Think until your head is about to burst.
Be a person who is hard to deal with.
Anything you can imagine, you can make real.
Cling to fairness.
Hold humility together with an unyielding strength.
Have the courage to give your passion even if it means cutting off your escape.
Read the next era ahead of time and wait for the era to catch up.
Don't shrink your own vessel.
The real condition for being a true colleague is 'will.'
— from Masayoshi Son's sayings
A really bad idea
It might sound brutal, but my job is finding startups at their early stage (including pre-launch).
After I've ignored how dumb I thought they were, I've watched them blow up unbelievably. Something like this has happened to me at least four times. Every time I promise myself I won't call their idea crappy again, and every time it happens again.
I don't know if the lesson here is a warning about arrogance, but I have two stories to share with you.
Late 2009, I got an email from someone who wanted to meet and get advice on what I thought about their new project.
At the time I was a designer and he wanted to hear some advice from me. So we agreed to meet at The Creamery (a coffee shop), the classic San Francisco startup meeting spot.
\"I want to make a mobile app for browsing catalogs. Like a fashion catalog where you can share and organize outfits,\" he said.
Then he pulled out his iPhone and showed me a prototype with only the bare minimum features. The UI was plain and kind of clunky: the side-swipe navigation only worked after several tries.
And he kept showing me women's outfits appearing one after another. I said \"nice\" but I dismissed the idea.
How on earth could a 20-something in Silicon Valley launch a service targeting middle-aged women? Would those middle-aged women even want this service? Do they even have iPhones? I think I asked a string of questions like this — I don't even remember what he answered.
And I thought, 'this is really bad.'
We finished our coffee, and he seemed to feel I wasn't interested. As we parted, he asked me this:
\"By the way, what do you think of the name we came up with? We called it Pinterest.\"
*Pinterest: a blockbuster social service that hit 17 million members in just 9 months.
(Second story omitted.)
If someone asks in the comments, I'll translate it.
These days I have a lot on my plate, so... (T_T)
Going back to meetings with Pinterest founder Ben Silbermann and Dom Hofmann (Vine founder), I deeply regret the reaction I gave them in those meetings. Within five seconds of meeting either of them, you could see the passion they had. They saw the future and actually made it real. But because of my own mistaken biases, I didn't look at the strengths of their early work — I doubted it, immediately pointed out problems, and dismissed their ideas.
Seeing the future through the lens of the present is very hard. It's easy to unconsciously dismiss a first version that looks trivial or useless. Or dismiss it as a foolish idea.
