They saw the future and still failed
You can have the right idea at the right time with all the money in the world and still not ship.
For anyone here and anyone with the entrepreneurial bug or the tech bug, I would watch this. It's on a company called General Magic.
They saw the future in the 80s and early 90s. They were trying to build the iPhone. And they got feature creep is what happened.
Everything was just piled into it. And they had more money than any other company at any time because everybody knew it could be amazing.
But they didn't have enough constraint.
That's the thing that kills most projects. Not lack of vision. Not lack of funding. Not even lack of talent. It's the absence of constraint.
When you have unlimited resources and unlimited time, you keep adding. One more feature. One more integration. One more thing that would be cool if it worked.
And then the whole thing collapses under its own weight.
Even though the company was a fail, almost everybody from that company went on to be big shots elsewhere. And that led to the iPod and the iPhone and everything.
So they had the right people. They had the right idea. They just didn't have the thing that forces you to ship.
Constraint is what makes you choose. It's what makes you say 'this feature, not that one.' It's what makes you launch before it's perfect. It's what makes you cut the thing you're most proud of because it's slowing everything else down.
And I know that sounds like a limitation. But it's actually the opposite.
Constraint is the feature.
When you only have a weekend, you can't build everything. So you build the one thing that matters most. When you only have a small budget, you can't hire a whole team. So you figure out what you can do yourself. When you only have one shot to pitch something, you can't explain every detail. So you find the one sentence that makes somebody lean in.
The tighter the constraint, the clearer the decision.
And the thing about General Magic that gets me is this. They had so much talent that came out of that failure and went on to build the actual future. The iPod. The iPhone. The things that changed everything.
So the lessons were there. The people were there. But the thing that shipped, the thing that actually changed the world, came later when somebody said 'we're making a music player. That's it. Not a camera. Not a phone. A music player.'
And then after that worked, 'we're making a phone. That can also play music.'
One thing at a time. That's the constraint.
Here's your homework:
- Look at what you're building right now. Write down every feature or idea that's part of it. Then cross out half of them. Just cross them out. You can add them later. Ship the other half first.
- Set a deadline that feels uncomfortably close. Not impossible. Just uncomfortable. And commit to it out loud to someone who will hold you to it.
- Find one thing you're doing because it's cool or impressive but it's not actually moving you closer to done. Cut it. Today.
Constraint isn't the enemy. Constraint is what separates the people who build from the people who plan forever.
Stay in the fight, Kevin
Pulled from a live call I was on and turned into this post with my AI setup. I spoke these words and my system cleaned them up. I use it to mine and produce content from my daily life and document the lessons I'm learning at a volume that wasn't possible in the past. If you see this footer, I used this system. If you don't, I wrote them word for word.