Taken from How To Spot a Breakthrough: Tips from Early Amazon Investor Nick Hanauer, which has a lot of good sound bytes:

The key elements of a breakthrough idea, Hanauer said, are value creation and social disruption.

As for social disruption, Hanauer gave a quick summary of what he meant:

—If everyone thinks it’s a great idea, it probably sucks.
—If people understand it, you’re too late.
—If people don’t like it and don’t understand it, it probably still sucks.

If you have a breakthrough idea, you don’t need a breakthrough way to get it to the market. “If you have transformational value, people will beat down your door…Focus on the product. If the product is good enough, marketing will take care of itself. If the product sucks, no amount of marketing will get you over the hump.” [see ALL IN Expert]

—”I’m not a technologist. From my point of view, technology is simply a thing that allows you to bring transformational things to customers…People get excited about a particular technology, and they forget the question: what does this do for people? It’s about what the customer gets compared to the alternatives.”

—”As an entrepreneur, I’ve never been concerned about competition. If you’re early, run like hell. It’s all about execution at the end of the day. It’s about having a great idea, executing like hell, and delivering value to customers.”

—As for walking a different path, “I was difficult for my parents, and for my teachers. I’m incredibly uncomfortable in crowds, I never go to sporting events…What that allows is for you to have an idea and be comfortable with people not liking it. Jeff Bezos calls me a high-functioning contrarian.”

Hmm, I think I just quoted about half the article.