Idea Maze, Multi-Maze

The Idea Maze is a company's path to its desired outcome.

A path that traverses the limitless series of pitfalls and obstacles that lie before any venture worth undertaking.

Balaji Srinivasan puts it like this:

"A good founder is capable of anticipating which turns lead to treasure and which lead to certain death.

A bad founder is just running to the entrance of (say) the “movies/music/filesharing/P2P” maze or the “photosharing” maze without any sense for the history of the industry, the players in the maze, the casualties of the past, and the technologies that are likely to move walls and change assumptions."

Strong ideas are well-considered, multi-year plans that consider many possible paths through an unknown, changing world.

In this path of paths, there are near-infinite degrees of freedom to choose. And therefore, near-infinite ways in which to be wrong.

At the beginning, a founder* is walking up to the edge of several mazes. Peering in, perhaps taking a few tentative steps to get a feel for how the maze might work and how they might behave in any maze.

Now founders must choose. There's little benefit in a series of hesitant steps at the mouths of many mazes.

With a maze selected, we've passed the initial hurdle. The maze is ready to be mapped out and meandered through. A founder can focus on this idea maze, and this maze alone.

Beware however, some mazes open out into others.

They intersect and cross. You can traverse them.

Consider the idea maze then as a multi-entry, multi-exit maze with occasional intersections between different mazes. And many more intersections between strongly overlapping idea spaces. These intersections are essentially minor-pivots.  

Now, some mazes overlap and intersect in ways that are surprising. Before Uber, few would have thought that the taxi maze had passages across to the scooter maze. Or that there was an off-shoot into Food Delivery or even double-sided ratings mechanisms.

Most paths in the idea maze fork to dead ends, traps, doldrums and monsters.

And as in the single maze - the bad founder who rushes to the entrance of many mazes tends to traverse many contiguous mazes. Some traversing will be necessary as assumptions and the world we live in change. But many traverses simply leaves you deep within a maze you didn't expect to find yourself in at all. And one for which you are ill-prepared.

With little sight out of it.

A new maze full of unfamiliar traps and unexpected monsters. And you with a shrinking set of ideas of how to move forward.

Consider then, each traverse (each pivot) an almost-reset. Just because you're deep in a maze - doesn't mean you're deep in the contiguous one.

Navigate with caution.

Remember, mazes are multi-dimensional and moving.

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Notes

*I am using founder loosely here to include those starting new ventures within existing companies and institutions.