Optimally Naive

It's never feels good to be called Naive. But when it comes to startups, I want to propose the idea of Optimal Naiveté. This idea has been cooking around in my head for a few months on two levels.

First, I think any person doing something that is actually disruptive has to be incredibly Naive about how easy it will be. I know this is true about myself. Even today, after spending 2 years running full speed into walls, I still feel like, if I just sprint a bit faster, I could really change the world. Every day it occurs to me how stupid this is, but I just can't shake the Naiveté. But this is just the obvious "startups are hard" kind of statement that everybody says. I don't think this Naiveté actually helps Rebound be more successful outside the fact that, if I was more down to earth, I would have just gotten another job after the first wall / Russell interaction.

The more important  way that Naiveté effect success is on the technical / idea level. I think for any industry, if you had an impossible amount of data, you could construct a plot that looked like this:

The basic idea here is this: a person decides to start a company developing a technology for a given industry. That person is somewhere on the spectrum between Very Naive and Very Knowledgeable. Where they are on this curve matters. If that person is very knowledgeable the probability that they make something possible is very high, but the probability that they make something new is very low. On the other side of the spectrum it is the opposite. 

What is interesting is that the probability of making something that changes the world is something like the product of these two values. IE, in order to change the world your idea needs to work AND be new. A _____ that works 2% better than what we have today is great, but not going to change the world so much. A _____ that has crazy potential is also great, but if it is not actually going to work then it wont change the world at all. 

So there is some amount of Naiveté that is optimal. In the case of that first plot it is right in the middle. This might be true for some industry out there with a middle of the road approachability like robotics. There are technical barriers, but a smart person with a good idea probably wont run into insurmountable unknowns as they take their idea to the world. I think that the thermal process equipment industry (Rebound's industry) is something like this too.  

On the other hand, a industry with huge barriers to approachability like, lets say, the rocket industry. Might have a plot that looks more like this: 

Here, someone with an idea who is very Naive has a very low chance of success due to the many layers of technical unknowns that crop up between the conception of the idea and actually executing. Look at all the space startup failures! Actually, try to think of a success outside of SpaceX (and at the same time, look at how much SpaceX's technology has moved towards the norm over time). In this industry Niavete is a huge liability because the older more experienced engineers already have an idea of how things work. And there are not a lot of other ways of doing things. 

Now lets look at an industry were the opposite is true like the app industry! This industry might have a plot like this:

Here, being knowledgeable actually becomes a liability and being naive is a requirement. Think about it, if a CS fresh out of college has an idea of how a new app might change the world, what technical unknowns are there? Relatively few.  But the older more experienced app developers are at serious risk of becoming stale and antiquated because they already have an idea of how things work, but this time, there are many many ways that could work just as well if only they were Naive enough to try. 

Is this overly simplified? Oh hell yes! But the point is, we call people who have dreams of a different way of doing things Naive in order to diminish their idea. That is a hard argument to overturn because we know we are Naive. But nobody every points out that that Naiveté may actually be the trait that leads us to success. Or, more importantly, that the expert's own mountainous knowledge might be just the thing that leads to their empire's demise.