Mitch Kapor, the creator of the modern spreadsheet application and software industry luminary, came to speak at YCombinator last Tuesday. He was a childhood hero of mine. Some kids looked up to Batman or President Reagan or something... I looked up to the founders of Apple, Microsoft, and Lotus. He was incredibly well spoken and talked at length at what he's seen as a founder during the early days of the PC revolution, and later his experiences as a VC, angel, and advisor to startups. Incredible story, and it was fantastic to hear his lessons first hand. Part luck, and part pluck, really.
He emphasized how important it was to be at the forefront of a major market theme. Greg McAdoo has spoken about this previously at YC Startup School and that's generally Sequoia Capital's guiding light when searching for the next big startup hit. As an entrepreneur, you have to ride a wave -- you are not God. You can't create it. And often times, when it comes to computing or networks, you might not own the wave you're riding on. Mitch Kapor's first company, Lotus, essentially bet big on the x86+DOS architecture and won. But eventually Microsoft, who owned the most exciting ripcurl of the wave (the operating system), decided to enter their space. As a result, these days we use Excel.
There are similar waves happening today. The Facebook platform. The iPhone platform. Even the Adobe Air platform could be seen as new disruptions. Certainly Flash Video made an entire class of online apps possible. But as Mitch Kapor pointed out, "Nobody is clairvoyant." Nobody really knows what's going to happen in the moment, but as long as you have some skin in the game and your wits about you, good things can happen.