The following popped up in my feed a few days ago and it was an interesting read. Mira genuinely feels that they have come up with a new innovating approach/idea not realizing that they are just repackaging / reinventing the lunch break. We are so conditioned to treat the old ways / existing ways of doing things as obsolete and have this fascination about breaking things where we tend to ignore existing work because no one is rewarded for doing things the old way. You need to rebrand it as something innovative/ground breaking like in this case a “Just Eat Power Hour” for people to eat their lunch without working at the same time…
They re-invented the lunch break!
This is not an isolated instance, there have been multiple cases where a silicon valley bro ‘invented’ stuff that already existed. Such as Roommates. WeLive is the communal housing offshoot of WeWork where a bunch of people live in a place and share common areas. This is called “co-living” in the world of WeWork. In the real world, it’s called having roommates. Then we have MakeSpace which raised $57 million for its “cloud storage for physical stuff.” i.e. a storage locker. There are so many of these examples and they sound so obvious and have existing implementations. Unfortunately the inventors are living in their own world where they are constantly told that all their ‘inventions’ are groundbreaking where in fact they are just rebranded versions of the existing stuff.
– Suramya