But I was a year late.

The only problem was I didn’t follow through on it.

I was working for a high tech travel software company in the early 2000's. It wasn’t unusual to go and have a couple of pints at lunch or after work. My fellow tech nerds would often discuss new technologies to save the world.

Because everyone had a ton of 8MM recorded videos shot with large hand-held video cameras, I thought if I could start a business and somehow upload them to the internet, they would be saved forever. No more degrading tapes. People all over the world could now have hours of their own personal histories, never to be lost.

My colleague “Mike” looked at me and said it would be “IMPOSSIBLE!” because you’d need “petabytes” of disc space on thousands of servers. Peta-what? At the time I hadn’t actually heard of a petabyte but knew it had to be a big file.

Impossible to do!

The idea died quicker than finishing my beer.

A year later YouTube was born and eventually acquired by Google for something like $2-petabillion dollars. Just missed it. Had I just thought it through a tiny bit more.

It just goes to show that if you think of some crazy new idea, continue to think it through but DON’T TELL ANYONE! If you do, someone will shoot the idea down and deflate you. It will never go anywhere. Bring the idea to market and test it with real users for free. If someone actually uses it, it’s a good idea.

With over 7 billion people in the world, most likely someone else right now is thinking about the same thing as you. If you don’t follow through, they WILL! They’ll become wildly successful while you finish up your pint and go back to working in your cube.