not even want to see.
Except that the ground floor of Netflix was in 1997, five years before, and wouldn’t move into video streaming for another five years, 2007, and Hulu also wasn’t announced until 2006 and didn’t form until 2007. While the estimate for movie rights was insanely high, the $10-15 billion for network infrastucture was low - there just wasn’t that kind of bandwidth available in most places, and trying to get 2007 speeds in 2002 would not be cheap. Hulu was valued at around $1 billion in 2007 and Neflix was also similarly large, so the friend would probably need that kind of capital to do a streaming movie business, which isn’t likely if he’s doing a ‘friends and relatives’ business investment.
So no, Wolfman’s friend was half a decade too late to get in on the ground floor of Netflix, and half a decade too early for the streaming game to start.
