Came across a nice article from "Peter Sims". Couldn't resist sharing it.
Most people look to start a company or take an unconventional career path, but it needs a great idea first. Most successful entrepreneurs don't start with brilliant ideas - they discover them. Google didn't begin as brilliant vision, but as a project to improve library searches, followed by a series of small discoveries that unlocked a revolutionary business model. Larry Page and Sergey Brin didn't begin with an ingenious idea. But they certainly discovered one.

Meanwhile, Pixar started as a hardware company that never found a market, and got into digitally animated movies by making a number of small bets on short films.

Twitter began as a side project with-in Odeo, a pod-casting company that was going nowhere. After asking employees for suggestions about what the company should do, Odeo Founder Evan Williams gave Jack Dorsey, then an engineer, two weeks to develop a prototype for his short messaging idea. People inside Odeo loved using it and Twitter was soon born.

The truth is, most entrepreneurs launch their companies with-out a brilliant idea and proceed to discover one. Pixar story tellers make thousands of little bets to develop a movie script. Hewlett Packard co-founder Bill Hewlett found that HP needed to make 100 small bets on products to identify six that could be breakthroughs.

Small bets are affordable and achievable ways to learn about problems and opportunities while big bets are for capitalizing upon them.

Seasoned entrepreneurs tend to determine what they are willing to lose, rather than calculating expected gains. The next new billion-dollar idea is virtually impossible to predict, even for a visionary like Mark Zucker-berg for much of Facebook's early history.

Unlike some old guard venture firms who still seek to bet big on ideas before the entrepreneurs have proven they are solving user problems, Y Combinator, Lean start-ups and the customer development model, as well as the way some 'Super Angels' invest, are predicted on small bet philosophies and affordable losses, while seeking to help entrepreneurs iterate as cheaply and quickly as possible to find valuable problems.

Peter Sim's latest book is Little Bets: How breakthrough Ideas Emerge from Small Discoveries