
Idea Generation - awaxman11
https://blog.samaltman.com/idea-generation
======
godot
> (By the way, it’s useful to get good at differentiating between real trends
> and fake trends. A key differentiator is if the new platform is used a lot
> by a small number of people, or used a little by a lot of people.)

As a one-time founder, I feel embarrassed to have to ask this; but in the
spirit of no-stupid-question and also that there's gotta be someone else
wondering the same -- which one is the real trend and which one is the fake
trend?

By way of interpreting sentences in a normal way, I would assume "used a lot
by a small number of people" is the real trend and "used a little by a lot of
people" is the fake trend (going by order of mentions in both sentences).

However, I struggle with this a bit. Dapps were used a lot by a small number
of people as of a few years ago (think the cryptokitties trend), but it didn't
exactly pan out as a real trend IMO. In other cases, yes, when early adopters
love a product and use it a lot, that tends to become a real trend. On the
other hand, Facebook apps in 2008 (when they were smaller apps like Superwall
and such, before games took over) were somewhat "used a little by a lot of
people" at the beginning. I think it wasn't until games took over where the
"used a lot" (by a large number of people in that case) really took off.

~~~
nostrademons
There's two competing lenses of thought that bookend your struggle:

On one hand, Sam's point is basically described by Paul Graham's essay on
"Narrow and Deep" ideas [1]. You want an idea to have a few passionate users
rather than lots of lukewarm users, because there's an activation energy to
building a habit and if you're only lukewarm you're not going to get over it.
As PG put it, "Sum that reaction over a whole population, and you have no
users."

On the other hand, you have Geoffrey Moore's "Crossing the Chasm" [2]. This
has the critical observation that early adopter & mainstream populations are
different. About 10% of the population has an early-adopter mindset: they will
try anything _because_ it's new and cool. Those are the people Sam says you
should be hanging out with in this article. But your experience with them
doesn't generalize, because _most people don 't think like that_. Most people
are self-interested and have short attention spans: if it doesn't deliver
clear value to them with minimal hassle, they aren't interested.

The set of world-changing products really exists in the intersection of these
two worldviews. Products that had lots of passionate early adopters but failed
to cross the chasm include Lisp, LiveJournal, RSS, VR (both times), and
cryptocurrency. Products that aimed for too mainstream a market and only had
lukewarm users include WebTV, grocery delivery, and smartwatches. In between
are products like the iPhone, where the PDA market had been sitting in early-
adopter limbo since 1991 but technological changes finally made it practical,
or YouTube, where streaming video had been in early-adopter limbo since
RealAudio in 1997 (?) but cell-phone video, Flash, and easy web uploads made
it practical in 2005.

[1]
[http://www.paulgraham.com/startupideas.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/startupideas.html)

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crossing_the_Chasm](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crossing_the_Chasm)

~~~
atupis
>grocery delivery

I think the USA implementation is poor not the idea is bad. Here Finland
K-ryhmä[1] did really nailed implementation and it is like 10x better than
going to the supermarket. My mom and aunt both in their 70 started using this
separately and both are saying they are not going to back in supermarkets
after covid19.

[1] [https://www.k-ruoka.fi/kauppa](https://www.k-ruoka.fi/kauppa)

~~~
danjac
That's interesting - I live right next to a K-Market and I'm not in a risk
demographic so not had the need, but when I moved from the UK to Finland some
10 years ago one thing I missed was that the UK supermarkets at the time had
excellent online delivery systems (they're buckling under the strain of the
current crisis due to surge in demand, but back then they worked well enough).
Finland didn't seem to have anything equivalent until recently, which I
thought was more due to geography, population density and other factors that
just didn't make it economical for the K and S chains.

~~~
dharma1
Supermarket delivery in the UK has been fantastic, much better than Finland. I
think you are right about the population density, and also the amount of
competition between 8 large supermarket chains in the UK, vs the near cartel
like situation in Finland.

~~~
danjac
Another example would be automated checkouts - that came much later in Finland
compared to the UK. I think there's a good point there that the duopoly
stifles innovation, plus there's just a much smaller market and less pressure
to scale up.

------
austincheney
I have always found that entire scenario very odd. How are you a start up
founder if you don’t know what you want to start up?

I always look at that like a soldier jacked up on adrenaline wearing an
arsenal of ammunition ready to destroy the enemy having forgotten to ask who
the enemy is or where they are. Lost. Maybe if they just start spraying ammo
at everybody the enemy will suddenly make themselves known and something will
stick.

This entire scenario is completely at odds with Indie Hackers who continually
stress to refine a good idea until you have both revenue and product/market
fit before quitting your day job. This advise is well suited to people who
have the reality of personal finances and time constraints, so I guess there
are some people who have unlimited funding and time to burn in search of
something they should already have.

~~~
renewiltord
I am sceptical too but it's not an unusual idea to think that perhaps you can
just put smart people together and they'll work something out.

God knows that much of that attitude is often lauded on HN for other things.

~~~
austincheney
Kind of.

I am entering my fifth military deployment so I can speak to the nature of
spontaneously formed teams of strangers. Intelligence is largely, but not
completely, irrelevant. You learn to identify that a team is strongest due to
a mix of good discipline and putting the proper personalities in the correct
positions and then codifying a single common purpose. I recommend reading the
book _Good To Great_ for further examination.

------
jameslk
Having failed the startup game my fair share of times, I've found a more
reliable way to come up with good ideas is to let others who need something
give you ideas. Work in a specific industry long enough that you learn about
the trade and type of problems and solutions needed.

I currently focus on providing services to ecommerce companies, and I get to
hear all the time about their pain points and things they wish they had. It's
given me a lot of ideas for products to work on and the bonus to that is I
already have established relationships with my market, making it much easier
to iterate, build case studies, and sell.

A lot of the demographic on HN is engineers. That is an industry. You can
start with asking your engineer friends and colleagues what painful
engineering problems they face, why nothing they use is good enough, and what
they wish they had to fix it. If you find enough people saying the same thing,
then you've found a potential market. And luckily engineers are early adopter
too.

~~~
mdorazio
> Work in a specific industry long enough that you learn about the trade and
> type of problems and solutions needed.

The problem with this is that the recent grads with effectively no practical
experience to speak of can't start startups with VC funding and dreams of
grandeur this way. But I agree that this is the best path to start a company
that's actually likely to succeed based on actual long-term profitability and
legitimate problem solving.

~~~
Swizec
This is how you start a real company with actual potential that investors will
love.

But it doesn’t feed into the Silicon Valley career mill. So it doesn’t get
talked about.

SV’s assumption is that you want to “get signed” and start your path.
Acquihire by acquihire you build a career. Some outliers get rich and motivate
the others.

The whole thing is a self-sustaining finance market. Failed founders provide
the workforce, outliers provide the funds. And the mill keeps turning.

(the real winners are GPs and LPs, the VCs are just as much hamster wheel
runners as the rest of us, just later in the career)

------
ritikm
> YC once tried an experiment of funding seemingly good founders with no
> ideas. I think every company in this no-idea track failed.

We were a no-idea company in the S12 batch. We ended up starting Streem [1],
which was acquired by Box in 2014 [2] and ended up integrating and becoming
Box Drive [3]. While we didn't build an enduring company, I'd say it was a
moderate success by some metrics.

YC had two no-ideas in S12 and another one or two in W13 before they shut the
track down. Unclear if that's enough data to spot a trend, but YC is smart and
likely had other data to back up the decision. Looking back, it was a painful
process to go from "no idea" to what eventually became Streem. I don't think
I'd ever go and decide to start another company without an idea in the future.

[1] [https://lifehacker.com/streem-offers-unlimited-cloud-
storage...](https://lifehacker.com/streem-offers-unlimited-cloud-storage-and-
streaming-for-1563536464)

[2] [https://venturebeat.com/2014/06/16/box-acquires-streem-so-
yo...](https://venturebeat.com/2014/06/16/box-acquires-streem-so-you-dont-
have-to-keep-filling-your-local-disk-with-cloud-based-files/)

[3] [https://www.box.com/drive](https://www.box.com/drive)

~~~
fouc
Didn't ycombinator pick a number of startups with bad ideas or non-ideas and
encouraged them to pivot? Or encourage new teams to form around a different
idea?

For example Reddit's original team wanted to do a "My Mobile Menu", and also
Aaron Swartz pivoted from Infogami to merging with Reddit.

I would almost count this partially under the "no idea" category.

~~~
nl
There's plenty of YC Companies that have changed their idea during YC, or
pivoted completely during the program (I think Daniel Gross pivoted twice?)

I think YC expects most companies to modify what they are doing during the
program.

But all of these things are very different to taking someone on board with no
idea at all.

------
11thEarlOfMar
In my view, business ideas are formed out of life experience. They happen as a
consequence of observing situations, working in specific industries, engaging
in certain hobbies or entertainment.

I am confident that if I were required to make a dedicated effort to 'develop
a startup idea' that was absent life experience, success would require more
good fortune than if it were coming from a synthesis of experiences,
observations and innovative thought.

YC already did an experiment, as Sam notes, that points to the need for some
type of fertile idea space that gains nutrients from ones life experience.
I've had a bunch of ideas, each more or less fleshed out, and some actually
acted on. I stumbled on all of them because I was trying to solve a problem
that I had personally experienced.

------
davidivadavid
Look, you don't even need an "idea" for your startup, much less one based on
some ethereal "trend" you should try to catch.

What you need is a goal and a vision for an improvement to something that
people want. Take any current service, and try to figure out what metric
people are _really_ using to evaluate it.

Now think about what it would take to 10x that metric. I'm stressing the
_really_ because that's where you have to do some folk anthropology and try to
understand what people really want.

If you think people eat food to maximize calories, providing them with 10x
calories would sound like a good thing, but that's probably not what's
happening. Maybe what you want to figure out is how to have 10x calories /
dollar.

But people don't just eat food for calories, they also eat it for the nutrient
mix. What would be the perfect nutrient mix? Does it need to be custom? Can it
be done at a good cost? (that's kind of what Soylent has been doing)

Food is also one way we experience some of the most varied sensations: can you
make something that's both incredibly nutritious, and that expands people's
palates?

Food is also built around social experiences, how can you improve the social
experience of cooking and eating together? What's the metric? What does 10x
that metric look like?

Can you 10x along those 3 axes at the same time? Are there trade offs? Can you
overcome them?

I'm just using food as it's an obvious need/want everyone recognizes (low on
the Maslow pyramid).

But that can apply to literally anything, as long as you dig deep enough to
figure out the underlying need/desire/want.

And that way you can quit trying to find random "ideas" based on trends that
are just at the surface of things.

Jeff Bezos (and a bunch of other people) said it before: don't try to think of
what's going to change, think about what's _not_ going to change. People's
desires are one of the most stable thing you can build on. Figure out that bit
and you'll find a bottomless well of ideas.

------
lordnacho
> YC once tried an experiment of funding seemingly good founders with no
> ideas. I think every company in this no-idea track failed.

How many people did they try this with? Most startups fail, so it will be
interesting to see whether they funded enough of these. I think there's a rule
of thumb about the upper limit on a probability that isn't observed, but I
can't remember what it is.

As for generating ideas, the founders I've come across have tended to know
some industry well enough to understand some of the problems. Often this is
very specific industry stuff, including understanding which experts are needed
and what customers to focus on.

Of course there's plenty of people who have grown up in some industry, but I
think the other ingredient you need is enough general knowledge about business
to be able to put some pieces together: how to get funding, what a corporate
structure is, how to do certain mundane things like pay taxes. The
intersection can be smaller than you think, because a lot of corporate types
are comfortable where they are, plus they feel (rightly or not) that the job
is providing a fair bit of the business infrastructure they need to use their
expertise.

~~~
otoburb
I thought that entrepreneurs-in-residence at VC firms are the equivalent of
this idea of funding exceptionally capable potential-founders (many who seemed
to have been past founders) with no ideas to execute in the current period.

------
jwblackwell
_The best ideas are fragile; most people don’t even start talking about them
at all because they sound silly._

I hear this expressed quite a lot and there's certainly some truth here. I
think it can be quite misleading though.

Many good ideas also just sound like pretty good ideas and turn out to be
great businesses. Not every idea has to be completely crazy sounding. Perhaps
this is even more true in B2B software / boring industries.

VCs and Accelerators are incentivised to encourage the craziest "moonshots"
because that's how they make money. If you're just looking to get rich selling
software you don't need to go to mars.

------
eigen-vector
This goes hand in hand with writing. (Good) Writing involves thinking deeply
about an idea or a topic. Many good writers appreciate critical feedback, this
involves getting your ideas validated or invalidated.

It is quite easy to be in an environment of smart people thanks to the
internet. By thinking deeply about a problem or ten, trying to write a clear
essay on it helps with this.

------
danans
> It’s important to be in the right kind of environment, and around the right
> kind of people.

That seems like the buried lede in the blog post.

I don't know Sam or have any window into his motivations, but he seems to be
(at least obliquely) addressing the current HN debate about whether fully
remote is equivalent in efficacy to in-person for creative work.

Without taking a stance in that cat fight, he is making the (IMO sensible)
argument that creativity requires a particular type of human environment,
regardless of whether that is remote or not, and social isolation from your
professional peers isn't such an environment. Of course, he goes further to
suggest that a creativity-fostering environment requires a particular kind of
professional peer group.

------
rl3
Ideas become better when refined. Sometimes over the course of _years_. You
can assemble a larger composite idea under the umbrella of a single vision,
comprised of many smaller ideas.

There's of course a balance to be struck depending on the idea's scope and
urgency. Both may change with refinement.

Idea generation is both a learned skill and intrinsic to a person's
circumstance and psychology. Ample unstructured time, low amounts of stress,
and an affinity for day dreaming tend to help. Over time you grow to actually
enjoy deep thinking as recreation.

I've noticed whenever I'm focused on a particular idea, it kind of forms a
lens that shapes my world view. Anything I then encounter I view as a puzzle
piece, which my mind attempts to reconcile into the larger puzzle that is the
foremost idea in my mind at the time. It's a very similar dynamic to PG's
musings on the subject.[0]

[0] [http://www.paulgraham.com/top.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/top.html)

~~~
chiefalchemist
> Ideas become better when refined.

Agreed.This is why execution is more important than idea. Why? Because most
ideas aren't born great. They evolve and progress. That's part of execution.
The process of taking a good idea and make it great.

~~~
rl3
I think trying to say one is more important than the other is a false
dichotomy. They are both very important.

It's true that ideas tend to dramatically evolve as a result of execution.
Likewise execution affords an opportunity for refinement that simply isn't
there prior. I'd argue it's a different kind of refinement though from what
you get while you're still in the green field stage.

Thinking and research on their own—over the course of a very long period of
time—offer insight that isn't easily gleaned under the high-stress environment
of execution. A different kind of insight or refinement, if you will.

It's worth noting that there are entire professions where the majority of what
they do is think. Physics and philosophy come to mind. Why thinking is valued
so little in tech by contrast, I don't know.

~~~
chiefalchemist
My benchmark: Good execution of a 7 idea will beat bad execution of a 10 idea.

As mentioned, the idea isn't static. The idea is more of a process. And
processes are driven by (quality of) execution, and team.

I'm not dismissing the value of idea. But it's generally over-valued. You'll
do better starting with a good idea and making it better than you will waiting
for a great idea.

------
TrackerFF
From my somewhat limited experience, working as a consultant (management,
etc.) is great for identifying problems, and subsequently coming up with ideas
(solutions).

Reason is that you work very closely with companies, often many different in
the same sector, and get to see all the various aspects, quirks, and flaws at
nearly every level of operation. Just the act of getting exposed to all this,
can work as a great catalyst for ideas and brainstorming - much better (imo)
than just sitting around and trying to think up something, where one can
easily fall for the "solution looking for a problem" trap.

Now, unfortunately, most people can't just walk into those jobs - and you're
not there to brainstorm solutions for every flaw you see. But if you ever get
the chance to be in such a position, do try it out.

A lot of profitable entrepreneurship revolves around "boring" business
problems.

------
peterwwillis
> The most common question prospective startup founders ask is how to get
> ideas for startups. The second most common question is if you have any ideas
> for their startup.

You really can't come up with a better set up to an episode of Silicon Valley.

 _" I Want to start a start-up! But I have no idea what to start or how to
start it. Can you tell me everything I should do?"_

------
fredsters_s
> YC once tried an experiment of funding seemingly good founders with no
> ideas. I think every company in this no-idea track failed

...coinbase was a 'no idea' startup

~~~
zhoujianfu
Were they not even interested in bitcoin in some way? If not, good
counterexample... but if they were, I think saying something as vague as
“we’re going to do a bitcoin company” around then would count as an idea,
probably even a tectonic shift one.

------
netcan
This is a hard topic to theorize (essay-ize).

The retrospective view is somewhat illusionary. It's hard to capture what
really happened att. I think a lot of the insight is in the first few
paragraphs. Ideas in the "startup idea" sense, aren't one idea. They're a lot
of ideas had over time. AirBnB couldn't have given their idea, like Tolkien
couldn't have given middle earth to another writer.

Spotting trends is similarly hard, and similarly treacherous. Retrospective
examples (eg mobile phones) seem way easier than they are.

One major pitfall for spotting trends is timelines. The whole 90s dotcom
bubble, in hindsight, was mostly wrong about timelines. Browsers are important
platforms, and controlling one does kind of make you "a microsoft." Moving
early and grabbing market share is very important. Online markets do tend to
be winner-take-all. They were just 10 years early.

------
imedadel
How do you manage your ideas? I'm using a combination of Google Sheets,
Notion, and a notebook. I rate each idea in Sheets using colors and I keep
Notion and a notebook for research so that I don't think about an idea twice.

~~~
x32n23nr
I find this odd. Have you worked on any of those ideas?

~~~
imedadel
Oh yes. And it feels good to go back and mark an idea as done!

Whenever I have a thought, I write it down. If I got that thought again, I
might do a quick Google search and then give a rating to the idea. If I kept
constantly thinking about it, I start researching it.

The research part might take maybe an hour a week. The other steps don't
really take much time.

I find this to help with procrastination or losing focus.

------
rexreed
Ideas aren't the primary issue. Execution is the main problem. Our amazing
brains are fantastic at creativity and thinking in new ways, and coming up
with all sorts of fantastical ideas. Some practical, most not.

But our same day-dream happy brains are absolutely terrible at helping us
execute on those ideas. Finding the most effective and efficient ways at
making ideas come to fruition. And the millions of ways that an idea, no
matter how great it may sound, may never come to pass.

This is a "how to day dream better" post. Which maybe some people need I
suppose.

But I'd rather see a "how to make your dreams a reality" post.

------
aazaa
> A good question to ask yourself early in the process of thinking about an
> idea is “could this be huge if it worked?” There are many good ideas in the
> world, but few of them have the inherent advantages that can make a startup
> massively successful. Most businesses don’t generate a valuable accumulating
> advantage as they scale. Think early about why an idea might have that
> property. It’s obvious for Facebook or Airbnb, but it often exists in more
> subtle ways.

This reminds me of David Heinemeier Hansson's talk at Startup School waaayyy
back.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0CDXJ6bMkMY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0CDXJ6bMkMY)

The gist: funders tell founders all the time to catch a wave. Go big or don't
bother. The reason is that the funder must have a big payoff and small
outcomes don't cut it.

But there's plenty of room for a small, well-run company with no aspirations
of getting bigger. I believe the analogy was: best Italian Restaurant in the
city.

The other advantage of thinking smaller than "huge" is that success is so much
more likely because the competition tends to be less intense.

Maybe the author and I have a different idea of "huge," but the examples
suggest otherwise.

If you're looking for a community that embraces the small startup idea and has
developed a lot of material for exploring it, check out Microconf:

[https://microconf.com](https://microconf.com)

~~~
ezl
I love this.

Just a few days ago I was reading an old thread on HN about "patio11's law"
(The software economy is bigger than you think)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23162651](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23162651)

The comments are great and they talk about these non-venture companies that
are quietly churning out 10s of millions or maybe 100s of millions of dollars.

------
jandrewrogers
I don't know how it works for other people but I don't search for really great
ideas, really great ideas find me. And once they latch on they don't let go.

Most things I would classify as "really great ideas" are emergent patterns in
industries I know very well. Also, most of these are not abstract product
ideas _per se_ , you can usually see a direct and plausible path to generating
large quantities of revenue and profit.

------
rb808
The problem I see is 9/10 startups have stupid ideas but manage to pocket
millions before the company crashes and burns. How do you get ideas like that
will let you live well, but not necessarily be a good business? Doing sensible
businesses just isn't viable in SV these days.

> Stay away from people who are world-weary and belittle your ambitions.

OK maybe that just is me.

------
axegon_
I touched this subject in another discussion a few days ago briefly. Here is
what I've learned over the years:

People keep repeating that you should work on ideas that solve problems that
you have yourself. Now given some time on your own, it's natural to start
looking at your problems and seeing how to solve them for yourself and
potentially others and make a profit along the way. If you want a sinister
spin on this, nothing sells better than fear or hope.

But this is HN and as far as tech people go, our instinct is to solve problems
that are given to us. And often when we have problems on our own, we come up
with a solution and don't really think about it twice. I was recently talking
with someone about a project they had at their work and how their company paid
something like 3 million euros to another company to build a "platform" for
them. And given that their company isn't that large or doesn't have that many
users (say 40k/month tops), that raised my eyebrow a bit. So I asked them to
show me what that "platform" was. Long story-short, a website with a username
and password registration, email verification, paypal subscription, which
allows you to download a list of PDF's.

To a developer the whole concept sounds like a joke - anyone with a few months
of experience can mash that up in two weeks. "Oh but we have so many users and
traffic, it's not that simple."

Bruh... 40k users/month, 100 pdf's, ~2mb each is something a raspberry pi can
serve without any issues.

The truth is, most tech people are very much detached from reality(granted
that the mass of people is the reality and not the other way around). We try
to fix problems which we really don't have ourselves and we over-engineer the
crap out of them. And commonly this is the result of the so called "idea
generation". It's easy to create a startup that solves a niche problem. But we
often fail to acknowledge how tiny these niches really are. It's easier to
sell something that costs 10000 euros to 10 people and make 100k as opposed to
selling something for 5 euros to 20000 people.

The truth is, most people create 5 euro products which have a potential
audience of 10 people, hence the reason why they make 50 euros as opposed to
100k. You can scroll through PH for days and keep repeating "omg, who needs
this?!?!?"

I know I have. And truthfully I doubt many people have hit the 50 euro mark,
not to mention the 100k.

But people make that mistake all the time. We are surrounded by people who
will hook up an led to an arduino which will blink when someone mentions them
on slack while they are watching a movie, while ordinary people are looking at
a website which has payments and they think that's quantum physics. Tech
people and ordinary people live in parallel universes at this point. The ideas
we come up with are solutions to problems no one has. That's the reason why
SaaS is proving to be a lot more successful strategy than B2C.

My take on this is that every time you come up with an idea, don't bother
sharing it with your tech friends first. In most cases you will get a 50-50
positive-negative response. Find people who are completely detached from your
world and have no idea what the difference between a USB and RJ45 is.

1\. Can you explain your idea in 4 sentences or less?

2\. Do they understand it?

3\. Do they have that problem?

3a(if Y on 3). Do they have a working solution, even if it takes 3 times the
effort?

If the answers to those are:

1\. No

2\. No

3\. No

3a. Yes

Then don't bother. You will almost certainly fail.

~~~
lance_klusener
Thank you for writing this informative note.

Question - How do you discover the issues a business is having? Similar to the
PDF issue that you describe above?

~~~
axegon_
That's a 3 million euro question, isn't it. Frankly I have no clue. And even
though part of me wishes it did, it's not something anyone can do, even if
given the chace. I wouldn't be able to look at someone in the eyes and ask for
3 million for something that your average 14 year old geek can mash up in a
week. From what I saw, I'd argue the 14 year old would probably do a better
job...

------
parhamn
I think we need to have more founder-typing instead of prescribing everyone
act like they can be good at everything.

It’s much more important to find balance on your founding team than expecting
to learn idea generation suddenly.

We need better tools for these different types to find each other. Creatives,
executors, evangelists, etc can be different people.

------
sytelus
There are two kinds of idea generation: hole plugging and door opening. The
former means you look for holes in current state of affairs and use available
tech to plug it. The later means you invent something very new and open doors
to entirely new opportunities. Former requires cheap short term less risky
trials while later is usually more systematic long term expensive endeavors.
Unfortunately startups have became synonymous only for the hole plugging even
though door opening is an order of magnitude more rewarding. This is the
difference between Twitter and flying cars. I hope there is YC like model that
gets developed for door opening instead of keep fueling hole plugging through
college dropouts.

------
codingdave
> the world changes so fast that the big incumbents usually get beaten by
> fast-moving and focused startups.

I'm not sure this is as true as founders hope. Yes, startups take the lead
when change occurs. But then they also take on all the risk, fight it out with
similar startups, and a few years later often get purchased by one of the old
incumbents. And in those purchases, some specific founders get rich, but many
others fail, and many devs work quite hard and don't end up where they thought
they would.

At the same time, the big incumbents get to just sit back and let other people
fight it out, then re-buy their market share in the future.

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vumgl
This post may be immoral if it hopes for the next big thing. I wonder if it
does more harm than good for the world. If someone is to indeed invent the
next big thing after the Mobile Phone, for sure they don't need this kind of
motivational post. For "smaller" ideas, yes, read ahead. But think it is
immoral to encourage a wide audience to shoot for the stars, and try big ideas
that have a 0% chance of succeeding and 100% chance of causing lost time and
effort, and even financial, social and personal hardship.

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courtf
> _It’s important to be in the right kind of environment, and around the right
> kind of people._

Namely, people who went to an elite school (which inevitably implies they have
rich parents) and aren't going to burden your fledgling cash grab with any
world-weary ideas about integrity. Extra points if no one involved in the
project has any programming talent. That frees up lots of time for coming up
with brilliant ideas.

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chiefalchemist
You need a safe environment. And you need people who realize the best idea is
the one that most in the room will find a bit crazy at first.

The rest is time and iteration.

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bobnarizes
My problem is, where to find these optimistic people that know about the
field? I basically don't want to discuss my big ideas with colleagues, I just
trust them as colleagues. Outside the company I don't have so much contact
with people who are interested in start-ups, trends, etc. And corona is
blocking the opportunity to visit some hacker spaces, meet-ups,...

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mrfusion
Here are some ideas but they don’t seem any good:

Graham crackers with chocolate pre applied for making s’mores.

A racing league for bipedal robots.

~~~
imtringued
Racing league for bipedal robots sounds like a good concept for a
commercial/promotional event if you already have a bipedal robot company but
it isn't something you would build a company around.

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mifeng
I'm sure this post is well intended, but it just pushes new founders into
obvious, crowded categories like virtual conference and remote work SaaS. To
find good ideas, founders need to go a lot deeper than asking themselves "what
is different about the world today?"

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7leafer
"These sorts of people tend to think without the constraints most people have,
not have a lot of filters, and not care too much what other people think."

\- And have that murine sense of when to leave the sinking ship when this
disregard backfires.

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amiune
> Finally, a good test for an idea is if you can articulate why most people
> think it’s a bad idea, but you understand what makes it good.

It seems that all reduces to find if you have some information asymmetry to
take advantage of

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justicezyx
Well, I doubt Sam is really good at generating ideas based on his track
record. He had great achievement of identifying good ideas, but that's
different from generating them as the original thinker.

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minimaxir
Legit surprised Sam didn't recommend using an AI to generate ideas. :P

~~~
rexreed
Are you sure AI didn't generate this article?

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jamesrcole
Another means: have really high standards. It’ll make you better at spotting
when something ought to be easier to accomplish. You’ll instinctively feel
irritated by the fact that it isn’t.

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dilandau
Utterly banal gibberish that might have excited the imaginations of money-
hungry Stanford grads 15 years ago, but this type of fluff has not aged well.

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asdf21
Frustrating article -- I have several killer ideas (and ideas for decent
execution paths for them as well,) but I tend to get pigeon-holed as "just an
idea guy" and generally invalidated..

So I've tried to learn to program to execute them myself, but that's a slow,
long process, I'm an excellent Project Manager but a B- programmer, plus
trying to wear every hat in a company is not exactly fun.

I've seen so much talent wasted on such poor ideas over the years, it's
frankly unbelievable, and it never seems to change.

/endrant

~~~
christiansakai
I think your skill is really valuable. I am the opposite end of the spectrum.
I'm an engineer and I think a decent programmer and a creative guy but when it
comes to generating business ideas I'm just dead as a zombie.

~~~
RhodesianHunter
Ditto. That or I have a great idea, and then go and realize someone else is
doing it and has been in business for years.

~~~
asdf21
That doesn't mean it's not a good idea.

There was MySpace before Facebook, 2nd mover advantage and all that.

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Kiro
Am I the only one with a list of over 1000 ideas that would all become billion
dollar companies if I just had the time to do them all?

~~~
keiferski
Nope. These idea generation posts don’t make any sense to me - I have too many
ideas, most of which would at least be successful small businesses if I put a
couple years into them. The difficulty is in focusing on one, to the exclusion
of others.

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dzonga
ideas beget ideas. yeah, waves tectonic shifts are real. and hyper-iteration
begets ideas. & filters good ideas from bad ones.

------
mrfusion
So what are some good ideas right now?

~~~
MattGaiser
Disrupt elder care. COVID is showing how much of a disaster that is in its
current state.

Could start by setting up some kind of IoT auditing system.

------
graycat
Sometimes ideas are easy to find.

An idea? Okay: Setup a _software as a service_ Web site to solve quickly all
traveling salesman problems with fewer than, say, 1 million cities, and
everything equivalent in computational complexity to them.

First difficulty: To write the server side software, basically are asking for
an algorithm that shows that P = NP, and now we have had some decades to
conclude that so far no one knows how to do that (with a _von Neumann_
computer, but maybe could get a solution using a quantum computer).

Well, for positive integer n <= 1 million, consider the traveling salesman
problem on n cities. Without loss of generality, assume that n is a prime
number (with factors only 1 and n). Then embed this problem in ..., and notice
that ..., and then apply ..., exploiting special case ...! Right!!!

Lesson 1: This idea was super easy to find!

Lesson 2: What it takes to make this idea work is something new, and, if we
get a solution, that would contradict the observation that there are no good
new ideas because all the good ideas were thought of long ago.

Lesson 3: Finding an algorithm that shows that P = NP is challenging, but with
that algorithm would have one heck of a strong _technological barrier to
entry_ and a contradiction to the claim that it is easy to copy a startup!

My real point: Have two lists. List A has the problems that plenty of people
would pay big bucks to have solved. List B has the tools for solving problems.
Pick a pair from lists A and B where the tool from B solves the problem from
A.

Next, if there is no suitable tool in list B, then do some research and find
one. If can't find a tool for the problem from A, then pick another problem
from A and try again to do the research to find the needed tool.

The research need not be as challenging as proving that P = NP. But broadly
one way to find "good ideas" is do some research that yields a tool that
enables solving a problem from list A that has been sitting there for a long
time unsolved due to the lack of a suitable tool from list B.

That is, one way to find a "good idea" is to do some research.

If we are restricting to having von Neumann computers do the data
manipulations, then we can notice that the manipulations are necessarily
mathematically something so that an enabling tool and the research are about
forced to be in applied math.

It might also be sufficient to use some of the math on the shelves of the
research libraries, math that so far has been neglected by the information
startup culture.

Possible _psychological_ issue: It may be that we frequently see good problems
to solve but right away, within a few seconds, implicitly, maybe even
unconsciously, reject solving the problem as a startup idea because we don't
see a suitable tool for a solution. Well, then, slow down a little on the
rejection step and consider some research or just what is already in the
research libraries. Uh, there's a lot in the research libraries!

