Before Google co-founder Sergey Brin started the work that would
make him famous, he tried to remake the business of pizza
delivery. In a Solve for X talk recently posted online, he
describes coming up with what seemed like an elegant solution to
ordering food: find the publicly posted fax numbers for
restaurants, then build an online form and write a script that
faxes it as an order. But his plan was derailed by the fact that
while his local pizza place had a fax machine, it was quite
reasonably being ignored. "The challenge of a problem, or the
importance, isn't really that related to how likely you are to
achieve it," he says. Of course, even in a talk about the value
of failure, his plan failed exceptionally quickly: it luckily
took just one order for him to realize people weren't using
their fax machines. The full talk is below; you can catch the
story at around 2:00 in.