Entrepreneurs, please please please use your research skills

What is one of the important components in getting an expensive education in Singapore? Our contributor, Wong Meng Weng thinks that research skills are one of them and urges wannabe entrepreneurs to start exercising the skills which they learned from school. A Singaporean entrepreneur who has returned from Silicon Valley and now an angel investor within the community, Meng Weng hopes that his open letter will offer a guide to wanna-be entrepreneurs when they should set up a meeting with an investor.

Dear would-be entrepreneur,

You are the product of an expensive education, one component of which was “research skills.”

Remember the field trip to the library? Remember the class on how to format a bibliography? Remember pulling a piece from an encyclopedia and “rephrasing” the article in your own words? Remember discovering Google for the first time?

Now that you want to strike out on your own, please don’t forget all those painfully acquired research skills. Look for the prior art. At the very least figure out what your industry is called, what generic names are commonly applied to your kind of product, and do a search to see who else is working in your space. You just might find that somebody started a company in 2002 to do exactly what you’re thinking about doing, and maybe they got acquired by Microsoft last month. If that’s what comes up, read it as God’s way of telling you to go do something else. Don’t reinvent the wheel.

Some people behave like they’ll only have one good idea in their lives.

You had an idea? Great. You know what? Chances are somebody else has already had that idea before you.

You want to commercialize that idea? Great. Chances are somebody else has already tried. Why don’t you see their products out there in the market? Because they failed, that’s why. Maybe they couldn’t build it. Or maybe they built it and nobody wanted it.

Sure, by all means, try: nobody will tell you that you’re wasting your time; it’s an unspoken cultural rule. In this business nobody ever discourages anyone from trying, they just say that the deal isn’t right for them. An experienced investor won’t try to stop you, but she will be thinking, even if she’s too polite to say it, that you’ll probably fail, just like the last guy failed. You can tell that’s what she’s thinking when at the end of the day she doesn’t write you a check.

There are exceptions.

If you can come up with very good reasons why you won’t fail, some very good ways that you’ll be doing things differently, that becomes interesting. You’re running a new experiment. You might discover a market.

Maybe the last guy was a college undergrad who couldn’t program, who partnered with his roommate who was also a college undergrad who couldn’t program, whereas you’re a thirty-eight year old Ruby, Java, and C expert, and you’re also a three-time entrepreneur who sold your last company to Google twelve months ago, are about to get out of your lockup, and are ready to do something different.

If the idea is truly new — say it’s based on groundbreaking research, science, or technology that simply didn’t exist a year ago, before you perfected it — then it could be interesting.

(This is why the institutional innovation ecosystem looks to institutes of higher learning and research institutes and R&D corporate labs as a source of new product ideas. Ideas that come from elsewhere simply tend to be retreads.)