How the Wright Brothers Blew It (2003)
Great article, reminds me of several things:<p>- <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Starlite" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Starlite</a> : An amazing material, apparently. There was a BBC show where it protected an egg from a blowtorch. Unfortunately the guy who made it was extremely protective, so we&#x27;ll never know quite what it was or whether it was really as effective as it seemed.<p>- I had a long discussion with my old partners about whether trading models should be kept secret. The big problem is that once you&#x27;ve decided you&#x27;ve got something - and over short periods, it may well look that way - you start to think you can walk on water. I still wonder which way round the causality is. Did we keep everything secret because we thought we&#x27;d found a goldmine, or did we think we were brilliant, and the secrecy was a way to flatter ourselves? In any case, once people develop the attitude that they are better than everyone else, it becomes very hard to get any new ideas in there.<p>- Once you decide your edge is in some kind of knowledge, rather than some kind of execution of a business plan, you are going one way only. Sure, you need some knowledge, but you&#x27;d better believe other people have that knowledge as well. There&#x27;s only one principle involved in steering a plane: change its shape. But there&#x27;s a HUGE number of ways you can do that, and a huge number of ways to shape your business to explore those ways.<p>- It seems the patent system was broken a hundred years ago, and it hasn&#x27;t been fixed. For me the main issue is it causes people to have idea fixation: the idea that ideas are somehow more important than everything else in a business. There&#x27;s a whole list of interesting things to say about patents as well, but I&#x27;ll stop here.