

Tap Into Y Combinator's Contrarian Thinking - kn0thing
http://www.inc.com/garry-tan/y-combinator-marketplaces-contrarian-thinking.html

======
1337biz
While I appreciate the promotion of contrarian thought and motivating people
to think different, act different, dare to be different, these example do not
look at all to me contrarian. At best one could argue, that they identify
existing phenomenons that were repackaged into a scalable, investable product.

AirBnB: _normal people would never be willing to rent out their place--or a
single room in their place--to strangers._

B&Bs have been around forever. Roomsharing, Couchsurfing, etc. The idea has
been around for a long time, just not as a scalable platform.

Tutorspree: _Having a human being on the other end radically reduced the time
needed to set up tutoring_

Well sure, maybe it is by now "contrariant" for tech companies that a decent
phone support can resolve problems quicker and is better for customer
retention than online support ticket systems...

FlightCar: _Travelers get a free car wash, and don't have to pay $18/day for
airport parking._

I like the idea, but it seems to me just a frequent flier version of similar
peer-to-peer car sharing systems (RelayRides, Getaround, etc).

~~~
graeme
I can't agree more. I had 'the idea' for Airbnb years ago, after couch surfing
happily many times.

I'm sure thousands of people had 'the idea' and knew 'not X'. It was really
clear to those who had tried the unpaid version there was vast untapped
potential in the market for a paid Couch Surfing.

What counted was setting up a system that made the matching process simple,
safe, and had critical mass.

------
mathattack
I like the core of Peter Thiel's comment. If you're not in the business, "Most
people think X, I know 'Not X'" then you're not really an entrepreneur.
Anything that is un-contrarian (maybe status quo is the better word) can be
done at a large company better.

If Excel is the optimal spreadsheet, work at Microsoft.

If hotels are pretty good, work at Hilton.

If airlines just need some tweaking around the edges, go work at American Air.
(Yikes!)

One can argue exactly how bold these places were in their contrarianism, but
they still bucked the status quo. I couldn't have dreamed that AirBnB would
have pulled it off.

------
pshin45
Is it a good thing or a bad thing that Y Combinator's two biggest home run
successes - Airbnb and Dropbox - both did not seem to fit Y Combinator's
typical selection criteria at the time?

Yes, the Airbnb founders have always been "relentlessly resourceful", but 2 of
their 3 cofounders were not hackers, which as far as I know is generally a big
red flag for YC. And as someone else mentioned, PG thought their idea was
terrible and only chose them because he liked their grit.

Drew Houston does seem to fit the mold of a prototypical YC founder, but it
can't be stressed enough that he was rejected the first time he applied to YC.
If Drew Houston had decided to not apply again and decided to get funded by
someone else, the way we view YC today might be significantly different. Of
course, maybe Dropbox wouldn't be where it is today without YC's help, but I
don't wanna delve too much into counterfactuals.

My point is, seeing as YC's two biggest successes came from two teams that
normally were rejected by their model, should YC be criticized for being too
narrow in the way they evaluate startups, or should they be lauded for being
willing to be contrarians against their own model when it came to Airbnb and
Dropbox?

------
jmtame
Hmm, not sure Airbnb was the best example to start off with to support that YC
has contrarian thinking. PG thought Airbnb was a stupid idea, and only agreed
to invest on them on a whim. It was a Black Swan event how Airbnb ended up at
YC through Michael Seibel. Tutorspree makes sense, I don't see it as crazy in
the same way that Airbnb was. Same goes for Flightcar, but great startup idea.
YC is generally investing in growth/traction at this stage and not crazy ideas
or founders. PG alluded to this in Farming for Black Swans. I believe they
were looking for certain types of founders in 2008-2009, but that has changed.
Not fully convinced that YC is driven by contrarian thinking today.

------
obviouslygreen
Correlation vs. causation seems weak here... while you might view some of
these companies as contrary to some sort of popular wisdom or historical
trends, it doesn't follow that "contrarian thinking" is necessarily an
effective way to build a company, nor does it suggest such a thing as a
requirement or even asset in establishing new businesses.

All it does say is that you can sometimes be successful by doing things other
people are not doing... not exactly a breakthrough. :)

I'm not saying it's a bad thing -- in some, perhaps many, cases I'd say it's
pretty useful -- just that it's not a necessary or sufficient thing for this
kind of success.

~~~
pg
It's certainly not sufficient, but it's close to necessary for startups,
because startups generally have to do something no one else is already doing.

~~~
tptacek
Counterpoint: Dropbox.

("Better" is obviously a form of "different", but I don't think that's the
implication of your comment.)

~~~
soneca
I would say that the counterthinking was to insist on something that a lot of
people (including some big players) were doing, without any real success.

But I admit there is some wishfull thinking there, as I am in this position.
My startup is a private social network, a field with a lot of high profile
players (Path and some YC companies), and still no one nailed it.

------
rvivek
Great article! Looking at a lot of successful companies (apple, tesla, spacex,
amazon, etc.), it seems like the founders believed that such a thing should
exist so strongly that they made the rest of the world follow them.

When iPhone launched (<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eywi0h_Y5_U>)

------
6thSigma
The thing that strikes me is some of the best ideas were not necessarily "Not
X" ideas. I also don't think the contrarian thinking is as binary as "X vs Not
X" implies.

For instance, it's not like everybody in the world was thinking "a clean and
concise search engine will never work" or "a social network catered towards
college students will never work."

Perhaps people thought "we don't need another search engine" or "we don't need
another social network," but those thoughts do not necessarily make Google and
Facebook "Not X" ideas. Both fixed very specific weaknesses with the then
current solutions and have since evolved.

Airbnb is different than Google and Facebook in that they created a market.
But like I mentioned earlier, I don't think the world was thinking "I will
never rent out a room in my house, if given the opportunity." More likely that
thought had never crossed their mind prior to Airbnb.

------
Rick-Butler
"Airbnb, Tutorspree, and FlightCar have all shown that a contrarian nature is
necessary to succeed."

a contrarian nature suggests that you are opposed to standard view. Yes, all
the companies mentioned are contrarian in the sense that they do not follow
the majority view of their respective markets. It's really a matter of
semantics, but I would say what article is calling contrarian is at it's heart
just disruptive innovation.

------
isaacsu
This may go against the popular opinion around these traps, but does anyone
else feel like the premise of success arising from the pursuit of "not X" a
little flawed in that for every AirBnb story that makes frontpage, a hundred
other "not X" ventures never see the light of day?

------
up_and_up
Re Airbnb.

> Thus was born a multi-billion-dollar business that is one of the most
> meaningful new start-ups to emerge in the past decade.

This seems a bit over hyped plus vrbo.com and friends have been around for a
while.

------
runn1ng
I hate to be "that guy", but... the site does't work at all for me on Android.
It redirects me to some mobile version and then displays an empty page.

------
marcamillion
Not quite sure I follow the "Not X" of the FlightCar example.

What was the X? The traditional rental car & parking arrangement?

------
thoughtcriminal
Ycombinator startups are examples of contrarian thinking? Not really, although
I've grown to admire some of them. The article reads more like a suckup-
atorial.

