Genius is one percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration according to Newsvine co-founder and CEO Mike Davidson.
I often hear people say things like “if only I thought of YouTube a year before YouTube did, I’d be rich”, implying that given first-mover advantage, that person could create a company as great as YouTube. A statement like this completely disregards just how difficult YouTube was to build, from having the balls to allow brazen copyright violation, to building a great user experience, to scaling out the ability to serve millions of video streams a day. In other words, 99 out of 100 people who may have had the same idea at the same time would have failed to create anything remotely as successful as YouTube.
In some cases, such as Hot or Not for instance, a relatively simple, though clever, idea has seen some “lucky” entrepreneurs rewarded handsomely (no pun intended), without a massive investment of money or layout of technical infrastructure.
The Million Dollar Homepage and Jump The Shark are other suggestions.
