Guy Reams (00:00.942)
Today is day 206 out of thin air.
So.
I have a core thought going on in my head this morning about this concept of coming up with an idea out of thin air. I got this, this is an idiom that's commonly used in the English language. People will say, well, this person came up with this idea out of thin air. I actually heard this recently when we were listening to an investor or listening to some investors talk about this really cool business idea.
It was like, wow, this guy just came up with this out of thin air. And I thought, that's interesting. Does anything ever really come up out of thin air? Does an idea just suddenly pop into your head? So I started thinking about idea generation. Like, where does it really come from? And what I think I've come to the conclusion is most really good ideas are born from the very common. Someone who's experiencing a problem,
We're experiencing it with enough intensity that the idea for solution is born out of just necessity. You know, the adage that necessity is the mother of invention, I think, is more appropriate than out of thin air. Most ideas seem to become, most really successful ideas seem to have this core ingredient. The story always starts with something to the effect of,
Guy Reams (01:37.39)
While I was fill in the blank, I was dealing with fill in the blank and then I realized we could just fill in the blank. And if you're ever looking for a really good idea for a new business, then look no further than what you're doing every day. If there's something that you're doing every day and engaged in constantly, chances are there is an innovation hiding in there somewhere.
This has led me to a thought process that I've tracked for quite some time. I used to teach computer science for about 20 years, and I had a class in which we dove into the history of computer science. What I didn't realize when I started teaching in the 90s was that a lot of the greatest history in computer science hadn't happened yet, right? Like,
I'm sitting here talking about IBM and all this stuff and talking about pretty good privacy and these interesting things. But I didn't know that while I was at the college and after I left the college is one of the greatest things would be invented, right? Very fascinating. But this leads me to this thought of what I call unintended innovations, which I think is where most
of the greatest things have come from. My key example of this is 3M.
So you might not remember, but 3M started as a sandpaper company. They were basically a mining operation. And they figured they could mine this one type of mineral that could then be glued to paper and made into sandpaper. And so that's what they got started doing. And I think they had some relative success. They got some investors. It wasn't great success, but.
Guy Reams (03:37.421)
There was one particular lab tech named Richard Drew that was at a, I think it was an auto body shop or a painting facility where they painted vehicles. And he saw that they were trying to cover the vehicles while they painted parts of it and having a really struggle with it. So that's where he came up with this idea, well, we're already making sticky paper. So why can't we not put rocks on the sticky paper?
and use the sticky paper to hold down the coverings for their painting. Well, that became the invention masking tape. So what 3M was already doing, making sticky paper that they would glue rocks to, ended up becoming the catalyst for masking tape. Of course, that would be one of their biggest inventions was masking tape. But it doesn't stop there. 3M has been around for a long time. So they've had lots of these types of things happen. So...
For example, they had this one adhesive they worked on that wasn't very sticky. It was reusable, but not that sticky. So people started internally using this adhesive for bookmarks. They would stick a piece of paper with this adhesive on it and stick it in a book, and that would flag a particular section of the book. Well, this became a ubiquitous thing at 3M. Everybody was using.
this paper with this backed adhesive. Well, it didn't take very long for somebody to figure out, hey, since we're using this a lot, this might be a great mass market product. So they did, and it became known as Post -it Note. Of course, now everybody's got Post -it Notes. I've got 10 of them right here, right? So Post -it Notes are everywhere. So that became, this marvelous invention became something that was used all the time internally, but never was made into a product, and then suddenly becomes a product. Now,
Over the years, I've cataloged and collected lots of these stories because I think they're fascinating.
Guy Reams (05:44.045)
So one of my favorite is the company TinySpec. Now you probably don't know or remember the name TinySpec. You might remember the hype around the video game Glitch, which you might remember. I think they might've even made a movie about it or something. I don't remember. But.
So Stuart Butterfield, who made all of his money with, I think it was Flickr, I forget, one of those photo companies, I can't even remember. But he came up with Tiny Spec, and the idea was they were gonna write this really cool video game called Glitch.
They never were successful at launching this video game. I think it failed. But during their process of developing the video game, they created this internal communication team tool so that members of the development team could talk back and forth. Because these remote people were not communicating very well. So they created an internal tool for this. Well, the internal tool became very popular and everybody liked using it. And this was a little small side project that kept going.
Well, eventually with the failure of Glitch coming, the company decided, hey, this could be a really good product. So they did. They became an enterprise software company and they sold this communication tool, this little unknown communication tool called Slack. And of course, you know Slack now, it's everywhere. And Slack was ultimately bought by Salesforce .com. So this was one of my favorite examples because here the company was trying to make video games.
when in reality they created an internal process to solve a communication problem and then that became the main product that they sold.
Guy Reams (07:35.373)
This has happened time and time again. The biggest examples are for, of course, Amazon. Amazon created this really robust e -commerce platform so they could rival e -commerce for selling on the internet. And of course, they became the defunct standard for that. We all use it. During the process of time of doing that, they wanted to create a platform where they could run their data centers and they could run that in such a way,
They had total resilience and speed for their e -commerce platform. And their developers started working on a way to make this, to really improve their ability to rapidly develop their product. Because staying ahead of the game was very much part of the process at Amazon. To become better than anybody else. And so they built this platform. Well, this platform, this infrastructure, this computing infrastructure, would eventually become so resilient and so powerful.
that they decided to make it a product. So in 2006, they launched this as AWS or Amazon Web Service. Well, this would become what we now call the cloud. So literally, Amazon created the cloud accidentally. Well, not really accidentally, but they created it not on purpose, but really as a way to run a platform for their e -commerce. Same thing happened at Google.
And I'm not talking about Google's data centers. I'm talking about Google's AdSense technology. They wanted a better way to advertise their own stuff. So they created a way to do that. They called it AdSense. Well,
pretty soon that would ultimately become their core product. So Google search is really not their core product anymore. Their real core product is their ad delivery mechanism, the way you buy ads on Google. So that AdSense product that they developed internally would eventually become their primary revenue gen. And the list goes on. Toyota created an internal lean manufacturing process they called TPS.
Guy Reams (09:46.125)
And that has revolutionized assembly line manufacturing, but it's also revolutionized software development and on many other things. So this Kaizen process they created. So it's amazing how the necessity of innovation is what ultimately starts, what creates the great idea. So my conclusion is that groundbreaking innovations do not spring from a vacuum. They do not come out of thin air. They come out of necessity.
So if you're really looking for the way forward, what your next big go -to -market is, what your next big success is, look no further than your own internal processes or your own life for that example. Like I was doing this exercise this morning in preparation for writing this blog today. I started thinking about what is it that I'm doing all day long every day, right?
And I started realizing there's a couple things that I'm doing that are taking a lot of time. That if I were to streamline that, I bet you it would be a powerful product for a lot of people. So once again, consider this very carefully. You could be sitting on a tremendous revolutionary innovation. It's probably something that you're doing every day.