Think big, start safe
In the past, I may have lamented the slightly smaller worldview that’s a natural side-effect of starting a business outside the Silicon Valley bubble. (Balanced, of course, by a heightened awareness of how the world works outside California and the US, in places without early adopters and device penetration and AT&T.)
However, idly musing on my longer term ambitions and ideas, a thought crystallised. While thinking big is definitely the path to changing the world, thinking too big can stop you even getting off the ground in the first place. Businesses evolve and rewrite their raison d’ĂȘtre on a constant basis – start with something safe, something that will a) work, b) get built, c) launch, d) have customers and e) get bigger. I’ve seen startups with grandiose dreams stuck at all stages of this iterative cycle without the rocket fuel to propel themselves around again.
In other words: execute! But to execute you need to pick something executable in the first place.
On a more individual level this thinking leads me to the conclusion: there’s no shame or harm in creating a small, successful business and then doing your Big Idea. In fact, while a lot of the media successes are focused on first-time college kids, there are plenty of serial entrepreneurs who aren’t learning everything for the first time, and doing jolly well as a result.
‘Safe’ is a curse word in a world where risk is everything, and I don’t advocate starting a franchise of Subway or anything like that. Even things like starting up a coding or design consultancy, selling handmade jewellery on Etsy, or becoming a paid blogger all – to me – count as baby steps on the entrepreneurial ladder. Course, I’ve done two of the three so maybe I’m biased. (I had an eBay shop, not Etsy.) Depending on your day job, a lot of the relevant experience might already be yours – but don’t underestimate the differences between flying solo and with a harness.
If you’re burning with a big idea, the time and team are right, and you have money to play with, by all means go for the gold. If not, think of how many of today’s successes started as small, experimental, safe side projects – “let’s build a website to scratch that itch” rather than “great idea, let’s raise $5mm” – and just get out there trying stuff that can give you a winning formula to base your future efforts on, or fail quickly enough that it doesn’t matter.
I’m personally going to try out idea iteration – spending two week cycles on each idea in my ideas book, long enough to build a prototype and do some acid testing, short enough to avoid tunnel vision. The test? If after two weeks I don’t want to change tracks, I’m on to something ;)

The idea of spending a week divided equally between Silicon Valley, London and various international airports might not sound exotic to some people, but for me the last seven days have been quite an adventure.
After the interview (which I’ll write about separately) I had a great time at the Computer History Museum. It’s weird to see stuff in my parents’ attic enshrined in a museum, but nostalgia is fun. We even saw a working PDP-1 with an amazing story behind it; a MIT undergrad, hacking on the machine at night, created a music synthesiser. When restoring the PDP-1 at the museum, they unearthed a box of tapes which turned out to be the music input for this program, but the program itself was long gone… fortunately, the original programmer was involved in the project! 40 years later, he rewrote it and we saw the machine play music. The creator of Spacewar! was also there demonstrating the game. Amazing stuff.
As of this morning I’m back in Edinburgh, collecting my thoughts, preparing to write more about Geek’n'Rolla — especially a few thoughts on the women panel! — the YC experience and so forth, as well as getting ready to pitch at the 
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