Innovation the Easy Way: Stealing Great Ideas

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Innovation the Easy Way Stealing Great Ideas

• Steve Kirsch
• Chairman
• Infoseek

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A confession
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I am a thief

• I steal ideas
• I steal property
• I steal money

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Prediction

• 1 year from now, many of you will
• pay me to use your ideas
• let me use your computers for free

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If you must leave early...

• Please send all your ideas, spare cash, excess
  equipment, etc. to
• Steve Kirsch
• Infoseek
• 1399 Moffett Park Dr
• Sunnyvale, CA 94089

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Agenda

• Why steal?
• How to steal
• What to steal
• What we should have stolen
• When not to steal
• What you can steal from us
• Stealing on a global scale
• andif you get caught...

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Agenda

• How to
• get out of jail
• FREE!

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Why Steal?
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How most companies innovate

• Put a team on it
• Look at what others have done
• Come up with new ideas, experiment

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The smart way to innovate

• Why take the risk?
• Why not adapt proven techniques?

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How to steal
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The most powerful idea stealing technique

• Question
• How does Cisco compensate its employees?
• How does Microsoft compensate its employees?
• Answer
• Ask 2 employees

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Other popular stealing techniques
Witchcraft

• How do you know things?

CIA
Psychic Powers
Ouiji Board
Magic 8 ball
Space Aliens
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Three ways to steal

• Passive stealing
• Provide a customer feedback mechanism
• Active stealing
• Research who does (or must be doing) this the
  best?
• Get a contact within the company
• Opportunistic stealing
• Magazine articles (Inc, Fortune, etc)
• Seminars (like this one!)

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Stealing ideas from customers

• Make customer feedback EASY!
• Easiest way add a Feedback link
• Hard part is asking the right questions
• Collaboration may bring innovative solutions
• BUT beware Always better to observe than to ask!

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Ideas weve stolen
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The power of stealing

• Stolen from PSS
• (They probably stole it too)
• We havent come up with any good ideas
  ourselves. All our good ideas weve stolen from
  others.

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How to quintuple revenues

• At Stanford U., can you sell
• 50 worth of lemonade
• in 20 minutes?
• This innovative technique was stolen from the
  winning team of the Stanford Entrepreneur Car
  Rally
• Applies to web sites

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Corporate values

• Great companies had them
• Got their values from the PR dept
• STARTED with the best Cisco, Peoplesoft,
  Southwest Airlines,
• and REFINED

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Single, simple goal

• Stolen from PSS
• Focuses your thinking
• Stretch goal
• Put on everything
• Presentations
• Memos
• Signs around the company

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Power of a single goal

• Food challenge 5K
• 100M page views

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Compensation based on customer satisfaction

• Stolen from Cisco
• Over half of cash bonus is based on customer
  satisfaction

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Product development process

• Stolen from HP product manager
• Write the datasheet and create the screens before
  writing the MRD

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Getting customer names

• Stolen from Quarterdeck, others
• Works on Web site
• E-mail required for download
• In 15 days from installation, we e-mail reminder

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Free access to corp info

• Stolen from PSS, with help from Apollo
• It forces you to be consistent and fair
• People love it

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Recuiting the best

• Stolen from Microsoft, Cisco
• Nice articles in Fortune about Ciscos and
  Microsofts recruiting practices

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Banner ad idea

• Stolen from Netscape
• We even copied the size!

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Searching the Web

• Stolen from Lycos

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Product ideas

• Steal from our competitors
• Yahoo directory layout
• Excite channels
• AltaVista portions of our query syntax

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Action-biased suggestion box

• Stolen from US Forest Service
• Old way
• Fill out 4 page form
• 60 ideas/yr
• New way
• Send e-mail or tell supervisor
• If no response in 2 weeks, and not illegal, do it
• 6,000 ideas/yr

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Ideas we should have stolen
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Yahoo!

• Their approach manual directory
• Our approach automated directory
• What consumers liked
• You are in deep doo-doo
• Now what?

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• Steal an idea from someone else to change the
  game!

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When not to steal
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When stealing doesnt work

• The imperfect copy
• Yahoo
• Conditions have changed
• The Internet
• Different industry

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The imperfect copy

• Theory Well apply technology to do it better
  and faster and with lower costs this way
• Reality
• Be VERY careful about improving a stolen idea
• You may need to vigorously defend this, in the
  face of overwhelming support against you

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Changed conditions

• ISP free trial model didnt work on the
  Internet
• Internet shopping experience is completely unique
• do not expect the same value propositions to apply

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Changed conditions

• Pacific Bell stole their awards program from
  Frequent Flyer of airlines
• Recently discontinued

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Ideas you may want to steal from us
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Python

• We used Python for Ultraseek Server
• Python is similar to Perl
• Python is to Java what Java is to C
• fast development
• easy to learn language
• easy to read
• object oriented
• portable
• easy to debug

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The homing beacon

• A simple addition to Internet software
• Sends message back after installation as to how
  many documents are indexed
• Allows our sales people to prioritize leads

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Direct Feedback

• E-mail from feedback page goes right to the doc
  person that created the page
• See software.infoseek.com

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Comments visibility

• Extract typical comments from your incoming
  e-mail and forward to upper management

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Periodically pretend you are the customer

• Submit feedback and see how long it takes to get
  a reply
• Try the download link does it download and
  install correctly?

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Product information on your website

• There are 18 or so categories of information that
  Id love to see about any product
• See software.infoseek.com for a list

• Customer sites
• Live demo
• Screen shots
• Feature list
• Specs
• System requirements
• FAQ
• Product documentation
• Press reviews
• Competitive comparison

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The Art of the Steal

• (Apologies to Donald Trump)

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Stealing saves money!

• Today
• OUR computers index YOUR data
• Tomorrow
• YOUR computers index YOUR data (running OUR
  software)

Ours
Yours
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Global theft benefits

• User results are more complete and up to date
• We leverage
• OPM
• OPC

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Summary

• If done properly, stealing is
• safer
• easier
• faster
• than innovating from scratch

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Stealing this presentation

• Goto Infoseek
• Type Steve Kirsch
• Go to the top hit (my home page)

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(No Transcript)
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Be supportive

• Failures along the way are expected

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Continuous experimentation

• Constantly explore new ideas through projects
• Fail quickly and often

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Dont overspec jobs

• Give people latitude
• Encourage people to venture outside field of
  expertise
• Working outside with customers

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Dont overplan

• Things change too quickly new info
• Prefer prototyping to planning
• Rapid prototyping lets you evaluate a concept
  with minimal investment
• Good ideas can easily get derailed by too much
  planning
• Examples at Infoseek
• Cowabunga skunkworks
• Use of Python

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Pair visionaries with pragmatists

• You need both
• Ideally, we use small groups of passionate,
  energetic, opinonated people
• Collaboration without compromise

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Look outside

• Home
• Universities
• Partnerships with other companies

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Be patient

• Few great ideas happen overnight
• Many take years or decades

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Ideas from Cisco

• Tie compensation to customer satisfaction
• Recruit in areas people arent looking for jobs,
  e.g., in the movies (see Fortune)

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Ideas from PSS

• We havent come up with any good ideas
• Masters of stealing
• The power of a single, seemingly unattainable goal

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Abstract

• Many of the most successful and innovative
  companies dont come up with their own ideas
  they steal the best ideas from other companies.
  Infoseek has successfully stolen and implemented
  a few key ideas from other companies that have
  made immediate and major impacts on the way
  Infoseek does business today.

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Old Agenda

• Python
• Innovative use of internet (pinging back require
  email to download advertising tuning)
• Battling not invented here
• mistakes we made
• success we had
• mulitiseek
• ultraseeek server
• hiring the right people recruiting techniques

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Improvements to our WWW site

• Stolen from customers
• A visible and easy to use feedback link that is
  monitored by people responsible for that area
  (not tech support)