A few years ago, Max Levchin—of PayPal and Slide fame— told me there were two kinds of entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley: Those who work tirelessly and are great at execution, and those who are visionary and truly create new ideas—and sometimes new markets. Levchin put himself in the former category. Indeed, a lot of Slide’s success has just been the result of doing a better job ripping off ideas from competitors like RockYou. He put Evan Williams of Blogger and Twitter in the latter. At the time, Twitter was only a techy phenomenon, but Max noted that unlike a lot of other Web 2.0 companies, Twitter was one of the only ones doing something untested and new.
With all the hyperbole about Twitter today, if I asked you whether the executor or the visionary would wind up being more successful, nearly everyone would say the visionary. But—as Levchin no doubt knew when he made this point—the visionary is usually the one that gets the shaft in Silicon Valley.
Napster changed the music world, but it was iTunes that profited off of it. Google was one of the last companies in the Internet bubble to try their hand at building a search engine—and was laughed out of some VCs’ offices as a result. Palm pioneered the smart phone, not Blackberry. And Friendster was the social network pioneer before Mark Zuckerberg even entered college.
What about Apple? Well it was visionary when it came to the computer, but what turned the company around was the iPod and the iPhone—both just way better versions of MP3 player and smart phones. You can extrapolate it to enterprise software too: Is it i2, PeopleSoft or Siebel that ended up reaping top dog rewards for creating the software that now runs every single large company? Nope. It’s SAP—a company great at applications but horrible at underlying technology—and Oracle—a company great at technology but horrible at applications.
Of course, you can’t talk about this issue without bringing up TiVo: The company that revolutionized how we watch TV and dramatically altered the business model of nearly everyone in that medium, whether it’s cable companies, networks, or advertisers. What was its reward? The company has mostly limped along losing money as competitors ripped off their idea and gave boxes away for free. Most people who use the verb “TiVo” have never even owned a TiVo.
Tom Rogers, TiVo’s CEO, granted a rare interview to NBC’s Press:Here, and he laid out his vision for why TiVo is getting stronger. First there are the financials: It finally turned a profit on net income last year, and a healthy one at about $100 million. Second, there’s the stock: It’s up from a November 16 low of $4.60 a share to nearly $11 a share. But the big question is where future growth will come from. Who doesn’t have a TiVo who wants one at this point?
In essence, Rogers says the company’s future lies in three main areas: Getting way more content than just broadcast and cable on their box; pioneering Internet-like market research on what people watch down to the second they start fast-forwarding through a commercial, and cooperating with TV stations to come up with ways to get their advertising message across that people will actually consume. The heavy lifting here won’t be innovation as much as it’ll be tough execution. Of course the company could always get bought. But given the stock bump, that’s probably not in the offing any time soon.
It’s not surprising that the focus is on programming and TV-partnerships since Rogers is a TV guy, not a techy. He was a long time NBC executive who co-founded CNBC and MSNBC. Notice in this clip how deftly he bats aside the question I asked about product innovation and why TiVo was so late to the HD game. The full episode can be viewed in the Bay Area on Sunday morning on NBC or here now.
tivo not in silicon valley. fail.
if they moved to the valley they would be better off.
> tivo not in silicon valley. fail.
Tivo is in Alviso, right off 237, the expressway across north San Jose between Fremont and Mountain View. In other words, Tivo is in Silicon Valley.
Don’t know where Alviso is? Fail.
Tivo is in the *heart* of Silicon Valley.
Cho’s snide and ignorant comment= Fail
i can see the tivo office on my way to lunch everyday in the heart of the valley (next to yahoo)
FAIL = FAIL
Let’s not miss the point folks. (Mainly Cho.)
$100 Million in Profit from working tirelessly = WIN.
But TiVo’s utter lack of UI improvement over the last few years makes me desperate to find a competitor who’s better.
Perhaps will be the myspace to someone’s facebook soon.
Great post and analogies. A combination of the two, with two founders, would really be the ideal situation, it seems.
It’s not about importance, the disciplines of ideation and execution are TOTALLY UNRELATED. The question is one of respect and trust, and people (for some odd reason) trust people who get things done.
Not always a bad impulse, but if you choose execution at the EXPENSE of vision, then you wind up chasing dying models, strangling your paying customers for every last cent while you can, and then dying a sudden painful death (or buyout, or metamorphosis into something better – but still painful).
Vision without execution is problematic, but not equally so – yeah, it’s easy to “see” that a great vision unexecuted is worth less than a mediocre one that gets “done”… But, only really because people weirdly “chase vision” as the cooler discipline, while giving true and focused visionaries (who get nothing actually DONE) zero respect.
The Valley does suck, mostly because they tried to offset the coder (executive) mindset with marketing (dullard me-too stupidity) instead of vision. You can start to see the cracks in the walls of the old guard, and I do think eventually visionary thinkers (many of whom have some serious ADD) are going to be a respected professional class unto themselves… But it’s going to take a while for it to happen. My 15 month old will probably lamenting in her middle age how easy the kids of the future have it, where they can simply think up ideas for money.
“where they can simply think up ideas for money”
Been there, done that, do not recommend.
You don’t get clean money for only ideas. Everyone gets ideas, good ones. Similar ones. Relevant ones. Precise ones. Useful ones. Stunning ones. All types. Everyone. Only the guy close to the Patent Office gets the Patent. If he has more resources, he makes the product too. Or he hires a lawyer to make idea money. The business makes you an intellectual parasite. It’s not nice. Trust me. You either wander around looking at puzzled faces or you become a parasite and make money by pointing the patent gun at every other fat moneybag. Not good.
That’s why you need Silicon Valley around you, people understand what you’re talking or ask you to improve your design or idea or vision.
Old saying: A man is known by the company he keeps. If you’re in Silicon Valley, you could become well-known due to the company you keep.
The first few paragraphs sound like a sneak peek at that new book of yours, Sarah.
oh yeah, when will they announce the names of the winners for Sarah’s book?
Does she talk about herself that much in her books, too?
Don’t know. Haven’t read it. I was kinda hoping to win it.
Wow, i didn’t realize that tivo was that unsuccessful financially. I guess they really did get shafted pretty hard.
definitely true. also goes back to invention in the industrial revolution. inventions always get ripped off since the inventors don’t know how to execute properly
Google and Apple did not come to dominate the areas referenced in the article because of ‘execution’. Yes, lack of good execution would have certainly prevented them from succeeding, but it was solid business models that made them what they are. Great execution with a weak business model never brought any company much success, imo.
Annon, good business model is part (a very important one) of good execution..
If you do not think so, what do you consider good execution?
Choosing to programme PHP over .NET?
oh man, i think it always depends on the programmer , the task and the how well the framework is suited to the task.
.Net is awesome for desktop apps, I prefer python for scientific (still trying to kick my matlab habit) and web apps though.
Python for scientific?? Tell me more.
Wasn’t Google’s initial business model about selling their technology to other portals?
Great post Sarah, but you failed to mention ReplayTV, which was a DVR pioneer and in the market before TiVo. ReplayTV had automatic commercial skipping and the ability to transfer recorded shows & movies in 2000. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReplayTV
Another example: Joost pioneered the ad supported premium video space…Hulu executed better.
Hulu didn’t win because they executed better. They won because of the assets they had available, as a joint venture by Fox and NBC (and later ABC/Disney). Joost had to pay for the rights to everything. That shit’s expensive.
Good read and an interesting question. But isn’t the real issue outcomes? Satisfied customers, financial results and growth are more about the whole business, not the personality of the entrepreneur.
Anyone who wants to start a business pretty much can. I haven’t seen any solid research that shows a causal relationship between personality and business outcomes. In fact, I’ve seen success come from both the execution and vision camps.
Let’s not forget the other popular camps out there: the collaborator, the bully, the maverick, etc. Diversity rules.
“Every idea MUST go through the trash can” – read some stories about the entrepreneurs of the past, they are informative.
http://www.mediaweek.com/mw/content_display/news/digital-downloads/metrics/e3i6fad5a2a1d8e5132095b309a55981cc9
Is it i2, PeopleSoft or Siebel that ended up reaping top dog rewards for creating the software that now runs every single large company? Nope. It’s SAP—a company great at applications but horrible at underlying technology—and Oracle—a company great at technology but horrible at applications.
That is so wrong. Oracle vs SAP technology = have you used either? Serious why else does Oracle buy out its rivals to fill out its technological weaknesses.
You should do some research before you amke some blaise statements. Serious get an education first before you trump this rubbish.
Oracle buys market share, not technology! Duh.
“Most people who use the verb ‘TiVo’ have never even owned a TiVo.” Since TiVo was a pioneer, the company became the generic name–like Kleenex or Xerox–for digital video recording; it’s interesting, though, that the company is not leading the industry financially. We’ll see if they can somehow utilize that brand recognition to increase profits.
This simple A/B entrepeneur breakdown does not work. Further, the assumptions used to provide a foundation are completely off on a per company basis.
Care categorizing these companies:
Amazon
Pointcast
Preview Travel
“It’s SAP—a company great at applications but horrible at underlying technology—and Oracle—a company great at technology but horrible at applications.”
I don’t think you understand the underlying technology. Enterprise application is more than just a database. SAP underlying technology is superior to its competitors, the usability of it is a whole different story.
napster – itunes
friendster – facebook
those are examples of first mover vs. fast follower
but not necessarily good analogies of execution vs. visionary. –> which are leadership types rather than strategies
Great article. I’m thinking that execution is always required to be successful. So, maybe it’s not vision versus execution, but execution plus vision or execution plus “ripping off others” or execution plus whatever – you get the point.
So, for example, we could call Friendster a visionary failure (at least compared to Facebook), but then again, we could also call hundreds of other copycat social networks failures as well. So, at the end of the day, you won’t succeed without execution – but even with it, success isn’t guaranteed if you’re executing the wrong ideas.
Another advantage of being an executor rather than an innovator is that executors tend to execute year after year, while few people/companies have more than one radical innovation.
Excepting obvious improvements like HD capacity and more storage, today’s top-of-the-line TiVo might be 20 percent better than the debut device. Might.
The company has pretty much stagnated idea-wise, and if the current CEO thinks he’s gong to make money by partnering with content makers rather than partnering with his customers to fight content makers, then customers clearly shouldn’t expect many radical improvements in the pipeline.
Vision without execution is day dreaming. Execution without vision is a nightmare.
[chinese saying]
Very interesting article. A lot of people said and are saying that they had the similar ideas as ours after we launched but none of them is even close to executing any of them.
The problem with visionaries is NOT that they don’t know *how* to implement, it’s that they usually don’t know *when* to implement. When you see the future clearly, it is hard to accept how far away it is. Visionaries almost always try to implement too soon.
I could give many examples from my own career… But, since you mention Tivo, I’ll suggest my grandfather as an example. Back in the 1940’s, he put a tremendous amount of effort into “movies on demand” delivered to home televisions. His “Phonevision” system was deployed to several hundred homes in the Chicago area in 1950. But, it failed in part due to the movie companies who resisted home viewing of movies — claiming that by putting TV projectors in movie theaters, they would be able to save home owners the expense of buying televisions. Today, movies-on-demand is normal. Back in the 40’s, it was visionary. My grandfather knew well how to execute and proved it with many other products. But 1950 was simply too early to execute on movies-on-demand, no matter how accurate his vision might have been and no matter how well he knew how to execute a market introduction.
bob wyman
the road to success is paved with the bodies of failures. its not just when… and its never first to the market.
Its first to get it right.
you only get it right by looking at all the people who got it wrong.
Unless you get it right the first time.
Some very interesting comments here. I’ve been on both sides of the fence so many times over so many years. Too many people don’t execute because they’re afraid of failure. Vision without execution spells provarocation. Rgds Vince
PresshereTV just took 3 minutes to load what ever they were trying to load into that god awful player of theirs.
Get a new player folks.
@Cho – you’re a moron, a fast poster but a moron none the less.
@HTK – Joost pioneered ad supported video!!! HA HA – that has to be the funniest TC comment of all time. Have you ever heard of Television? You know that ad supported medium of moving pictures. They even have color!
Execution always wins. Twitter is a great example. Twittering will be around for years – I’ll bet that others do it better than Twitter within a year.
The web is littered with great ideas and failed businesses. Its all about execution. Wait for the innovators to make the mistakes and then take advantage of their mis steps.
You’re assuming that the innovators will make mistakes.
Execution is key. But having the guts to either start executing (even if it’s ripping off another idea) or changing course mid-stream to maintain competitive position is even more important.
One without the other is FAIL
First!!
oh, wait for it…
FAIL
Speaking as an “execution” guy, and as a Master of the Obvious…
Execution Trumps Everything
No, dude, I saw “The Apprentice.” It’s “Trump Executes Everyone.”
Maybe I’m missing something, but when we talk about executing, aren’t we talking about executing a vision? The cart without the horse goes nowhere.
Wasn’t this kind of settled by Edison a 100 years ago
“Genius is one percent inspiration, ninety-nine percent perspiration”
Slightly different context but same general idea.
methinks – vision will always be the kool-kid in the town.
Good assessment. Most adults of course do both though they tend to be good at one or the other. While we are talking of executors, there’s the story of Bill Gates and DOS, and both him and Steve Jobs versus Xerox when it comes to the UI and mouse!
Regarding SAP, I don’t know which category Agassi falls under. He tried really hard to convert the underlying technology in SAP to Java, but I think he ended up with an interesting mix and the customers haven’t upgraded as much as SAP wanted.
He is likely a visionary given his interesting grand scheme to bring electric power to cars. Like any good visionary, he’s been able to sell the idea and get an amazing initial funding. Whether California will see the battery swap stations of his or not, is yet to be seen.