
Startup Ideas: a response - cwan
http://mattmaroon.com/2012/11/21/startup-ideas/
======
tomasien
This reminds me of the most frustrating conversation I have ever had:

This summer my startup, located in Virginia, was in final talks to join a
large seed fund/accelerator in SV and both sides were trying to decide if it
made sense. Our only issue was our lead software engineer was still in college
and needed to convince his mother that taking time off (or dropping out if
things went well) to do this program was a good idea.

His mother was, shall we say, less than receptive to the idea. She decided to
have her brother, an executive in the valley, reach out to his VC friends to
see if this accelerator, an extremely well thought of and prominent
accelerator, was worth doing.

He reached out to a former partner at KPCB who said he'd never heard of the
accelerator, which is in itself insane, but also that our startup wasn't doing
something "differentiated" enough to even justify continuing to do.

I reached out to him to clarify, and he said "you've got to find something
that truly stands out, that nobody else sees. For instance Google didn't win
because they built the best search engine, but because they figured out how to
sell those little ads better than anyone had ever sold them before".

I stared at my screen reading that sentence over and over again. I couldn't
believe it. There was a former PARTNER from KPCB that led a round of
investment at Google that did not know that Google actually got the idea for
Pay Per Click advertising from Overture and Adsense from Applied Semantics.
This person thought that what made Google great was they had an idea so
different from what everyone else was doing, NOT that they just out executed
everyone by a country mile.

I was so dumbfounded by that, it barely even registered with me that a partner
at a huge VC firm had never heard of the largest seed accelerator in the
world. I never responded to that email, I get too sad every time I try.

~~~
pbreit
I'm not sure how what the KPCB person said was wrong (here it is again: "they
figured out how to sell those little ads better than anyone had ever sold them
before")(not "they invented pay per click"). And if your accelerator was any
other than YC, I, too, would probably suggest staying in school for the year.

~~~
tcgv
Google won because they were able to provide much more meaningful results then
its competitors, thanks to the PageRank algorithm[1].

When you have the most efficient SE, it is easy to 'monetize' without risking
losing your users.

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank>

~~~
lutusp
> it is easy to 'monetize' without risking loosing your users.

<http://www.ericpinder.com/html/lose.html>

~~~
tcgv
Thanks for correcting my grammar. I'm actually not a native english speaker,
and I'm not writing from home where I have a grammar checker plugin in my
browser... so that's my excuse ;)

~~~
lutusp
> I'm not writing from home where I have a grammar checker plugin in my
> browser ...

I wish there really was a "grammar checker" as opposed to a spell checker.
That would be great, but such a thing doesn't exist yet. It would be much more
complicated than a spell checker -- there are so many rules and exceptions to
rules. In fact, thinking about it, I suspect it's not even possible.

But I would like to write a small, substitute grammar checker with very
limited abilities. It would do trivial things like catch misuses of "less"
when "fewer" is meant:

Less apples -> fewer apples.

But even that would be complicated -- there are edge cases and exceptions.

Oh well. :)

~~~
biot
Please tell me you're joking.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammar_checker#History>

Grammar checkers are far from perfect, but they've been around in various
forms for around 40 years.

~~~
lutusp
I should have said "grammar checkers that actually work." My bad.

~~~
biot
Word 2010 actually works, particularly with your example:

    
    
      1. Type: "I want less apples." 
      2. Click Review > Spelling & Grammar
      3. Grammar dialog appears:
           Number Agreement: "I want *less* apples"
           Suggestions: "fewer"
      4. Click Explain
      5. "Number Agreement
    
          A noun and the words that modify that noun must agree in number. "Many"
          and "few" modify plural nouns. "Much" and "less" modify nouns that cannot
          be counted or divided such as "much oil," "less happiness." In addition,
          the phrase "one of" must modify a plural noun."
    

Word 97 (and possibly earlier versions) also supported grammar checking for
number agreement as evidenced in this review:
<http://www.ateg.org/monographs/haist.php>

------
pg
Yes, there are two reasons something might not seem worth doing: because
someone else already owns the market, and because the market doesn't seem big
enough. I addressed that here:

    
    
      A startup can't hope to enter a market that's obviously 
      big and yet in which they have no competitors. So any 
      startup that succeeds is either going to be entering a 
      market with existing competitors, but armed with some 
      secret weapon that will get them all the users (like 
      Google), or entering a market that looks small but which 
      will turn out to be big (like Microsoft).

~~~
ryanx435
yeah, you covered it, but you glanced over it very cursorily while matt maroon
addresses the issue much more in depth and in a much clearer way.

------
dave_sullivan
Although the examples used in PG's article can be framed in a lot of different
ways, I thought the general advice was pretty useful and echos much of what's
been said about product development in the last 5-10 years: don't sit around
trying to come up with ideas--get out there and talk to people in other
industries about their problems and solutions will naturally present
themselves.

I also thought the concept of the "sitcom idea" was really clever and dead on
--I hadn't heard that one before.

Re: next big markets--retail is an interesting one and it occurred to me that
Walmart is going to have a RIM like crisis of its own over the next decade.
E-commerce growth probably will continue as consumers grow increasingly
comfortable with it, and the economics make so much more sense than building
walmart's everywhere. I suppose they will start getting rid of their stores
and moving to online, finding themselves looking like Amazon at the end of it,
or out of business.

AIs--or approximations of them--are going to be a big thing. Self driving cars
--google won't be the only company that makes that software. Big data--data is
important for these types of applications, someone will find that it might
make sense to standardize this data and simply sell it to the various
AI/something-like-it makers rather than try to do all of it. Meanwhile,
AI/something-like-it startups will not want to build a fleet of vans to drive
around taking pictures of everything. This is going to be a really interesting
industry over the next ten years and people won't remember what they were
doing before.

------
dschiptsov
The key concept of pg's essay is the _prepared mind_.

It is a variant of the very old idea that we cannot see that we don't know.
This is called blindness of ignorance.

The rest is a list of examples of what could be seen and have been seen by
others and some hints to how to train your mind.

What could be seen does not matter. What matter is _how to gain the ability to
see_ , which means to overcome ignorance.

It is quite possible that pg himself saw it as a meta-model, or it was just an
insight of the one, who already made his way to "enlightenment".)

btw, being familiar with Pirsig's book in ones twenties is a very telling
factor.)

------
freddy
First off thank you for writing the article. It doesn't seem to me that
Facebook or Google saw a huge market inflection and decided to create a
company in the hopes if hitting it at the write time. To me it seems they were
doing something PG mentioned which is building something they themselves
wanted regardless of the market potential. It just so happens that by doing
this they built something that a lot of other people also wanted and were able
to execute it in such a way. Sometimes I feel "looking for an idea" is the
wrong approach but instead viewing the world from behind a critical lens we
will see problems that need to be solved. By solving them we feel our lives
will be better and maybe that is enough to begin with and by solving these
types of problems, once in a while we may just discover that others feel the
same way.

------
lazyjones
Online- and Software-centric startups are way overhyped right now. I believe
that the commoditization of personal computing, smartphones and websites and
the emergence of giants like Google, Apple, Facebook has made these much less
interesting than people might think so the best long-term startup
opportunities lie elsewhere (robotics/AI, biotechnology, sustainable living
... ). But internet startups are still good for a quick buck due to crazy
valuations and low entry barriers, so VC will still pour down on them
(sadly...).

At the end of the day, there's still things we need (food, medicine, health,
production of goods) and things we don't (yet another website or SaaS/PaaS
startup or electronic gadgetry).

Then again, right here, we're all biased ...

------
neebz
Maybe I'm wrong but I think PG's article was focussed towards startup
founders. And this article is more towards investors.

From a founder perspective, it is not just enough to know which market has the
biggest potential in near future but also in which market can I execute my
idea successfully. Just getting into a good market is not enough but you
should be able to have the arsenal to execute an idea. And this is where
organic ideas are way better than thought-up ideas. When you have actually
faced a problem, then your path is a lot easier and you know where do you want
to take your product/service.

------
weisser
No other social network successfully kept a lid on who could join like FB did
in the beginning.

Anyone who started a social network at the time wanted as many people to sign
up as possible but could care less who they were or where they were from. This
resulted in lots of random people signing up but few connections that existed
in the real world translating to the social network. Consider Myspace (or many
others) where your "friends" were often people you did not know. Sometimes you
didn't even know their names!

Facebook did the exact opposite. They wanted to transfer the real world
connections to the web. By getting almost everyone at Harvard on the service
they were able make this happen. They repeated the success at many other
schools. It was a long time before just anyone could join FB and at that point
so many real world connections were already in place that when a person joined
there were already people they knew on the site.

~~~
ig1
You're forgetting aSmallWorld

------
mvkel
The inherent flaw in both arguments: citing exceptions.

Facebook, Google, Amazon et al succeeded _despite_ being bad/unknown
quantities on paper. They specifically should _not_ be used as examples of
"how to do it right."

Look at smaller sustainable startups that are flying under the radar to
unearth proven, repeatable best practices. You can't establish patterns in
methodology by citing exceptions.

For a $10mm company to become a $1bn company, know what you need? Luck.

EDIT: To those below, you're both validating my point. Luck isn't the sole
driver of success, but it's the difference between a modestly successful
company and an insanely successful company. The other skills the founders have
to exploit opportunities are already there. The x-factor is luck. Nobody says
"okay, all we need is 500 million users and we're successful!"

~~~
qznc
I also would like to hear some investigations about serial startups. For
example the Samwer brothers are doing it successfully again and again. The
recipe: copy successful US-only startups/companies in europe. Another example:
Richard Branson aka Virgin Group. I cannot get his recipe nailed down, but his
biographical book is called "Screw It, Let's do It".

------
FrankFrank
Interesting write up. However, I don't see the point of picking apart a small
paragraph, which, IMHO, was meant to provide mere guidance and perspective.
All the other points made in this 'response' are all fairly obvious and again,
IMHO, already being worked on. I think PG was spot on with his guiding essay;
many things stand out and serve as a guide for people formulating ideas for a
start up. If I am going to seriously undertake the task of building a start
up, and dedicating an important part of their life to building something, I'd
take all the sound guidance I can get.

Especially liked how this was put together:

    
    
         Live in the future, then build what's missing.

------
arikrak
I think sometimes there's too much emphasis on finding the problem, but that's
not why companies like Google or Microsoft were successful.

The reason Google won at search was that they had the best results. They
probably still would have won if they started a couple of years earlier or
later. Maybe eventually it would have been harder to enter the market against
bigger players, but the hard part if figuring out the best solution, not
figuring out the problem.

------
kolleykibber
I think a fundamental point missed is that Google, Facebook and the iPhone
were better than Altavista, MySpace and the smartphones of the time. The
untapped market was unimportant, that's an AOL play. I recall a general
frustration that things should be better and a pleasant feeling of
confirmation when each of the winners launched.

Not unlike AAPL, renewables and 3D printing right now.

------
Tactix47
The poker analogy is an interesting one - I believe that it's been said that
advertising is the only differentiation among products (or services) of equal
value. Paradise Poker had a better interface and a wider variety of poker
variations, but Party Poker (along with Ultimate Bet and Poker Stars soon
thereafter) became the household names due to advertising.

------
omegant
I still think the PG post is way ahead. I remember why I started using google,
it was just massively better than yahoo. It just worked. The same happened
with facebook, I almost didn't use my myspace account because it was so
limited the way to use it. Also it scared lots of my friends because if you
wanted something cool you had to pimp your account. Facebook just was come in
and use it, share stuff and locate people easily. The market was found acter
the use, they developed an amazing product and then discovered how to
monetize. It doesn't have to be that way, good ideas don't need to be . But
there are lots of broken things around and if you feel amazed(living in the
future) that nobody is doing the right stuff then it is probably a good idea
waiting to be developed. Of course a good development is a huge part of the
equation (and good luck too). He is right that there are too much picture apps
though.

------
bozho
True that about the growing market. And true that few of these
products/companies are really anything novel. But you have to do things better
than the rest (I've discussed that more extensively here
<http://web.bozho.net/?p=125>)

------
MariaLaLoca
I like some of the points made in that article and I would like to add that pg
and the y-combinator startups he works with are a small part of what is out
there and what is possible. The only thing I disagree with is the need (I
think even many VCs feel) is to need apps that connect to hardware for it to
feel more real. We don't even have decent social networks yet that solve basic
problems for us. Facebook, twitter etc, in perspective, are just the first few
truly global networks but... are they really the best we can make?

------
tomelders
"Here, off the top of my head, are three things that sound like a formula for
success, and here's three companies you like that I'm going to say had all
three of these ingredients and you will believe me because it is convenient."

------
huhtenberg
> _... few others realize are worth doing._

Pursuing. I'm pretty sure Paul meant "pursuing."

~~~
mariobertschler
exactly... few others realize are worth "doing", because (a) market isn't
worth it OR (b) competition is too big..

Everybody knew search is a big market, but few people realized that you can
become a big player besides Altavista ad Yahoo! in 1998

so the statement remains correct....

