Surely that’s been done before. What’s so new about that? Yet another location-based social something or other? In startup land, where people constantly (and let’s face it: sometimes incessantly) tell others about their business ideas, that’s often the feedback people give founders and wannabe tech moguls when they hear about their ideas. But even technologies that sound truly revolutionary are actually incremental.
The New York Times has an article written by Nathaniel Popper, the author of a newly published book about the history of Bitcoin. When telling the story of one of the early contributors to the digital currency, Mr Popper writes:
Mr. Szabo’s story provides insight into often misunderstood elements of Bitcoin’s creation. The software was not a bolt out of the blue, as is sometimes assumed, but was instead built on the ideas of multiple people over several decades.
Bitcoin didn’t materialize fully formed in Satoshi Nakamoto’s head out of thin air. It was built on work done by others before him.
When Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web he combined two technologies that were already well known and developed, hypertext and the Internet. Anyone who has studied Calculus and marvelled at the genius of Isaac Newton should remember that he was also building on prior knowledge, as he famously acknowledged in a letter to a colleague. “If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants“.
Bitcoin isn’t the only technology that is misunderstood in this respect. In my experience, people think the incremental is instead revolutionary and sometimes that the revolutionary is only incremental. But they are mistaken. The incremental and the revolutionary are one and the same thing.
When you tell a startup founder that his idea has been done before or that it doesn’t represent a big enough revolution – you might be right. But you might also be wrong. So, as you roll your eyes and deliver your verdict before sipping your beer at the next networking event, remember that Google, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and the World Wide Web itself were all incremental improvements to technologies that had been built in previous tiny steps of progress.