Serendipity of Ideas

A day ago I started and finished reading Sarah Lacy’s great book Once You’re Lucky, Twice You’re Good. The book chronicles the rise and fall of doctom companies in the early part of the decade and the subsequent rise of Web 2.0 companies.

Besides being a compelling read on the people behind the code (and the people are fascinating indeed), Lacy weaves in a number of important ideas in describing what made these people and business successes (or failures).

One very interesting concept is that so many of the social media and web startups recently have been focused on bringing us the information we want, without us having to search for it. Facebook brings us the contact information of all of our friends, Digg brings us the web’s most popular articles, Technorati tells us the blog topics which are hot this week, this day, or this hour. Of course, Google is the king of information providing, thanks to their domination of the search engine market.

So much effort has been placed on getting us what we ask for, that we are able to remove a large amount of randomness from our lives. One benefit of not being able to find things immediately is that you often come across other useful things along the way. This is the concept of serendipity, and many entrepreneurs champion its importance. Exposing oneself to random ideas from different disciplines can create some of the most original (and profitable) business ventures.

It’s an interesting bargaining problem with our time and attention. We can increase efficiency with any number of tools out there, but we may sacrifice important learning and ideas that could unlock new paths. One of the great qualities of Wikipedia is that it facilitates both efficiency and serendipity; we can search directly for a topic, then click links to any range of related (or unrelated) topics.

I’d be unsurprised to see new services crop up which provide an experience of serendipity in a more efficient way. Serendipity is something that can be generated using the internet and it’s web of connections, but nobody seems to have focused on that yet.

-Barry