In the last episode of season 2 of the TV series Sherlock, a remake of the books by Arthur Conan Doyle, the villain Jim Moriarty uses a smartphone app to simultaneously break into the Tower of London, Pentonville Prison and the Bank of London.
This results in a bidding war among global security agencies and the criminal underworld for his code that opens any cyber-lock or door.
At the end of the episode, it is revealed that instead of having smart software he had people inside the tower of London, the prison and the bank opening doors and vaults. The app was just smoke and mirrors to start a bidding process.
This story is analogous for the startup world where the technology and the hype are not always directly aligned.
Dropbox, a company with amazing software, became famous and valuable from a video that showed what their software “did”, although very little technology had been built yet. Smoke and mirrors.
A very famous case of smoke and mirrors was the launch of the iPhone in January 2007. When Steve Jobs made the announcement, the iPhone prototypes hardly worked. :
The quotes below are from the New York Times article, And Then Steve Said, ‘Let There Be an iPhone’.
The iPhone could play a section of a song or a video, but it couldn’t play an entire clip reliably without crashing. It worked fine if you sent an e-mail and then surfed the Web. If you did those things in reverse, however, it might not…
The software in the iPhone’s Wi-Fi radio was so unstable that Grignon [a senior engineer at Apple] and his team had to extend the phones’ antennas by connecting them to wires running offstage so the wireless signal wouldn’t have to travel as far…
It often ran out of memory and had to be restarted if made to do more than a handful of tasks at a time. Jobs had a number of demo units onstage with him to manage this problem. If memory ran low on one, he would switch to another while the first was restarted.
Despite all its problems, the showmanship around the iPhone launch was enough to generate global demand and create the momentum to fix all the bugs and setup production lines before it became available for purchase 6 month later.
In a startup and life, often the perceived confidence in what you’re doing is enough to get to the finish line. Fake it till you make it.