The Freedom Trap

In 1990, a startup spun out of Apple with a plan to build the iPhone. Seventeen years early.

They called it General Magic. The name came from Arthur C. Clarke: “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

And the team was magic. Andy Hertzfeld. Bill Atkinson. Susan Kare. A young engineer named Tony Fadell slept on the office doorstep until they hired him.

They had everything. Sixteen of the biggest companies on earth lined up to fund them: Sony, AT&T, Motorola, Toshiba, and on and on. So much money they went public with zero revenue. On day one, the stock doubled.

And the freedom. No managers, no hard deadlines, and enough money that nobody ever worried about payroll. Just brilliant people building whatever they could dream up.

So they dreamed up everything. An early USB. The touchscreen keyboard. The app store. Emoji. They even invented the cloud.

Sounds like heaven, right?

Here’s the twist. You’ve never heard of General Magic.

The device shipped four years late. It needed a 200-page manual. It sold 3,000 units, most of them to friends and family. A year after the IPO, the stock was down 85%.

One engineer was told to build a calendar. He set it to run to the year 2096. Someone asked why stop there, so he rebuilt it to start at year one. Then someone asked why not the beginning of astronomical time. He never finished it. The job needed four lines of code.

No walls, so the ideas grew forever and never became a product. As the investor Bill Gurley put it: “More startups die of indigestion than starvation.”

Now here’s the part that gets me.

Those same magicians, once they left, went on to build the iPod, the iPhone, Android, and Nest. Same people. Same talent. What changed? They got constraints. A real customer. A real deadline. A real budget.

Tony Fadell said it best: “If you don’t have constraints, make up constraints.” He built the iPod that way. Sleek, cheap, a thousand songs in your pocket. One clear box.

So next time you’re staring at a blank page and total freedom, don’t celebrate. That freedom is the trap. Give yourself a wall to push against.

Speaking of walls. This blog only gets one minute. That made-up limit is the only reason it ever gets written.

Pick your box. Then build.

— Dan

P.S. What’s the constraint you keep avoiding? Add it this week and watch the fog lift.

P.P.S. This story is from Inside the Box by David Epstein — same guy who wrote Range. Worth your time.