Is it better to be a starter or a finisher?

[Ward Cunningham]

Ward starts lots of things but often leaves it to others to carry them forward. Is this a good strategy to become rich or famous?

[phil jones]

Tell me about it. :-(

No, starting without finishing doesn't traditionally make you rich and famous.

But I wonder if it's possible to apply some creativity to this, to change that curve a bit.

First question : *why* does finishing make you rich and famous? Is it because you're closer to the final customers / users / consumers of the ideas? Is it some other reason?

Can some kind of branding help? Like "Intel inside" where a company in danger of becoming an anonymous commodity inside the computer fought for public recognition. So is there a "Ward Inspired" brand which can be injected into end-products?

Completely different angle : the new YASN-as-platforms (Ning, Facebook) etc. offer widget developers an interesting opportunity. You can write very small, focussed "features" (or user-stories) while you can delegate to the YASN the customer relationship management, infrastructure and distribution. If it's easier for a starter to finish something small, then an infrastructure that supports small things has got to be good news for starters.

Third angle : what other markets are there for starters? There must be a lot of finishers who are currently finishing lousy ideas. Why can't they find / recognise / partner with *better* starters? Is this just branding? Is there a need for better "back-propagation" of recognition from a succesful finish to the most successful inputs. Mathematically this problem can be solved. Do we need new institutions; types of markets?

[phil jones]

Actually, I'm still intrigued by this idea of "flattening" the "curve" which is the diproportional reward for finishers.

Is it actually related to the curve for "cost of change" of a project? In a flat project, the reward for doing a story at the beginning should be the same for a story at the end?

[BillSeitz]

One factor is that finishing is closer to the revenue generation.

Another is that iterating on the original idea tends to be crucial to actually get market success. So if you dropped out before that process you're not perceived as being crucial to success.

Maybe the "Advisory Capital" model that Stowe Boyd tried could work? You keep some involvement in the ongoing iteration but it's not as time-consuming as the initial idea-development?

[phil jones]

"One factor is that finishing is closer to the revenue generation."

I wonder what would happen if the company had an "internal" market. Where sales people had to buy from the developers. You'd see a fight between different parts of the company for the "economic rent". Is it necessarily so obvious that the salespeople would win?

"Another is that iterating on the original idea tends to be crucial to actually get market success. So if you dropped out before that process you're not perceived as being crucial to success."

Agreed that if iteration is adding value, not being there for all iterations is clearly not being involved in all the value creation. But doesn't the same thing hold for people who join *later* than the earlier iterations? The whole question here is why late is better than earlier.

Yeah, interesting to know how Stowe's model is working out.

[Brian Marick]

While driving home last night, I heard the tail end of an interview about two types of artists. It sounded a bit like it might be relevant, though the author came across as something of a crackpot at times. Since I missed the beginning of the conversation, this summary could be wrong:

He contrasted explorers and... can't remember the word, but abstracters will do. Cezanne counted as an explorer; Picasso as an abstracter. Abstracters, it seemed, typically peak young, when they are (1) familiar with the rules, (2) but not yet bound by them in their thinking, and (3) can see the world as simple. Explorers are... different (that's part of what I didn't hear). Cezanne, he claimed, anticipated cubism, was moving in the direction of (a form of) Cubism, slightly overlapped the beginning of Cubism.

I inferred that the interviewee didn't think Cezanne would have gotten the credit for Cubism even had he lived longer, because he would not have been able to make it as stark a change as Picasso could. In a sense, Picasso could come out with a finished product quickly because of his nature and youth.

Implications for this topic? Not sure, but: finished is good, so unfortunate for you. But simple is also important, so fortunate for you.

Book

Audio: (Real Media only)

[BillSeitz]

It seems like it's worked ok for getting famous! (At least within some tiny niche of humanity.)

I don't know how to get rich off that model. Get a piece of Y-Combinator equity and find young teams to finish what you start?

[Brian Marick]

You could use a ghost-writer to put what you say in maximally punchy, maximally memorable form.

Your public speaking style is ruminative, when the route to fame and riches requires more certainty, more forcefully stated.

You could be aggressive about ownership of what you're letting other people finish. Don't let a thousand flowers bloom. Let one flower bloom: the one you bless. Make more of an effort to smother the ones you disagree with, and even the competitors that are on the right track.


That's all speculative, from one who is neither famous nor rich. The only thing I can say from personal experience is: if a tiny, tiny company gives you stock for being on their technical board, and that company is destined to be in the Fortune 500, don't flip the stock and be pleased at the tidy $30,000 profit from four half-days of work.

Also don't assume that the stock Google offered you won't be worth that much post-IPO, after the fever dies and Microsoft finishes their "Google killer."

[Ward Cunningham]

Larry Constantine once told me that he had been asked whether he would rather be rich or change the world, if he couldn't do both. The surprise, he admitted, was that he couldn't decide.

[phil jones]

Another thought : I'm a big fan of John Hagel's idea (outlined again here in a recent blog post : http://edgeperspectives.typepad.com/edge_perspectives/2007/09/conve... ) that companies are going to unbundle into different kinds of specialist.

One of these is the "product innovation" specialist, which strikes me as the attractive place to be : all about creativity and starting new things which the "infrastructure" and "customer relations" people have to bring to fruition.

Now if, as Hegel believes, "product innovation" can be unbundled from "customer relations", this implies that there will be business models for the PI people to work with the others. (Aside : As a free software advocate, I'm hoping that that model isn't "intellectual property".)

[BillSeitz]

I'm not sure that gives much direction when you're specialty is way up at the meme/meta level.

Perhaps the personal-business-model there is to get a patronage-type position (MS-Research, Google-Research) from which you spend most of your time doing the conference circuit and writing... more fame than writing there...

Unless perhaps you create a certification/blackBelt program for your cult...

[Bernard D. Tremblay (ben)]

I "start things" as a way to keep track of what I'm thinking. But I know that lack of reaction from others really only goest to show that I've never been A-list. (My "Buddhism on the Web" page was an early success. I've moved it 3 times but still, after 13 years on the web, it still has a following. It seems that real reputation is sticky.)

But what I really want to point out is this (not relating precisly to "rich and famous" *grin): just recently I decided to bring together material related to the ill-fated LATimes ' "WikiTorial" project. (Was it set up to fail? I can't say that.) A number of interesting things came to light, but none rocked me more than this. (The link escapes me in the moment.)

Typically, folk say that with works like WikiPedia the vast majority of work is done by a small percentage of participants. (My fave formulation: 89% participate, 10% contribution, 1% initiate".)
Well, there's more than one way to fillet a fish; crunch the numbers one way (I reserve the right to mangle and mix metaphors as I will, but will apologize as appropriate and required. Like now.) and that's what shows up: since the WikiPedia community is large, there is a large number of WikiGnomes, and that group (a small proportion of the whole) do in fact contribute the majority of edits.
But if you drill into the data through a different facet you get a different and revealing result: a large amount of the "product" is contributed by individuals with a small number of "commits". The WikiGnomes' work is undeniable, but there's something else happening!

As bummed as I am (trying to remember how I rationlized leaving the monastery in '92 to do this stuff) I have to say that there's evidently a deep truth to "build it and they will come" ... even though it's actually a complex set of activities.

---

Found it! on my CoWriting page: from "Who Writes Wikipedia?" by Aaron Swartz in his "Raw Thought"

"Wales seems to think that the vast majority of users are just doing the first two (vandalizing or contributing small fixes) while the core group of Wikipedians writes the actual bulk of the article. But that's not at all what I found. Almost every time I saw a substantive edit, I found the user who had contributed it was not an active user of the site. They generally had made less than 50 edits (typically around 10), usually on related pages. Most never even bothered to create an account." [...] "When you put it all together, the story become clear: an outsider makes one edit to add a chunk of information, then insiders make several edits tweaking and reformatting it. In addition, insiders rack up thousands of edits doing things like changing the name of a category across the entire site -- the kind of thing only insiders deeply care about. As a result, insiders account for the vast majority of the edits. But it's the outsiders who provide nearly all of the content."