Not too long ago I was at a dinner party with a bunch of VCs and startup CEOs. The first guy I met at that party was a CEO who is building a virtual reality satellite to send into space. He brought a prototype that was smaller than a shoe box, and VCs were lining up to take selfies with him and his satellite.
The rest of us with our analytics tools, legal software and travel sites really had our work cut out for us. This is the town I live in folks.
VCs listen to a lot of pitches. I have to think they've seen every idea out there, and some version of the same idea a million times. So as much as any of us are deeply excited about our own idea, we have to take a step back and think about whether it would impress someone who's seen it all.
David Teten says that there's a classic VC rule of thumb:
"A third of startups are zero’s, a third are boring, and the remaining third are where the returns are."
Don't be boring.
I completely believe this. People need magic. Not just the VCs, but anyone who might use whatever thing gets built next. That unexpected sense of wonder is one of the coolest things we can gift to the world. This is what Hollywood is built on, and when it happens in tech, it's just awesome.
I had that kind of experience recently while in a toy store with my daughter. We were checking out some electronic handheld games and I picked up this game called 20 questions. The idea is that you think of an object, then answer the device's questions (sometimes/never/always/rarely) and after fifteen to twenty questions it guesses the object.
My daughter and I decided the object would be "pony" and the toy took us through a series of seemingly unrelated questions, from "is it shiny?" to "is it bigger than a loaf of bread?" until finally it guessed: pony. Our jaws dropped and we laughed! It was so unexpected.
It turns out that little toy runs on a neural network form of artificial intelligence, that was built back in the late 80s. With all the current hype around AI, this simple game actually made us feel something, using 20+ year old artificial intelligence technology.
I bought two, one for home and one for the office. I love asking people to try it out, just to see how they respond.
That look people have when they try it out the first time and the toy guesses their object, that's the look you want to see when you're talking about your startup, or when they use your product. That's one box every startup should aim to tick before pitching for funding.