On: Enter Zenter: "We want to be the Gmail of PowerPoi...

[zach]

And yet YouTube is the Flickr of Flash videos, right?

And Google was the better-AltaVista of AltaVista. I'm just saying, those are pretty big waves.

[palish → zach]

Well, what I meant was that it's a dangerous frame of mind to look for innovation only by crossing existing things. Originality helps :)

[zach → palish]

Originality is not, in itself, valuable in many markets. It's often a liability.

So maybe it's more true that originality hurts. That is, you don't want to be as original as possible, you want to be only as original as you can afford to be.

Joe Kraus's stellar lecture at Startup School last year explained this pretty well.