Jon Fox

When I left Automattic to start a new company, the first question all my friends and family asked me upon hearing the news was “So what’s your big idea?”. The funny thing is, at the time I didn’t have one. I had no idea what my next company would be and what it would do. This seemed to surprise people.

My take on the matter was that it was more important to figure out the team than the idea. The only thing I had decided at that point was that I wanted to build my next company with the help of Josh Fraser. We didn’t yet know what we wanted to do, but we knew we wanted to work together. To me, the important part was figuring out who I wanted to work with. I figured a couple of smart people could find a problem worth tackling.

This conversation with friends and family lead me to again consider the value of ideas. In my experience, most people value ideas a lot. When they have a good one they hesitate to share it for fear someone will “steal” it. They look at successful companies and say to themselves “If I had just had that idea”. I view ideas very differently. I think a small niche of them are very valuable, but the vast majority have little value in and of themselves. The main reason for this is that ideas are so easy to spread. Once you have an idea, there’s no way for me to take it from you, and spreading it is as easy as a Tweet or a conversation.

So if the idea isn’t the valuable part, what is? In my opinion it’s the ability to execute on the idea that is valuable. My biggest argument for this is a simple hypothetical situation. Imagine you could go back 10, 20, or 100 years – knowing what you know now – how many of the big companies could you have built knowing the basic idea behind them? Even if you knew that the idea behind Google was big, you probably wouldn’t build Google. Even if you knew the idea behind Microsoft, you probably wouldn’t have built that either. Just knowing that there is a lot of value in a specific market or problem doesn’t give you money or success directly. You have to execute on that idea, build the company, hire the right people, out maneuver your competition, etc.

I think we have a great idea with our current company, Torbit, but I think that idea alone won’t bring us success. The company (or companies) who win in this space will win based on their execution of the idea. And I for one, am excited to build this company out.

I’m excited to finally talk about my new project.  Josh Fraser and I have founded a company called Torbit.  Torbit is a service to make websites faster.  On an average site 80% of the time a user spends waiting is actually on the frontend (downloading images, running js, etc), not the backend (page generation time).  This means that the majority of the performance of your site is actually determined by the contents of the page rather than the servers generating it.

There are a lot of relatively simple things developers can do to improve their performance.  Combining files to reduce the number of HTTP requests, minifying files to reduce the size of the download, etc, but many of these are still not done because they’re annoying and tedious to do and developers are often focused on other things.  Many of these optimizations (along with many others) can be automated though, freeing developers from the hassle.  We intend to make this process super simple and free developers from these headaches.  We can also do a lot of optimizations that don’t make sense for the average site to do themselves.  For example, browser specific and mobile optimizations. If you’re curious about the details you can check out our how it works section.

Josh and I met in TechStars in 2007 when he was working on Eventvue. We’ve both been itching to start something new and are passionate about the web performance space. I’m thrilled to be working with him.

40% of people will leave a site if it takes more than 3 seconds to load.  We’re ready to make the web faster for everyone.  You can sign up for our beta now, we’ll be opening this up wider soon.