Hamilton Helmer

Helping the people founding those companies, is there anything that you could say that would maybe guide them to be a little more iPod-ish and a little less Bomar-ish, right?

But the problem with that is that the nature, as the two of you know from your acquired site, as well as all the other things you've done,

the nature of developing business is adaptive and evolutionary.

It's not like you sit a bunch of bright people in the room and you figure out the strategy and say, okay, we're just going to execute from now.

It's you go forward in time and effort and new information comes in.

Oh, that customer didn't do what I thought.

This competitor is coming in this way.

The technology frontier has changed, all this stuff.

And you have to adapt to that over time

And so the problem with that is that, okay, well then, if it's that way, how does a body of thought contribute to that?

And the answer to that is that if you can provide a useful mental model, or as Jin Yi calls it, pattern recognition.

You provide something so that as entrepreneurs are moving through space and time, they can see what's a little more likely to end up iPod-ish and a little less likely to end up Bomar-ish.

That kind of metal model is actually hard to construct.

And what I say in the book is that the very high hurdle that it has to clear is that it has to be simple but not simplistic.

So simple, it has to be that way or people won't remember it.

If it's some complex theory that you have to go back and look it up every time, it's not going to help a lot when you're making business decisions.

And not simplistic means that it's got to cover most of the situations you face.

In other words, it has to be relatively exhaustive.

And that's a high hurdle.

So there were a number of strategy frameworks before that were extremely interesting and made great contributions, but weren't simple but not simplistic.