Paths & Platforms
A little start-up kicked up a big storm when they launched late Sunday night. The company is Path and they’ve built a really beautiful iPhone application for sharing experiences with a close network of friends. They’ve decided to go against the tide of most large social services by limiting the number of people you can share with to a mere 50. I’ve read a few of the articles and watched a video of Path’s founder, Dave Morin, walk through a thoughtful explanation for why they’ve chosen this route and what they’re hoping people will do with their service. Will it work, I don’t know and neither do most of the people playing armchair entrepreneurs. But considering their name and their short history is seems that there’s a story to be told that applies broadly more to to the start up world. When Dave left Facebook, there was a post on Techcrunch in which he was tight lipped on specifics of their company, but he did let one detail slip, that they would be building Facebook Connect into the product. A month later, the very clever Marshall Kirckpatrick posted a detailed review of the service from a Google cache of the Path.io site. The Path that Marshall reviewed was a service for creating and sharing lists. So, at some point they were both going to be heavily integrating with FbConnect and at another they were going to be building a list service. Yet, the product that launched on Sunday had neither lists nor FbConnect. Hmm. My point in brining any of this up is not to suggest that Path is the next big thing or that they’re headed to the dead pool. I don’t know if the new app they launched will work, neither do they and neither do you. What we do know is the app that launched isn’t their first product and it won’t be their last. They seem to have built a culture more intent on iterating around opportunities in getting people connected and sharing than in any specific use case. They’ve built flexibility, agility and learning into the company and I think more than anything, they’re success will hang on their ability to execute on those principles over time. The path a start up follows is rarely a straight line. Its full of twists, turns, forks and obstacles. I admire the companies that are willing to embark on the journey.
All the various things that have been written about Path since it launched recently have been focused around whether or not this particular product will succeed or fail. I think @bryce nails it here, noting that it’s not necessarily about This Exact Product, but about a culture and point of view that is built around the founders of the company. Some products turn into companies, but more often than not companies build products.
What’s got me interested, in the age of hyper-fast iteration of product, is the importance of the product’s core platform — not just the technological platform, but the foundation of values and ideas that products grow from.
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wcrtr posted this
