Why I Teach Entrepreneurs to Keep Reinventing the Wheel
Would you put a 5,000-year-old wheel on your Tesla?
I was judging a startup pitch competition alongside a prominent venture capitalist. For the sake of discretion, I’ll leave him nameless here.
A founder was pitching us his web metrics tool. I thought it was a creative and unique approach to the problem, and I told him as much in my feedback. After my comments, the VC shared his thoughts. In a rather uncharacteristic move for VCs, he didn’t hold back his criticism. “It was a good pitch,” he said, “but I’m not sold. What you’re talking about here is a solved problem. The world already has Google Analytics. It’s free. It’s ubiquitous. There’s no need to reinvent the wheel.”
The founder slouched a bit in response to the criticism, but otherwise seemed to take it well. He thanked us for our feedback and walked off stage.
Following the event, there was a reception. I saw the founder sitting alone at a table, nursing a soda and looking dejected. He hadn’t won the competition, but I thought he’d had one of the better projects, and I wanted to encourage him to keep pushing forward.
“Nice pitch,” I said as I sat down next to him.
