I keep seeing new product ideas that were basically what we were working on in 2016. The problem with innovation is that everyone thinks they are the first to think of something.

I've always taken the opposite approach, that whatever we were "inventing" was already out there in nature.

At DLab, once we were able to find what was done before us we were able to ideate faster because we weren't trying to build new from scratch. That's why my team kept winning accolades. We weren't smarter, it was that we weren't bogged down by hubris.