Saturday, 27 April 2013
Let's Start a Rock and Roll Band!...... interesting Story
Let's Start a Rock and Roll Band!
Being twenty, living at home with my single Mom that does pills every night and sleeps for cash, no girlfriend (never had one), and basically no money, there's nothing to do. All I have is my computer, video games, and my community college that sucks. I don't have the grades to go somewhere nice, and I'm too poor to run away.
Being a pretty boring person, I need something. Anything. I finally decided that I would do the one thing that makes every person cool, even if that person sucks at it: creating a rock band.
Having no friends, I would have to start my band from scratch at community. Having a second hand electric guitar that my older brother gave me years ago and barely played, I set off to find my new friends and band mates.
I put up signs all around my school, asking anyone with music ability to come and find me so that they could try out. On the day they were supposed to find me, only six people showed up.
The first was some hipster kid with a fedora on. I asked him what he played, and he said he plays a keytar. I ask what the fuck that is, and he pulls out a keyboard that looks like a guitar out of his case. He starts playing, and he's good, but I still can't shake the feeling that he's a gigantic faggot.
Being a pretty boring person, I need something. Anything. I finally decided that I would do the one thing that makes every person cool, even if that person sucks at it: creating a rock band.
Having no friends, I would have to start my band from scratch at community. Having a second hand electric guitar that my older brother gave me years ago and barely played, I set off to find my new friends and band mates.
I put up signs all around my school, asking anyone with music ability to come and find me so that they could try out. On the day they were supposed to find me, only six people showed up.
The first was some hipster kid with a fedora on. I asked him what he played, and he said he plays a keytar. I ask what the fuck that is, and he pulls out a keyboard that looks like a guitar out of his case. He starts playing, and he's good, but I still can't shake the feeling that he's a gigantic faggot.
Second and third were too girls who liked to sing. One was some black chick who just liked singing the same way Beyonce did and added in horrible dance moves. The other girl was some country chick from Oklahoma that sung like shit, but she was hot, so I picked her over the other chick.
Fourth was Lucas. Lucas is probably 400 pounds, black, and rides around in a wheelchair. He plays the drums, and he is fucking amazing. With his wheelchair, I don't even have to get a seat for him to sit down on while playing.
Next was some emo chick who played bass. She was bad as well, but she wasn't wearing a bra, so I told her that she was in.
Finally, a Korean kid, Lee Won, showed up. Wearing a South Korea soccer jersey, he took out a guitar and started to play Canon Rock. He wasn't even fucking trying, but he was fucking amazing. He can't speak English that well at all, and he looked more like a girl than the chick trying to be Beyonce, but the guy knew how to play guitar.
So at the end of the day, I had my band. Tony, the hipster keytar player. Chelsea, the Spears wannabe singer. Lucas, the wheelchair bound African drums player. Lauren, the depressing chick who doesn't wear a bra. And finally, Lee Won, the Korean who can play guitar like a God.
We called ourselves KOREAN POP ROBOTS 9000.
Fourth was Lucas. Lucas is probably 400 pounds, black, and rides around in a wheelchair. He plays the drums, and he is fucking amazing. With his wheelchair, I don't even have to get a seat for him to sit down on while playing.
Next was some emo chick who played bass. She was bad as well, but she wasn't wearing a bra, so I told her that she was in.
Finally, a Korean kid, Lee Won, showed up. Wearing a South Korea soccer jersey, he took out a guitar and started to play Canon Rock. He wasn't even fucking trying, but he was fucking amazing. He can't speak English that well at all, and he looked more like a girl than the chick trying to be Beyonce, but the guy knew how to play guitar.
So at the end of the day, I had my band. Tony, the hipster keytar player. Chelsea, the Spears wannabe singer. Lucas, the wheelchair bound African drums player. Lauren, the depressing chick who doesn't wear a bra. And finally, Lee Won, the Korean who can play guitar like a God.
We called ourselves KOREAN POP ROBOTS 9000.
Sleeping around, etc. My Mother is a slut. She's not a terrible Mom, and she's not mean, but she's been really flaky since my Dad left her for some Swedish transfer teacher.
Anyways, after that day, we started practicing every day. The Spears wannabe didn't show up for the first two practices, so we had the others try and sing. Lucas couldn't sing at all, Tony and Lauren sounded like they were trying to do a cover of My Chemical Romance, but Lee Won, again, was pretty good. You couldn't really understand the fuck he was saying because he was mixing in Korean and English, but he had a nice voice.
Chelsea showed up for our forth practice, and she said that she had an important date with her boyfriend all those days. This put me off because I wanted to bang her, so I became jealous and told her that Lee Won would be our lead singer and guitar player while she sung back up to him.
We got into a fight, she wanted to quit, but Lucas stepped in (...rolled in) and told us all to stop acting like faggots. Tony was off to the side smoking some weed, and Lee Won was reading manga on my couch. Lauren was sitting by herself on a chair I brought from my room and was staring at everyone back and forth like she was about to explode from anxiety.
We kept practicing for a few weeks, and we became closer as a band. We started thinking of songs, mostly me, and we were finally hitting a groove. Chelsea was fine with being the back up singer to our Korean superstar, and the others were having fun with it all.
First gig we had came when Lucas came up to me and said that his little brother was having a party. I agreed to play it, and we were all pumped to be getting paid $10 each to play for an hour at a party.
We show up at the party and it turns out his little brother is sixteen-years-old, a gangster in training, and everyone at his party was black. We all stuck out like a sore thumb, and the music playing before we came on was all 50 Cent and Lil' Wayne.
I confronted Lucas and asked why the fuck didn't he tell me that his brother didn't like rock/alternative music, and he told me that if he said anything that I would have declined. Being stuck in the situation, we started to playing and it went terrible.
It wasn't like we weren't playing well on our first song known as 'Fit', but the kids weren't paying attention to us. They were all of, drinking alcohol and talking to each other while we looked like idiots playing to two black kids who were staring at Chelsea the whole time.
We finish the gig early, about forty minutes early, and prepare to get the fuck out of there. Lucas' parents thank us and tell us we did a great job; even if they didn't hear us play at all while they were in the house.
We start packing up, and Lauren comes up to me and thanks me for helping her get out of the house. She tells me that her brother killed himself and all that jazz, and she didn't do anything all day but play World of Warcraft before the band sign-ups came up.
She hugged me, and fuck, she smelled good. Like strawberries and sweat mixed together into a totally sweet combo. She then walks off and gets in Lee Won's van that he took from his parents restaurant.
Our first gig was a failure, but luckily, that wasn't the end.
We show up at the party and it turns out his little brother is sixteen-years-old, a gangster in training, and everyone at his party was black. We all stuck out like a sore thumb, and the music playing before we came on was all 50 Cent and Lil' Wayne.
I confronted Lucas and asked why the fuck didn't he tell me that his brother didn't like rock/alternative music, and he told me that if he said anything that I would have declined. Being stuck in the situation, we started to playing and it went terrible.
It wasn't like we weren't playing well on our first song known as 'Fit', but the kids weren't paying attention to us. They were all of, drinking alcohol and talking to each other while we looked like idiots playing to two black kids who were staring at Chelsea the whole time.
We finish the gig early, about forty minutes early, and prepare to get the fuck out of there. Lucas' parents thank us and tell us we did a great job; even if they didn't hear us play at all while they were in the house.
We start packing up, and Lauren comes up to me and thanks me for helping her get out of the house. She tells me that her brother killed himself and all that jazz, and she didn't do anything all day but play World of Warcraft before the band sign-ups came up.
She hugged me, and fuck, she smelled good. Like strawberries and sweat mixed together into a totally sweet combo. She then walks off and gets in Lee Won's van that he took from his parents restaurant.
Our first gig was a failure, but luckily, that wasn't the end.
Alright, so we finished our first gig, and we all went back to college that week and took a week off of practicing because of mid-terms. I was studying like crazy to get good grades, and since I suck at anything school related, Lauren told me that she would help me. Seeing as she was getting straight A's in everything, she helped me out while we worked on music at our house.
I tried to make a move on her one night, but she didn't notice it and went to go get food when I tried to put my hand on her knee. The next day, again, I tried to talk about if she had a boyfriend, but everything got interrupted when the whole band came over for a study session.
Chelsea brought her boyfriend, a guy who looked like he was a forty, and he had the balding hair to prove it. They just went off in the corner and made out while we were all working, and Lee Won went around and helped everyone with our math. He would come over to whoever was having trouble, take our pen, make a few swipes, and he would show us how to do it. Lauren helped everyone with our Literature course, and Lucas brought us food.
We all had a fun time, and we were ready for the tests in the upcoming days. Since the weekend was coming up, I asked Lauren if she wanted to go to Six Flags. She said that she would love to, and then she asked Lucas because he was right by us. Lucas then asked Lee Won, and Lee Won asked Tony who asked Chelsea who asked her boyfriend who brought some old people with him for some damn reason.We get to Six Flags in the Won Mobile (except Chelsea, her boyfriend, and his posse) and all start to go around and do all the shit we can find. Seeing as Lucas can't ride on the roller coasters, him and Tony went off to go play games. Me, seeing that as the most fun, first went to go out try X2 with Lee Won and Lauren.
Things then got kinda got awkward. Seeing as there is only two people per seat on the ride, and there was three of us, one of us had to get left out. We all looked at each other, and Lee Won said he would go with some random person and let us two go together. I gave him a high five behind Lauren's back, and he gave me a thumbs up.
The ride was awesome, and she didn't scream as much as I did. The coaster came to a stop, we got off, and went on other rides like Superman and Riddler while Lee Won continued to stay in the background with me and Lauren in the front.
All of us finally got back together around 4:00 PM for some food, and Chelsea and her boyfriend were hanging out with these old guys in suits. They were discussing politics and crap while she looked like she was only interested in making out with her balding love.
We ate our food and then went to go play games with Tony and Lucas. We all played that game where you have to shoot the target until the thing goes into the air and hits the top, so we all went at it at once. Lucas somehow won, gave the gigantic teddy bear to Lauren, and she gave him a kiss on the cheek.I raged on the inside, but I let it slide seeing as I didn't think of Lucas as a competitor for her heart. The rest of the day was a bunch of rides and games. The most memorable thing could probably be the 3-Point Challenge thing the park was running.
It was a basketball court, and they were saying if you could hit 10 three pointers in sixty seconds, you could win a basketball jersey or a mini electric guitar. Lee Won told us that he would try, gave $7 to the guy running it, and hit 12 three pointers with five seconds to spare.
A crowd submerged onto all of us, and he got cheers from all the girls and got high fives from all the guys. He took one of the mini guitars and gave it to me, saying we were best friends.
We all had a great time that day, and we left in the Won Mobile back to my house for a late night cramming session.The night comes and everything is hectic. We're all supposed to show up at my house, but my Mom has two gentlemen over, and they're drinking alcohol and partying in the living room.
I have to intercept everyone, bring them to the garage, and get ready there. I'm no going to say I'm ashamed of my Mother, but...never mind, I am very ashamed of her. We all get ready, throw our shit in the Won Mobile, and we're on our way to the high school.
We show up and there is a gigantic group of people around most of our ages in front of the school. Mixed in with college students and high school students, a lot of them are holding bottles with brown bags covering them and cowering into corners where no one can see them.
We get ready and start heading inside when a few girls come over to van and start chatting up Tony. Tony, wearing some horrible looking black and white striped tuxedo with a hat to match, starts to chat with them and then bails for a few minutes to go wherever they wanted him to go. Lucas says he'll go roll after him, but I tell him that I'll go.
Lee Won tags along, and we leave the heavy lifting to the two girls and the guy who is in the wheelchair. We head over to where there are some kids hanging out near the lunch tables of the school, at night, and see that Tony is with them with his unique attire.I question Tony what the hell he is doing, and he's doing coke lines on the table while some other kids cover him. One of the girl has her hand on his ass, and I take his hat and throw it on the ground, saying that we need to take this seriously.
Tony gets in my face, pissed off that I threw his hat, and Lee steps in to calm everyone down. Tony and the random underage jailbait make out for a few minutes, and then all three of us run towards the school to get prepped for the show.
We get inside and almost no one is there. The teacher supervisors are all inside and not giving a shit about the party outside. The only kids inside seem to be the preppy kids and the nerds that wouldn't ever do drugs or drink alcohol.
All of us get our instruments on stage, check the sound system, play a little to get going, and we have to start. We begin playing, and we're not bad except for the awful country singing by Chelsea and the off tune keyboard playing by Tony.
The set is finished, and a few kids clap. A few kids danced, some told us that we did a good job, and that was it. We had finished our second gig, and it was a big improvement over the last one, I guess.Tony explains to us since we're done playing, he's going to go outside and find a girl named Sara. Lucas tells me to fuck off and to carry all the shit I made him carry before, and he follows after Tony. Chelsea gets on her cellphone right away and calls up her boyfriend, ignoring all of us.
That leaves me, Lauren, and Lee Won to clear the stage and put everything back. Me and Lee start getting the drum set to take back and Lauren takes the smaller things, all three of us sticking close together.
Some random guy walks out from the back entrance where the van was, and he asks Lauren if she wants to go have fun with him. Since me and Lee are putting the instruments away, we don't see what's going on, and when we look back she's getting harassed by some guy doped up on drugs.
Before I can yell for help, Lee rushes over to her and headbutts the guy in the chest and then punches him in the face. I then yell for help, and people rush over to check out what happened. We explain the situation, and we say that the guy has drugs on him.
A few hours later after all three of us are hanging out in the van, the other three people in our band show up and we're ready to go home. While Lee drove us back to my house to rest, I couldn't shake the feeling that Lauren was looking at me.Okay, friends went home already, so I can continue. Let's see, after the Valentines Night Dance, we all said we would take a few days to settle our heads before practicing again. Me and Lee Won were at my house, doing some homework when my cell began to ring. It was Lauren.
I pick up, trying not to sound surprised and excited, wanting to pick out the perfect words. When I started to stutter and sound idiotic, Lee Won picked up his pen, wrote some lines on a paper and held them up to me so that I could sound like I knew what I was doing.
Lauren wanted to thank me for being a great help, and she says that her family is proud of her for doing something productive instead of sitting around the house all day. She questioned me to see if me and her could meet later on that night at a local book store, and I couldn't contain my happiness. I told her I would be there in an hour, and I hung up.
Lee Won gave me a pounding of the fist and asked if I had ever been on a date before. Seeing as I was twenty, it was weird telling him that I had actually never been out with a girl alone before. He told me that he hadn't either, and he was 19-years-old. I was shocked, knowing how great the guy was, but he then added in that his Mom thought women in America were demons and would rape him.
I laughed, and Lee said that he didn't like it. He felt like an outsider when most of his friends talked about trying to get girls back in high school, and he knew that if he asked out a girl that his Mom would beat his head in. His Dad, on the other hand, wanted Lee to fuck every girl he saw, but his Mom wore the pants in his family, so Lee Won was out of luck.
I told Lee that he could sleep here tonight with my Mother not caring who stayed. She was out for the night, anyway, probably having sex with her new Italian boyfriend named Rodrigo or some shit like that.I tried to find the nicest clothes I had that didn't smell terrible, but the only things I could find were a plain black shirt that said 'HAPPY DOG' with a brown cartoon dog smiling on the front and jeans that were to small for me. I had no time, so I forced myself into the jeans and put on the stupid shirt.
Lee told me to have a great time and to get Lauren. He added that I was a good guy, and he knew that Lauren liked me the same way I liked her. I don't know why, but I gave him a hug, and while the silence broke in, I ran out of the room without looking back.
She was at the book store when I got her, and she was sitting down at the counter where they served coffee. I asked her what she was reading, and she told me it was just the newspaper from the school we performed at. They called us the 'College Dropout Robots 9000' for some fucking reason, probably Lucas, but it also said that we were an upcoming band, so that felt nice; even though that piece of writing was probably from some 14-year-old kid that didn't even listen to us.
We started talking about how much fun it has been to have so many people around, and she thanked me again for being always there for me. She looked me in the eye, smiled, and gave me a gigantic hug. I melted in my seat, and if I died right there, it would have been fucking awesome. My first intimate hug from a girl that wasn't part of my family, and it was soft, warm, and her body smelled like strawberries without the sweat this time. The last time she hugged me was different. This time it meant something."You're like a big brother to me."
...What?
WHAT?
WHAT THE FUCKING FUCK?
"You're always there for me, Leon..."
I sat there, sipping on my cold cup of shit beans grounded up, and put on the most fake smile since the Presidential election.
"So, I wanted to tell you first before even Chelsea."
I nodded.
"I like someone in the band."
My stomach curled into a knot, and my heart exploded like a bomb had just been dropped on it. I didn't care who the fuck it was anymore.
"Lee Won...right?"Of course, my best friend. It had to be the guy who I actually liked, but at least he was a good guy. At least it was Lee Won.
"No, I think I love Tony."
Tony? Hipster Tony? The guy who makes out with under age girls Tony? Guy who ruined our performance almost by snorting coke at the lunch tables with loser high school rejects?
"...That's great."
"I'm going to ask him out. Do you think he'll say yes?"
"...Yeah."
Everything after that was a blur of her talking about how hot and perfect he was. How she LOVED his style. How she LOVED his fucking keytar playing. When she came to give me a hug to leave, I hugged her and felt nothing but my heart breaking even more.
Luckily, though, for me, I had one person that could move mountains if need be. I had the one person that had the power to change the balance of love in one go.
I had Lee Won.I go back to my house a few hours later and see that Lee is on the computer doing some homework before heading off to sleep on the sleeping bag that I had in my garage. He asked me how the date went, and I said that it wasn't any date.
He asked me if he found out about Lauren liking Tony, and I flipped out. He fucking knew? Then why the hell didn't he tell me this before? He told me that he wanted me to have confidence and not feel like shit going, and Lee Won thought she would like me the same if I had some confidence. His confidence busting failed, and I felt like shit.
He told me that Lauren told him the night of the Valentines Day Dance, and how she was really jealous of him going after those young teenage girls. She asked him what she should do to get Tony, and Lee Won told her that Tony seemed kinda of a free spirit and probably couldn't be tied down by one girl. He then said she responded by saying that it was her goal to tame him or some dominatrix shit like that.
We spent the rest of the night trying to think of a way for her to fall for me and not him, and he suggested to take his van, go to her house, stand atop the van, and play guitar outside her window. I told him that her parents would flip out and kill me, and he agreed.On Monday we had class, and me and Lee Won hung out during free period to become strategical and find a way to make myself appealing to her. We thought maybe that I should change my style to what Tony wore, but we agreed that becoming like him would be too much money and be a waste of time. Lucas came over in his chair forty minutes later and asked what was up, saying he heard about Tony and Lauren.
We ask him how the hell he found that out, and he told us that Lauren came to him last night on the phone, asking how to get Tony. I raged inside, Lee tried not to laugh at all of her attempts, and Lucas said to go up to Tony, show her breasts, and ask him for sex. I was about to hit the fucking 500 pound wheelchair bastard, but Lee stopped me and said that he was just joking. He wasn't, but I was calmed down by that point.
I call a band meeting after school at my place and everyone shows up, including Tony and Lauren. I tell them that we'll probably be booking our new gig soon, so we should start practicing. We all agree to do an instant practice session, and we begin. An hour or two later, Tony says he has to leave and bolts, Lauren following behind him.
Me and Lee Won stop for a few seconds, look at each other, and go closely behind her to see what transpires. Mom wasn't home again, so the two of them were in the kitchen we caught up to them out of the garage.Lauren had her hands on his trashy suit that he was wearing, and I could hear the words, 'I like you' over the silence that overcame me. My heart dropped, again, and I felt like shit...again. Tony took her arms, pressed his hands around her waist, grabbing her ass in the process, and started to make out with her in my kitchen.
I sigh, tell Lee Won let's go back, and we do. We go back to the garage and hang out with Chelsea and Lucas who are talking about some shitty new television show on VH1 or some stupid crap . I sit down on the rundown couch I have in the corner and put my heads in my face. I felt like crying, but I couldn't feel any water come out of my eyes.
Chelsea asked me what was wrong, but I just told her that I hit my head when walking to the bathroom. She sat next to me and apologized randomly for always bringing her outside friends to practices and outings we have. I told her it was fine, and we shared...a moment...somewhat.
The night ended with Tony and Lauren coming back to the garage, hand in hand, Tony saying that he had the energy to practice some more.
We practiced all night long, and even if the rest of the band was having fun, I was not.She called me the night after the practice, saying that she couldn't believe that he liked her the same way she did him. I didn't believe any shit that came from Tony's lips, even if he was apart of my group, and I wish he would burn in hell for putting his lips on the girl I really, really liked.
The next few days of practicing was awkward, having the two of them playing right next to each other with Tony grinding the top of his instrument into the backside of Lauren while playing. If it wasn't for Lucas and Lee Won stopping me after that practice, I was going to follow Tony and Lauren, killing Tony when I caught up to them.
The two of them left practice right away and went to some cheap cafe that Tony raved about, Lauren wanting to try the coffee that he adored. The rest of the night was spent with me, Lucas, Lee, and Chelsea playing scrabble with my Mom and Rodrigo.
We wanted to go out and do something as a group, but my Mom saw us all come out from the garage and insisted we spent the night meeting her new man. The game lasted until 12:00 AM when Rodrigo finally got drunk enough to start groping my mother in front of my friends. She said that she should get him to bed, and the two of them went upstairs with his hand up her shirt.
Lucas said he should get home and had Lee Won help him down my front steps to get to his expensive car. Chelsea trailed behind the two and stayed with me while Lee gave his best shot at making Lucas get off his chair and take a few steps down.She implored to why I looked like I was about to throw up during practice and wondered if I had a crush on Lauren. I told her that I didn't and just thought Tony was ruining our practice, but she didn't believe me and saw through my simple disguise of not caring.
Chelsea told me that if I wanted, me and her could go out on a date and see if I liked her as much as she liked me, but I declined. Told her that she was just joking with me, and I walked away before she could say anything else to me. I went down to push Lucas off his chair and force him to walk to his car while Chelsea's eyes burned in the back of my skull.
Next gig was lined up for February 27th at Lucas' Mom's best friend's daughter's party that she was holding because she got back together with her old boyfriend. A stupid reason for a party, but Lucas got us another gig, so we took it right away.
Tony and Lauren wouldn't get away from each other. Every time I looked at one of them, the other was there. I asked Lee if he could ask Tony to see if he really liked Lauren and wasn't just doing it for sex, and Lee Won complied by getting Tony alone after practice before he went off with his new girlfriend.
Lee came back, telling me that Tony said that he really loved Lauren, and I wanted to punch something. The guy was such a douche, and if Lauren wouldn't quit from it, I would have kicked him out of my band. He didn't add anything to the band, anymore.Then it hit me on the head. He never signed up for my band because he wanted to play music. He signed up so that he could get high, get paid, and have sex with women...Dammit, it was really like he was a rock star.
Two days before the performance, Lee Won came to me with an idea. He told me that he had an idea to get Lauren and Tony to break up and leave her to me. I didn't know why he was so mad at Tony, but then he added that he found Tony and Lauren in his van...doing stuff, and he had to explain to his parents why his van smelled the way it did.
With that said, we made a pact. In two days, we were going to take down the hipster and get myself the girl I love.
Sadly, Lee Won would never get to forget the images that he saw that night in the van.
Be Good............an Essay
(This essay is derived from a talk at the 2008 Startup School.)
About a month after we started Y Combinator we came up with the phrase that became our motto: Make something people want. We've learned a lot since then, but if I were choosing now that's still the one I'd pick.
Another thing we tell founders is not to worry too much about the business model, at least at first. Not because making money is unimportant, but because it's so much easier than building something great.
A couple weeks ago I realized that if you put those two ideas together, you get something surprising. Make something people want. Don't worry too much about making money. What you've got is a description of a charity.
When you get an unexpected result like this, it could either be a bug or a new discovery. Either businesses aren't supposed to be like charities, and we've proven by reductio ad absurdum that one or both of the principles we began with is false. Or we have a new idea.
I suspect it's the latter, because as soon as this thought occurred to me, a whole bunch of other things fell into place.
Examples
For example, Craigslist. It's not a charity, but they run it like one. And they're astoundingly successful. When you scan down the list of most popular web sites, the number of employees at Craigslist looks like a misprint. Their revenues aren't as high as they could be, but most startups would be happy to trade places with them.
In Patrick O'Brian's novels, his captains always try to get upwind of their opponents. If you're upwind, you decide when and if to engage the other ship. Craigslist is effectively upwind of enormous revenues. They'd face some challenges if they wanted to make more, but not the sort you face when you're tacking upwind, trying to force a crappy product on ambivalent users by spending ten times as much on sales as on development. [1]
I'm not saying startups should aim to end up like Craigslist. They're a product of unusual circumstances. But they're a good model for the early phases.
Google looked a lot like a charity in the beginning. They didn't have ads for over a year. At year 1, Google was indistinguishable from a nonprofit. If a nonprofit or government organization had started a project to index the web, Google at year 1 is the limit of what they'd have produced.
Back when I was working on spam filters I thought it would be a good idea to have a web-based email service with good spam filtering. I wasn't thinking of it as a company. I just wanted to keep people from getting spammed. But as I thought more about this project, I realized it would probably have to be a company. It would cost something to run, and it would be a pain to fund with grants and donations.
That was a surprising realization. Companies often claim to be benevolent, but it was surprising to realize there were purely benevolent projects that had to be embodied as companies to work.
I didn't want to start another company, so I didn't do it. But if someone had, they'd probably be quite rich now. There was a window of about two years when spam was increasing rapidly but all the big email services had terrible filters. If someone had launched a new, spam-free mail service, users would have flocked to it.
Notice the pattern here? From either direction we get to the same spot. If you start from successful startups, you find they often behaved like nonprofits. And if you start from ideas for nonprofits, you find they'd often make good startups.
Power
How wide is this territory? Would all good nonprofits be good companies? Possibly not. What makes Google so valuable is that their users have money. If you make people with money love you, you can probably get some of it. But could you also base a successful startup on behaving like a nonprofit to people who don't have money? Could you, for example, grow a successful startup out of curing an unfashionable but deadly disease like malaria?
I'm not sure, but I suspect that if you pushed this idea, you'd be surprised how far it would go. For example, people who apply to Y Combinator don't generally have much money, and yet we can profit by helping them, because with our help they could make money. Maybe the situation is similar with malaria. Maybe an organization that helped lift its weight off a country could benefit from the resulting growth.
I'm not proposing this is a serious idea. I don't know anything about malaria. But I've been kicking ideas around long enough to know when I come across a powerful one.
One way to guess how far an idea extends is to ask yourself at what point you'd bet against it. The thought of betting against benevolence is alarming in the same way as saying that something is technically impossible. You're just asking to be made a fool of, because these are such powerful forces. [2]
For example, initially I thought maybe this principle only applied to Internet startups. Obviously it worked for Google, but what about Microsoft? Surely Microsoft isn't benevolent? But when I think back to the beginning, they were. Compared to IBM they were like Robin Hood. When IBM introduced the PC, they thought they were going to make money selling hardware at high prices. But by gaining control of the PC standard, Microsoft opened up the market to any manufacturer. Hardware prices plummeted, and lots of people got to have computers who couldn't otherwise have afforded them. It's the sort of thing you'd expect Google to do.
Microsoft isn't so benevolent now. Now when one thinks of what Microsoft does to users, all the verbs that come to mind begin with F. [3] And yet it doesn't seem to pay. Their stock price has been flat for years. Back when they were Robin Hood, their stock price rose like Google's. Could there be a connection?
You can see how there would be. When you're small, you can't bully customers, so you have to charm them. Whereas when you're big you can maltreat them at will, and you tend to, because it's easier than satisfying them. You grow big by being nice, but you can stay big by being mean.
You get away with it till the underlying conditions change, and then all your victims escape. So "Don't be evil" may be the most valuable thing Paul Buchheit made for Google, because it may turn out to be an elixir of corporate youth. I'm sure they find it constraining, but think how valuable it will be if it saves them from lapsing into the fatal laziness that afflicted Microsoft and IBM.
The curious thing is, this elixir is freely available to any other company. Anyone can adopt "Don't be evil." The catch is that people will hold you to it. So I don't think you're going to see record labels or tobacco companies using this discovery.
Morale
There's a lot of external evidence that benevolence works. But how does it work? One advantage of investing in a large number of startups is that you get a lot of data about how they work. From what we've seen, being good seems to help startups in three ways: it improves their morale, it makes other people want to help them, and above all, it helps them be decisive.
Morale is tremendously important to a startup—so important that morale alone is almost enough to determine success. Startups are often described as emotional roller-coasters. One minute you're going to take over the world, and the next you're doomed. The problem with feeling you're doomed is not just that it makes you unhappy, but that it makes you stop working. So the downhills of the roller-coaster are more of a self fulfilling prophecy than the uphills. If feeling you're going to succeed makes you work harder, that probably improves your chances of succeeding, but if feeling you're going to fail makes you stop working, that practically guarantees you'll fail.
Here's where benevolence comes in. If you feel you're really helping people, you'll keep working even when it seems like your startup is doomed. Most of us have some amount of natural benevolence. The mere fact that someone needs you makes you want to help them. So if you start the kind of startup where users come back each day, you've basically built yourself a giant tamagotchi. You've made something you need to take care of.
Blogger is a famous example of a startup that went through really low lows and survived. At one point they ran out of money and everyone left. Evan Williams came in to work the next day, and there was no one but him. What kept him going? Partly that users needed him. He was hosting thousands of people's blogs. He couldn't just let the site die.
There are many advantages of launching quickly, but the most important may be that once you have users, the tamagotchi effect kicks in. Once you have users to take care of, you're forced to figure out what will make them happy, and that's actually very valuable information.
The added confidence that comes from trying to help people can also help you with investors. One of the founders of Chatterous told me recently that he and his cofounder had decided that this service was something the world needed, so they were going to keep working on it no matter what, even if they had to move back to Canada and live in their parents' basements.
Once they realized this, they stopped caring so much what investors thought about them. They still met with them, but they weren't going to die if they didn't get their money. And you know what? The investors got a lot more interested. They could sense that the Chatterouses were going to do this startup with or without them.
If you're really committed and your startup is cheap to run, you become very hard to kill. And practically all startups, even the most successful, come close to death at some point. So if doing good for people gives you a sense of mission that makes you harder to kill, that alone more than compensates for whatever you lose by not choosing a more selfish project.
Help
Another advantage of being good is that it makes other people want to help you. This too seems to be an inborn trait in humans.
One of the startups we've funded, Octopart, is currently locked in a classic battle of good versus evil. They're a search site for industrial components. A lot of people need to search for components, and before Octopart there was no good way to do it. That, it turned out, was no coincidence.
Octopart built the right way to search for components. Users like it and they've been growing rapidly. And yet for most of Octopart's life, the biggest distributor, Digi-Key, has been trying to force them take their prices off the site. Octopart is sending them customers for free, and yet Digi-Key is trying to make that traffic stop. Why? Because their current business model depends on overcharging people who have incomplete information about prices. They don't want search to work.
The Octoparts are the nicest guys in the world. They dropped out of the PhD program in physics at Berkeley to do this. They just wanted to fix a problem they encountered in their research. Imagine how much time you could save the world's engineers if they could do searches online. So when I hear that a big, evil company is trying to stop them in order to keep search broken, it makes me really want to help them. It makes me spend more time on the Octoparts than I do with most of the other startups we've funded. It just made me spend several minutes telling you how great they are. Why? Because they're good guys and they're trying to help the world.
If you're benevolent, people will rally around you: investors, customers, other companies, and potential employees. In the long term the most important may be the potential employees. I think everyone knows now that good hackers are much better than mediocre ones. If you can attract the best hackers to work for you, as Google has, you have a big advantage. And the very best hackers tend to be idealistic. They're not desperate for a job. They can work wherever they want. So most want to work on things that will make the world better.
Compass
But the most important advantage of being good is that it acts as a compass. One of the hardest parts of doing a startup is that you have so many choices. There are just two or three of you, and a thousand things you could do. How do you decide?
Here's the answer: Do whatever's best for your users. You can hold onto this like a rope in a hurricane, and it will save you if anything can. Follow it and it will take you through everything you need to do.
It's even the answer to questions that seem unrelated, like how to convince investors to give you money. If you're a good salesman, you could try to just talk them into it. But the more reliable route is to convince them through your users: if you make something users love enough to tell their friends, you grow exponentially, and that will convince any investor.
Being good is a particularly useful strategy for making decisions in complex situations because it's stateless. It's like telling the truth. The trouble with lying is that you have to remember everything you've said in the past to make sure you don't contradict yourself. If you tell the truth you don't have to remember anything, and that's a really useful property in domains where things happen fast.
For example, Y Combinator has now invested in 80 startups, 57 of which are still alive. (The rest have died or merged or been acquired.) When you're trying to advise 57 startups, it turns out you have to have a stateless algorithm. You can't have ulterior motives when you have 57 things going on at once, because you can't remember them. So our rule is just to do whatever's best for the founders. Not because we're particularly benevolent, but because it's the only algorithm that works on that scale.
When you write something telling people to be good, you seem to be claiming to be good yourself. So I want to say explicitly that I am not a particularly good person. When I was a kid I was firmly in the camp of bad. The way adults used the word good, it seemed to be synonymous with quiet, so I grew up very suspicious of it.
You know how there are some people whose names come up in conversation and everyone says "He's such a great guy?" People never say that about me. The best I get is "he means well." I am not claiming to be good. At best I speak good as a second language.
So I'm not suggesting you be good in the usual sanctimonious way. I'm suggesting it because it works. It will work not just as a statement of "values," but as a guide to strategy, and even a design spec for software. Don't just not be evil. Be good.
Notes
[1] Fifty years ago it would have seemed shocking for a public company not to pay dividends. Now many tech companies don't. The markets seem to have figured out how to value potential dividends. Maybe that isn't the last step in this evolution. Maybe markets will eventually get comfortable with potential earnings. (VCs already are, and at least some of them consistently make money.)
I realize this sounds like the stuff one used to hear about the "new economy" during the Bubble. Believe me, I was not drinking that kool-aid at the time. But I'm convinced there were some good ideasburied in Bubble thinking. For example, it's ok to focus on growth instead of profits—but only if the growth is genuine. You can't be buying users; that's a pyramid scheme. But a company with rapid, genuine growth is valuable, and eventually markets learn how to value valuable things.
[2] The idea of starting a company with benevolent aims is currently undervalued, because the kind of people who currently make that their explicit goal don't usually do a very good job.
It's one of the standard career paths of trustafarians to start some vaguely benevolent business. The problem with most of them is that they either have a bogus political agenda or are feebly executed. The trustafarians' ancestors didn't get rich by preserving their traditional culture; maybe people in Bolivia don't want to either. And starting an organic farm, though it's at least straightforwardly benevolent, doesn't help people on the scale that Google does.
Most explicitly benevolent projects don't hold themselves sufficiently accountable. They act as if having good intentions were enough to guarantee good effects.
[3] Users dislike their new operating system so much that they're starting petitions to save the old one. And the old one was nothing special. The hackers within Microsoft must know in their hearts that if the company really cared about users they'd just advise them to switch to OSX.
About a month after we started Y Combinator we came up with the phrase that became our motto: Make something people want. We've learned a lot since then, but if I were choosing now that's still the one I'd pick.
Another thing we tell founders is not to worry too much about the business model, at least at first. Not because making money is unimportant, but because it's so much easier than building something great.
A couple weeks ago I realized that if you put those two ideas together, you get something surprising. Make something people want. Don't worry too much about making money. What you've got is a description of a charity.
When you get an unexpected result like this, it could either be a bug or a new discovery. Either businesses aren't supposed to be like charities, and we've proven by reductio ad absurdum that one or both of the principles we began with is false. Or we have a new idea.
I suspect it's the latter, because as soon as this thought occurred to me, a whole bunch of other things fell into place.
Examples
For example, Craigslist. It's not a charity, but they run it like one. And they're astoundingly successful. When you scan down the list of most popular web sites, the number of employees at Craigslist looks like a misprint. Their revenues aren't as high as they could be, but most startups would be happy to trade places with them.
In Patrick O'Brian's novels, his captains always try to get upwind of their opponents. If you're upwind, you decide when and if to engage the other ship. Craigslist is effectively upwind of enormous revenues. They'd face some challenges if they wanted to make more, but not the sort you face when you're tacking upwind, trying to force a crappy product on ambivalent users by spending ten times as much on sales as on development. [1]
I'm not saying startups should aim to end up like Craigslist. They're a product of unusual circumstances. But they're a good model for the early phases.
Google looked a lot like a charity in the beginning. They didn't have ads for over a year. At year 1, Google was indistinguishable from a nonprofit. If a nonprofit or government organization had started a project to index the web, Google at year 1 is the limit of what they'd have produced.
Back when I was working on spam filters I thought it would be a good idea to have a web-based email service with good spam filtering. I wasn't thinking of it as a company. I just wanted to keep people from getting spammed. But as I thought more about this project, I realized it would probably have to be a company. It would cost something to run, and it would be a pain to fund with grants and donations.
That was a surprising realization. Companies often claim to be benevolent, but it was surprising to realize there were purely benevolent projects that had to be embodied as companies to work.
I didn't want to start another company, so I didn't do it. But if someone had, they'd probably be quite rich now. There was a window of about two years when spam was increasing rapidly but all the big email services had terrible filters. If someone had launched a new, spam-free mail service, users would have flocked to it.
Notice the pattern here? From either direction we get to the same spot. If you start from successful startups, you find they often behaved like nonprofits. And if you start from ideas for nonprofits, you find they'd often make good startups.
Power
How wide is this territory? Would all good nonprofits be good companies? Possibly not. What makes Google so valuable is that their users have money. If you make people with money love you, you can probably get some of it. But could you also base a successful startup on behaving like a nonprofit to people who don't have money? Could you, for example, grow a successful startup out of curing an unfashionable but deadly disease like malaria?
I'm not sure, but I suspect that if you pushed this idea, you'd be surprised how far it would go. For example, people who apply to Y Combinator don't generally have much money, and yet we can profit by helping them, because with our help they could make money. Maybe the situation is similar with malaria. Maybe an organization that helped lift its weight off a country could benefit from the resulting growth.
I'm not proposing this is a serious idea. I don't know anything about malaria. But I've been kicking ideas around long enough to know when I come across a powerful one.
One way to guess how far an idea extends is to ask yourself at what point you'd bet against it. The thought of betting against benevolence is alarming in the same way as saying that something is technically impossible. You're just asking to be made a fool of, because these are such powerful forces. [2]
For example, initially I thought maybe this principle only applied to Internet startups. Obviously it worked for Google, but what about Microsoft? Surely Microsoft isn't benevolent? But when I think back to the beginning, they were. Compared to IBM they were like Robin Hood. When IBM introduced the PC, they thought they were going to make money selling hardware at high prices. But by gaining control of the PC standard, Microsoft opened up the market to any manufacturer. Hardware prices plummeted, and lots of people got to have computers who couldn't otherwise have afforded them. It's the sort of thing you'd expect Google to do.
Microsoft isn't so benevolent now. Now when one thinks of what Microsoft does to users, all the verbs that come to mind begin with F. [3] And yet it doesn't seem to pay. Their stock price has been flat for years. Back when they were Robin Hood, their stock price rose like Google's. Could there be a connection?
You can see how there would be. When you're small, you can't bully customers, so you have to charm them. Whereas when you're big you can maltreat them at will, and you tend to, because it's easier than satisfying them. You grow big by being nice, but you can stay big by being mean.
You get away with it till the underlying conditions change, and then all your victims escape. So "Don't be evil" may be the most valuable thing Paul Buchheit made for Google, because it may turn out to be an elixir of corporate youth. I'm sure they find it constraining, but think how valuable it will be if it saves them from lapsing into the fatal laziness that afflicted Microsoft and IBM.
The curious thing is, this elixir is freely available to any other company. Anyone can adopt "Don't be evil." The catch is that people will hold you to it. So I don't think you're going to see record labels or tobacco companies using this discovery.
Morale
There's a lot of external evidence that benevolence works. But how does it work? One advantage of investing in a large number of startups is that you get a lot of data about how they work. From what we've seen, being good seems to help startups in three ways: it improves their morale, it makes other people want to help them, and above all, it helps them be decisive.
Morale is tremendously important to a startup—so important that morale alone is almost enough to determine success. Startups are often described as emotional roller-coasters. One minute you're going to take over the world, and the next you're doomed. The problem with feeling you're doomed is not just that it makes you unhappy, but that it makes you stop working. So the downhills of the roller-coaster are more of a self fulfilling prophecy than the uphills. If feeling you're going to succeed makes you work harder, that probably improves your chances of succeeding, but if feeling you're going to fail makes you stop working, that practically guarantees you'll fail.
Here's where benevolence comes in. If you feel you're really helping people, you'll keep working even when it seems like your startup is doomed. Most of us have some amount of natural benevolence. The mere fact that someone needs you makes you want to help them. So if you start the kind of startup where users come back each day, you've basically built yourself a giant tamagotchi. You've made something you need to take care of.
Blogger is a famous example of a startup that went through really low lows and survived. At one point they ran out of money and everyone left. Evan Williams came in to work the next day, and there was no one but him. What kept him going? Partly that users needed him. He was hosting thousands of people's blogs. He couldn't just let the site die.
There are many advantages of launching quickly, but the most important may be that once you have users, the tamagotchi effect kicks in. Once you have users to take care of, you're forced to figure out what will make them happy, and that's actually very valuable information.
The added confidence that comes from trying to help people can also help you with investors. One of the founders of Chatterous told me recently that he and his cofounder had decided that this service was something the world needed, so they were going to keep working on it no matter what, even if they had to move back to Canada and live in their parents' basements.
Once they realized this, they stopped caring so much what investors thought about them. They still met with them, but they weren't going to die if they didn't get their money. And you know what? The investors got a lot more interested. They could sense that the Chatterouses were going to do this startup with or without them.
If you're really committed and your startup is cheap to run, you become very hard to kill. And practically all startups, even the most successful, come close to death at some point. So if doing good for people gives you a sense of mission that makes you harder to kill, that alone more than compensates for whatever you lose by not choosing a more selfish project.
Help
Another advantage of being good is that it makes other people want to help you. This too seems to be an inborn trait in humans.
One of the startups we've funded, Octopart, is currently locked in a classic battle of good versus evil. They're a search site for industrial components. A lot of people need to search for components, and before Octopart there was no good way to do it. That, it turned out, was no coincidence.
Octopart built the right way to search for components. Users like it and they've been growing rapidly. And yet for most of Octopart's life, the biggest distributor, Digi-Key, has been trying to force them take their prices off the site. Octopart is sending them customers for free, and yet Digi-Key is trying to make that traffic stop. Why? Because their current business model depends on overcharging people who have incomplete information about prices. They don't want search to work.
The Octoparts are the nicest guys in the world. They dropped out of the PhD program in physics at Berkeley to do this. They just wanted to fix a problem they encountered in their research. Imagine how much time you could save the world's engineers if they could do searches online. So when I hear that a big, evil company is trying to stop them in order to keep search broken, it makes me really want to help them. It makes me spend more time on the Octoparts than I do with most of the other startups we've funded. It just made me spend several minutes telling you how great they are. Why? Because they're good guys and they're trying to help the world.
If you're benevolent, people will rally around you: investors, customers, other companies, and potential employees. In the long term the most important may be the potential employees. I think everyone knows now that good hackers are much better than mediocre ones. If you can attract the best hackers to work for you, as Google has, you have a big advantage. And the very best hackers tend to be idealistic. They're not desperate for a job. They can work wherever they want. So most want to work on things that will make the world better.
Compass
But the most important advantage of being good is that it acts as a compass. One of the hardest parts of doing a startup is that you have so many choices. There are just two or three of you, and a thousand things you could do. How do you decide?
Here's the answer: Do whatever's best for your users. You can hold onto this like a rope in a hurricane, and it will save you if anything can. Follow it and it will take you through everything you need to do.
It's even the answer to questions that seem unrelated, like how to convince investors to give you money. If you're a good salesman, you could try to just talk them into it. But the more reliable route is to convince them through your users: if you make something users love enough to tell their friends, you grow exponentially, and that will convince any investor.
Being good is a particularly useful strategy for making decisions in complex situations because it's stateless. It's like telling the truth. The trouble with lying is that you have to remember everything you've said in the past to make sure you don't contradict yourself. If you tell the truth you don't have to remember anything, and that's a really useful property in domains where things happen fast.
For example, Y Combinator has now invested in 80 startups, 57 of which are still alive. (The rest have died or merged or been acquired.) When you're trying to advise 57 startups, it turns out you have to have a stateless algorithm. You can't have ulterior motives when you have 57 things going on at once, because you can't remember them. So our rule is just to do whatever's best for the founders. Not because we're particularly benevolent, but because it's the only algorithm that works on that scale.
When you write something telling people to be good, you seem to be claiming to be good yourself. So I want to say explicitly that I am not a particularly good person. When I was a kid I was firmly in the camp of bad. The way adults used the word good, it seemed to be synonymous with quiet, so I grew up very suspicious of it.
You know how there are some people whose names come up in conversation and everyone says "He's such a great guy?" People never say that about me. The best I get is "he means well." I am not claiming to be good. At best I speak good as a second language.
So I'm not suggesting you be good in the usual sanctimonious way. I'm suggesting it because it works. It will work not just as a statement of "values," but as a guide to strategy, and even a design spec for software. Don't just not be evil. Be good.
Notes
[1] Fifty years ago it would have seemed shocking for a public company not to pay dividends. Now many tech companies don't. The markets seem to have figured out how to value potential dividends. Maybe that isn't the last step in this evolution. Maybe markets will eventually get comfortable with potential earnings. (VCs already are, and at least some of them consistently make money.)
I realize this sounds like the stuff one used to hear about the "new economy" during the Bubble. Believe me, I was not drinking that kool-aid at the time. But I'm convinced there were some good ideasburied in Bubble thinking. For example, it's ok to focus on growth instead of profits—but only if the growth is genuine. You can't be buying users; that's a pyramid scheme. But a company with rapid, genuine growth is valuable, and eventually markets learn how to value valuable things.
[2] The idea of starting a company with benevolent aims is currently undervalued, because the kind of people who currently make that their explicit goal don't usually do a very good job.
It's one of the standard career paths of trustafarians to start some vaguely benevolent business. The problem with most of them is that they either have a bogus political agenda or are feebly executed. The trustafarians' ancestors didn't get rich by preserving their traditional culture; maybe people in Bolivia don't want to either. And starting an organic farm, though it's at least straightforwardly benevolent, doesn't help people on the scale that Google does.
Most explicitly benevolent projects don't hold themselves sufficiently accountable. They act as if having good intentions were enough to guarantee good effects.
[3] Users dislike their new operating system so much that they're starting petitions to save the old one. And the old one was nothing special. The hackers within Microsoft must know in their hearts that if the company really cared about users they'd just advise them to switch to OSX.
How to get Start up Ideas
November 2012
The way to get startup ideas is not to try to think of startup ideas. It's to look for problems, preferably problems you have yourself.
The very best startup ideas tend to have three things in common: they're something the founders themselves want, that they themselves can build, and that few others realize are worth doing. Microsoft, Apple, Yahoo, Google, and Facebook all began this way.
Problems
Why is it so important to work on a problem you have? Among other things, it ensures the problem really exists. It sounds obvious to say you should only work on problems that exist. And yet by far the most common mistake startups make is to solve problems no one has.
I made it myself. In 1995 I started a company to put art galleries online. But galleries didn't want to be online. It's not how the art business works. So why did I spend 6 months working on this stupid idea? Because I didn't pay attention to users. I invented a model of the world that didn't correspond to reality, and worked from that. I didn't notice my model was wrong until I tried to convince users to pay for what we'd built. Even then I took embarrassingly long to catch on. I was attached to my model of the world, and I'd spent a lot of time on the software. They had to want it!
Why do so many founders build things no one wants? Because they begin by trying to think of startup ideas. That m.o. is doubly dangerous: it doesn't merely yield few good ideas; it yields bad ideas that sound plausible enough to fool you into working on them.
At YC we call these "made-up" or "sitcom" startup ideas. Imagine one of the characters on a TV show was starting a startup. The writers would have to invent something for it to do. But coming up with good startup ideas is hard. It's not something you can do for the asking. So (unless they got amazingly lucky) the writers would come up with an idea that sounded plausible, but was actually bad.
For example, a social network for pet owners. It doesn't sound obviously mistaken. Millions of people have pets. Often they care a lot about their pets and spend a lot of money on them. Surely many of these people would like a site where they could talk to other pet owners. Not all of them perhaps, but if just 2 or 3 percent were regular visitors, you could have millions of users. You could serve them targeted offers, and maybe charge for premium features. [1]
The danger of an idea like this is that when you run it by your friends with pets, they don't say "I would never use this." They say "Yeah, maybe I could see using something like that." Even when the startup launches, it will sound plausible to a lot of people. They don't want to use it themselves, at least not right now, but they could imagine other people wanting it. Sum that reaction across the entire population, and you have zero users. [2]
Well
When a startup launches, there have to be at least some users who really need what they're making—not just people who could see themselves using it one day, but who want it urgently. Usually this initial group of users is small, for the simple reason that if there were something that large numbers of people urgently needed and that could be built with the amount of effort a startup usually puts into a version one, it would probably already exist. Which means you have to compromise on one dimension: you can either build something a large number of people want a small amount, or something a small number of people want a large amount. Choose the latter. Not all ideas of that type are good startup ideas, but nearly all good startup ideas are of that type.
Imagine a graph whose x axis represents all the people who might want what you're making and whose y axis represents how much they want it. If you invert the scale on the y axis, you can envision companies as holes. Google is an immense crater: hundreds of millions of people use it, and they need it a lot. A startup just starting out can't expect to excavate that much volume. So you have two choices about the shape of hole you start with. You can either dig a hole that's broad but shallow, or one that's narrow and deep, like a well.
Made-up startup ideas are usually of the first type. Lots of people are mildly interested in a social network for pet owners.
Nearly all good startup ideas are of the second type. Microsoft was a well when they made Altair Basic. There were only a couple thousand Altair owners, but without this software they were programming in machine language. Thirty years later Facebook had the same shape. Their first site was exclusively for Harvard students, of which there are only a few thousand, but those few thousand users wanted it a lot.
When you have an idea for a startup, ask yourself: who wants this right now? Who wants this so much that they'll use it even when it's a crappy version one made by a two-person startup they've never heard of? If you can't answer that, the idea is probably bad.[3]
You don't need the narrowness of the well per se. It's depth you need; you get narrowness as a byproduct of optimizing for depth (and speed). But you almost always do get it. In practice the link between depth and narrowness is so strong that it's a good sign when you know that an idea will appeal strongly to a specific group or type of user.
But while demand shaped like a well is almost a necessary condition for a good startup idea, it's not a sufficient one. If Mark Zuckerberg had built something that could only ever have appealed to Harvard students, it would not have been a good startup idea. Facebook was a good idea because it started with a small market there was a fast path out of. Colleges are similar enough that if you build a facebook that works at Harvard, it will work at any college. So you spread rapidly through all the colleges. Once you have all the college students, you get everyone else simply by letting them in.
Similarly for Microsoft: Basic for the Altair; Basic for other machines; other languages besides Basic; operating systems; applications; IPO.
Self
How do you tell whether there's a path out of an idea? How do you tell whether something is the germ of a giant company, or just a niche product? Often you can't. The founders of Airbnb didn't realize at first how big a market they were tapping. Initially they had a much narrower idea. They were going to let hosts rent out space on their floors during conventions. They didn't foresee the expansion of this idea; it forced itself upon them gradually. All they knew at first is that they were onto something. That's probably as much as Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg knew at first.
Occasionally it's obvious from the beginning when there's a path out of the initial niche. And sometimes I can see a path that's not immediately obvious; that's one of our specialties at YC. But there are limits to how well this can be done, no matter how much experience you have. The most important thing to understand about paths out of the initial idea is the meta-fact that these are hard to see.
So if you can't predict whether there's a path out of an idea, how do you choose between ideas? The truth is disappointing but interesting: if you're the right sort of person, you have the right sort of hunches. If you're at the leading edge of a field that's changing fast, when you have a hunch that something is worth doing, you're more likely to be right.
In Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig says:
Being at the leading edge of a field doesn't mean you have to be one of the people pushing it forward. You can also be at the leading edge as a user. It was not so much because he was a programmer that Facebook seemed a good idea to Mark Zuckerberg as because he used computers so much. If you'd asked most 40 year olds in 2004 whether they'd like to publish their lives semi-publicly on the Internet, they'd have been horrified at the idea. But Mark already lived online; to him it seemed natural.
Paul Buchheit says that people at the leading edge of a rapidly changing field "live in the future." Combine that with Pirsig and you get:
If you look at the way successful founders have had their ideas, it's generally the result of some external stimulus hitting a prepared mind. Bill Gates and Paul Allen hear about the Altair and think "I bet we could write a Basic interpreter for it." Drew Houston realizes he's forgotten his USB stick and thinks "I really need to make my files live online." Lots of people heard about the Altair. Lots forgot USB sticks. The reason those stimuli caused those founders to start companies was that their experiences had prepared them to notice the opportunities they represented.
The verb you want to be using with respect to startup ideas is not "think up" but "notice." At YC we call ideas that grow naturally out of the founders' own experiences "organic" startup ideas. The most successful startups almost all begin this way.
That may not have been what you wanted to hear. You may have expected recipes for coming up with startup ideas, and instead I'm telling you that the key is to have a mind that's prepared in the right way. But disappointing though it may be, this is the truth. And it is a recipe of a sort, just one that in the worst case takes a year rather than a weekend.
If you're not at the leading edge of some rapidly changing field, you can get to one. For example, anyone reasonably smart can probably get to an edge of programming (e.g. building mobile apps) in a year. Since a successful startup will consume at least 3-5 years of your life, a year's preparation would be a reasonable investment. Especially if you're also looking for a cofounder. [4]
You don't have to learn programming to be at the leading edge of a domain that's changing fast. Other domains change fast. But while learning to hack is not necessary, it is for the forseeable future sufficient. As Marc Andreessen put it, software is eating the world, and this trend has decades left to run.
Knowing how to hack also means that when you have ideas, you'll be able to implement them. That's not absolutely necessary (Jeff Bezos couldn't) but it's an advantage. It's a big advantage, when you're considering an idea like putting a college facebook online, if instead of merely thinking "That's an interesting idea," you can think instead "That's an interesting idea. I'll try building an initial version tonight." It's even better when you're both a programmer and the target user, because then the cycle of generating new versions and testing them on users can happen inside one head.
Noticing
Once you're living in the future in some respect, the way to notice startup ideas is to look for things that seem to be missing. If you're really at the leading edge of a rapidly changing field, there will be things that are obviously missing. What won't be obvious is that they're startup ideas. So if you want to find startup ideas, don't merely turn on the filter "What's missing?" Also turn off every other filter, particularly "Could this be a big company?" There's plenty of time to apply that test later. But if you're thinking about that initially, it may not only filter out lots of good ideas, but also cause you to focus on bad ones.
Most things that are missing will take some time to see. You almost have to trick yourself into seeing the ideas around you.
But you know the ideas are out there. This is not one of those problems where there might not be an answer. It's impossibly unlikely that this is the exact moment when technological progress stops. You can be sure people are going to build things in the next few years that will make you think "What did I do before x?"
And when these problems get solved, they will probably seem flamingly obvious in retrospect. What you need to do is turn off the filters that usually prevent you from seeing them. The most powerful is simply taking the current state of the world for granted. Even the most radically open-minded of us mostly do that. You couldn't get from your bed to the front door if you stopped to question everything.
But if you're looking for startup ideas you can sacrifice some of the efficiency of taking the status quo for granted and start to question things. Why is your inbox overflowing? Because you get a lot of email, or because it's hard to get email out of your inbox? Why do you get so much email? What problems are people trying to solve by sending you email? Are there better ways to solve them? And why is it hard to get emails out of your inbox? Why do you keep emails around after you've read them? Is an inbox the optimal tool for that?
Pay particular attention to things that chafe you. The advantage of taking the status quo for granted is not just that it makes life (locally) more efficient, but also that it makes life more tolerable. If you knew about all the things we'll get in the next 50 years but don't have yet, you'd find present day life pretty constraining, just as someone from the present would if they were sent back 50 years in a time machine. When something annoys you, it could be because you're living in the future.
When you find the right sort of problem, you should probably be able to describe it as obvious, at least to you. When we started Viaweb, all the online stores were built by hand, by web designers making individual HTML pages. It was obvious to us as programmers that these sites would have to be generated by software. [5]
Which means, strangely enough, that coming up with startup ideas is a question of seeing the obvious. That suggests how weird this process is: you're trying to see things that are obvious, and yet that you hadn't seen.
Since what you need to do here is loosen up your own mind, it may be best not to make too much of a direct frontal attack on the problem—i.e. to sit down and try to think of ideas. The best plan may be just to keep a background process running, looking for things that seem to be missing. Work on hard problems, driven mainly by curiousity, but have a second self watching over your shoulder, taking note of gaps and anomalies. [6]
Give yourself some time. You have a lot of control over the rate at which you turn yours into a prepared mind, but you have less control over the stimuli that spark ideas when they hit it. If Bill Gates and Paul Allen had constrained themselves to come up with a startup idea in one month, what if they'd chosen a month before the Altair appeared? They probably would have worked on a less promising idea. Drew Houston did work on a less promising idea before Dropbox: an SAT prep startup. But Dropbox was a much better idea, both in the absolute sense and also as a match for his skills. [7]
A good way to trick yourself into noticing ideas is to work on projects that seem like they'd be cool. If you do that, you'll naturally tend to build things that are missing. It wouldn't seem as interesting to build something that already existed.
Just as trying to think up startup ideas tends to produce bad ones, working on things that could be dismissed as "toys" often produces good ones. When something is described as a toy, that means it has everything an idea needs except being important. It's cool; users love it; it just doesn't matter. But if you're living in the future and you build something cool that users love, it may matter more than outsiders think. Microcomputers seemed like toys when Apple and Microsoft started working on them. I'm old enough to remember that era; the usual term for people with their own microcomputers was "hobbyists." BackRub seemed like an inconsequential science project. The Facebook was just a way for undergrads to stalk one another.
At YC we're excited when we meet startups working on things that we could imagine know-it-alls on forums dismissing as toys. To us that's positive evidence an idea is good.
If you can afford to take a long view (and arguably you can't afford not to), you can turn "Live in the future and build what's missing" into something even better:
School
That's what I'd advise college students to do, rather than trying to learn about "entrepreneurship." "Entrepreneurship" is something you learn best by doing it. The examples of the most successful founders make that clear. What you should be spending your time on in college is ratcheting yourself into the future. College is an incomparable opportunity to do that. What a waste to sacrifice an opportunity to solve the hard part of starting a startup—becoming the sort of person who can have organic startup ideas—by spending time learning about the easy part. Especially since you won't even really learn about it, any more than you'd learn about sex in a class. All you'll learn is the words for things.
The clash of domains is a particularly fruitful source of ideas. If you know a lot about programming and you start learning about some other field, you'll probably see problems that software could solve. In fact, you're doubly likely to find good problems in another domain: (a) the inhabitants of that domain are not as likely as software people to have already solved their problems with software, and (b) since you come into the new domain totally ignorant, you don't even know what the status quo is to take it for granted.
So if you're a CS major and you want to start a startup, instead of taking a class on entrepreneurship you're better off taking a class on, say, genetics. Or better still, go work for a biotech company. CS majors normally get summer jobs at computer hardware or software companies. But if you want to find startup ideas, you might do better to get a summer job in some unrelated field. [8]
Or don't take any extra classes, and just build things. It's no coincidence that Microsoft and Facebook both got started in January. At Harvard that is (or was) Reading Period, when students have no classes to attend because they're supposed to be studying for finals. [9]
But don't feel like you have to build things that will become startups. That's premature optimization. Just build things. Preferably with other students. It's not just the classes that make a university such a good place to crank oneself into the future. You're also surrounded by other people trying to do the same thing. If you work together with them on projects, you'll end up producing not just organic ideas, but organic ideas with organic founding teams—and that, empirically, is the best combination.
Beware of research. If an undergrad writes something all his friends start using, it's quite likely to represent a good startup idea. Whereas a PhD dissertation is extremely unlikely to. For some reason, the more a project has to count as research, the less likely it is to be something that could be turned into a startup. [10] I think the reason is that the subset of ideas that count as research is so narrow that it's unlikely that a project that satisfied that constraint would also satisfy the orthogonal constraint of solving users' problems. Whereas when students (or professors) build something as a side-project, they automatically gravitate toward solving users' problems—perhaps even with an additional energy that comes from being freed from the constraints of research.
Competition
Because a good idea should seem obvious, when you have one you'll tend to feel that you're late. Don't let that deter you. Worrying that you're late is one of the signs of a good idea. Ten minutes of searching the web will usually settle the question. Even if you find someone else working on the same thing, you're probably not too late. It's exceptionally rare for startups to be killed by competitors—so rare that you can almost discount the possibility. So unless you discover a competitor with the sort of lock-in that would prevent users from choosing you, don't discard the idea.
If you're uncertain, ask users. The question of whether you're too late is subsumed by the question of whether anyone urgently needs what you plan to make. If you have something that no competitor does and that some subset of users urgently need, you have a beachhead. [11]
The question then is whether that beachhead is big enough. Or more importantly, who's in it: if the beachhead consists of people doing something lots more people will be doing in the future, then it's probably big enough no matter how small it is. For example, if you're building something differentiated from competitors by the fact that it works on phones, but it only works on the newest phones, that's probably a big enough beachhead.
Err on the side of doing things where you'll face competitors. Inexperienced founders usually give competitors more credit than they deserve. Whether you succeed depends far more on you than on your competitors. So better a good idea with competitors than a bad one without.
You don't need to worry about entering a "crowded market" so long as you have a thesis about what everyone else in it is overlooking. In fact that's a very promising starting point. Google was that type of idea. Your thesis has to be more precise than "we're going to make an x that doesn't suck" though. You have to be able to phrase it in terms of something the incumbents are overlooking. Best of all is when you can say that they didn't have the courage of their convictions, and that your plan is what they'd have done if they'd followed through on their own insights. Google was that type of idea too. The search engines that preceded them shied away from the most radical implications of what they were doing—particularly that the better a job they did, the faster users would leave.
A crowded market is actually a good sign, because it means both that there's demand and that none of the existing solutions are good enough. 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). [12]
Filters
There are two more filters you'll need to turn off if you want to notice startup ideas: the unsexy filter and the schlep filter.
Most programmers wish they could start a startup by just writing some brilliant code, pushing it to a server, and having users pay them lots of money. They'd prefer not to deal with tedious problems or get involved in messy ways with the real world. Which is a reasonable preference, because such things slow you down. But this preference is so widespread that the space of convenient startup ideas has been stripped pretty clean. If you let your mind wander a few blocks down the street to the messy, tedious ideas, you'll find valuable ones just sitting there waiting to be implemented.
The schlep filter is so dangerous that I wrote a separate essay about the condition it induces, which I called schlep blindness. I gave Stripe as an example of a startup that benefited from turning off this filter, and a pretty striking example it is. Thousands of programmers were in a position to see this idea; thousands of programmers knew how painful it was to process payments before Stripe. But when they looked for startup ideas they didn't see this one, because unconsciously they shrank from having to deal with payments. And dealing with payments is a schlep for Stripe, but not an intolerable one. In fact they might have had net less pain; because the fear of dealing with payments kept most people away from this idea, Stripe has had comparatively smooth sailing in other areas that are sometimes painful, like user acquisition. They didn't have to try very hard to make themselves heard by users, because users were desperately waiting for what they were building.
The unsexy filter is similar to the schlep filter, except it keeps you from working on problems you despise rather than ones you fear. We overcame this one to work on Viaweb. There were interesting things about the architecture of our software, but we weren't interested in ecommerce per se. We could see the problem was one that needed to be solved though.
Turning off the schlep filter is more important than turning off the unsexy filter, because the schlep filter is more likely to be an illusion. And even to the degree it isn't, it's a worse form of self-indulgence. Starting a successful startup is going to be fairly laborious no matter what. Even if the product doesn't entail a lot of schleps, you'll still have plenty dealing with investors, hiring and firing people, and so on. So if there's some idea you think would be cool but you're kept away from by fear of the schleps involved, don't worry: any sufficiently good idea will have as many.
The unsexy filter, while still a source of error, is not as entirely useless as the schlep filter. If you're at the leading edge of a field that's changing rapidly, your ideas about what's sexy will be somewhat correlated with what's valuable in practice. Particularly as you get older and more experienced. Plus if you find an idea sexy, you'll work on it more enthusiastically. [13]
Recipes
While the best way to discover startup ideas is to become the sort of person who has them and then build whatever interests you, sometimes you don't have that luxury. Sometimes you need an idea now. For example, if you're working on a startup and your initial idea turns out to be bad.
For the rest of this essay I'll talk about tricks for coming up with startup ideas on demand. Although empirically you're better off using the organic strategy, you could succeed this way. You just have to be more disciplined. When you use the organic method, you don't even notice an idea unless it's evidence that something is truly missing. But when you make a conscious effort to think of startup ideas, you have to replace this natural constraint with self-discipline. You'll see a lot more ideas, most of them bad, so you need to be able to filter them.
One of the biggest dangers of not using the organic method is the example of the organic method. Organic ideas feel like inspirations. There are a lot of stories about successful startups that began when the founders had what seemed a crazy idea but "just knew" it was promising. When you feel that about an idea you've had while trying to come up with startup ideas, you're probably mistaken.
When searching for ideas, look in areas where you have some expertise. If you're a database expert, don't build a chat app for teenagers (unless you're also a teenager). Maybe it's a good idea, but you can't trust your judgment about that, so ignore it. There have to be other ideas that involve databases, and whose quality you can judge. Do you find it hard to come up with good ideas involving databases? That's because your expertise raises your standards. Your ideas about chat apps are just as bad, but you're giving yourself a Dunning-Kruger pass in that domain.
The place to start looking for ideas is things you need. There mustbe things you need. [14]
One good trick is to ask yourself whether in your previous job you ever found yourself saying "Why doesn't someone make x? If someone made x we'd buy it in a second." If you can think of any x people said that about, you probably have an idea. You know there's demand, and people don't say that about things that are impossible to build.
More generally, try asking yourself whether there's something unusual about you that makes your needs different from most other people's. You're probably not the only one. It's especially good if you're different in a way people will increasingly be.
If you're changing ideas, one unusual thing about you is the idea you'd previously been working on. Did you discover any needs while working on it? Several well-known startups began this way. Hotmail began as something its founders wrote to talk about their previous startup idea while they were working at their day jobs. [15]
A particularly promising way to be unusual is to be young. Some of the most valuable new ideas take root first among people in their teens and early twenties. And while young founders are at a disadvantage in some respects, they're the only ones who really understand their peers. It would have been very hard for someone who wasn't a college student to start Facebook. So if you're a young founder (under 23 say), are there things you and your friends would like to do that current technology won't let you?
The next best thing to an unmet need of your own is an unmet need of someone else. Try talking to everyone you can about the gaps they find in the world. What's missing? What would they like to do that they can't? What's tedious or annoying, particularly in their work? Let the conversation get general; don't be trying too hard to find startup ideas. You're just looking for something to spark a thought. Maybe you'll notice a problem they didn't consciously realize they had, because you know how to solve it.
When you find an unmet need that isn't your own, it may be somewhat blurry at first. The person who needs something may not know exactly what they need. In that case I often recommend that founders act like consultants—that they do what they'd do if they'd been retained to solve the problems of this one user. People's problems are similar enough that nearly all the code you write this way will be reusable, and whatever isn't will be a small price to start out certain that you've reached the bottom of the well. [16]
One way to ensure you do a good job solving other people's problems is to make them your own. When Rajat Suri of E la Carte decided to write software for restaurants, he got a job as a waiter to learn how restaurants worked. That may seem like taking things to extremes, but startups are extreme. We love it when founders do such things.
In fact, one strategy I recommend to people who need a new idea is not merely to turn off their schlep and unsexy filters, but to seek out ideas that are unsexy or involve schleps. Don't try to start Twitter. Those ideas are so rare that you can't find them by looking for them. Make something unsexy that people will pay you for.
A good trick for bypassing the schlep and to some extent the unsexy filter is to ask what you wish someone else would build, so that you could use it. What would you pay for right now?
Since startups often garbage-collect broken companies and industries, it can be a good trick to look for those that are dying, or deserve to, and try to imagine what kind of company would profit from their demise. For example, journalism is in free fall at the moment. But there may still be money to be made from something like journalism. What sort of company might cause people in the future to say "this replaced journalism" on some axis?
But imagine asking that in the future, not now. When one company or industry replaces another, it usually comes in from the side. So don't look for a replacement for x; look for something that people will later say turned out to be a replacement for x. And be imaginative about the axis along which the replacement occurs. Traditional journalism, for example, is a way for readers to get information and to kill time, a way for writers to make money and to get attention, and a vehicle for several different types of advertising. It could be replaced on any of these axes (it has already started to be on most).
When startups consume incumbents, they usually start by serving some small but important market that the big players ignore. It's particularly good if there's an admixture of disdain in the big players' attitude, because that often misleads them. For example, after Steve Wozniak built the computer that became the Apple I, he felt obliged to give his then-employer Hewlett-Packard the option to produce it. Fortunately for him, they turned it down, and one of the reasons they did was that it used a TV for a monitor, which seemed intolerably déclassé to a high-end hardware company like HP was at the time. [17]
Are there groups of scruffy but sophisticated users like the early microcomputer "hobbyists" that are currently being ignored by the big players? A startup with its sights set on bigger things can often capture a small market easily by expending an effort that wouldn't be justified by that market alone.
Similarly, since the most successful startups generally ride some wave bigger than themselves, it could be a good trick to look for waves and ask how one could benefit from them. The prices of gene sequencing and 3D printing are both experiencing Moore's Law-like declines. What new things will we be able to do in the new world we'll have in a few years? What are we unconsciously ruling out as impossible that will soon be possible?
Organic
But talking about looking explicitly for waves makes it clear that such recipes are plan B for getting startup ideas. Looking for waves is essentially a way to simulate the organic method. If you're at the leading edge of some rapidly changing field, you don't have to look for waves; you are the wave.
Finding startup ideas is a subtle business, and that's why most people who try fail so miserably. It doesn't work well simply to try to think of startup ideas. If you do that, you get bad ones that sound dangerously plausible. The best approach is more indirect: if you have the right sort of background, good startup ideas will seem obvious to you. But even then, not immediately. It takes time to come across situations where you notice something missing. And often these gaps won't seem to be ideas for companies, just things that would be interesting to build. Which is why it's good to have the time and the inclination to build things just because they're interesting.
Live in the future and build what seems interesting. Strange as it sounds, that's the real recipe.
Notes
[1] This form of bad idea has been around as long as the web. It was common in the 1990s, except then people who had it used to say they were going to create a portal for x instead of a social network for x. Structurally the idea is stone soup: you post a sign saying "this is the place for people interested in x," and all those people show up and you make money from them. What lures founders into this sort of idea are statistics about the millions of people who might be interested in each type of x. What they forget is that any given person might have 20 affinities by this standard, and no one is going to visit 20 different communities regularly.
[2] I'm not saying, incidentally, that I know for sure a social network for pet owners is a bad idea. I know it's a bad idea the way I know randomly generated DNA would not produce a viable organism. The set of plausible sounding startup ideas is many times larger than the set of good ones, and many of the good ones don't even sound that plausible. So if all you know about a startup idea is that it sounds plausible, you have to assume it's bad.
[3] More precisely, the users' need has to give them sufficient activation energy to start using whatever you make, which can vary a lot. For example, the activation energy for enterprise software sold through traditional channels is very high, so you'd have to be a lot better to get users to switch. Whereas the activation energy required to switch to a new search engine is low. Which in turn is why search engines are so much better than enterprise software.
[4] This gets harder as you get older. While the space of ideas doesn't have dangerous local maxima, the space of careers does. There are fairly high walls between most of the paths people take through life, and the older you get, the higher the walls become.
[5] It was also obvious to us that the web was going to be a big deal. Few non-programmers grasped that in 1995, but the programmers had seen what GUIs had done for desktop computers.
[6] Maybe it would work to have this second self keep a journal, and each night to make a brief entry listing the gaps and anomalies you'd noticed that day. Not startup ideas, just the raw gaps and anomalies.
[7] Sam Altman points out that taking time to come up with an idea is not merely a better strategy in an absolute sense, but also like an undervalued stock in that so few founders do it.
There's comparatively little competition for the best ideas, because few founders are willing to put in the time required to notice them. Whereas there is a great deal of competition for mediocre ideas, because when people make up startup ideas, they tend to make up the same ones.
[8] For the computer hardware and software companies, summer jobs are the first phase of the recruiting funnel. But if you're good you can skip the first phase. If you're good you'll have no trouble getting hired by these companies when you graduate, regardless of how you spent your summers.
[9] The empirical evidence suggests that if colleges want to help their students start startups, the best thing they can do is leave them alone in the right way.
[10] I'm speaking here of IT startups; in biotech things are different.
[11] This is an instance of a more general rule: focus on users, not competitors. The most important information about competitors is what you learn via users anyway.
[12] In practice most successful startups have elements of both. And you can describe each strategy in terms of the other by adjusting the boundaries of what you call the market. But it's useful to consider these two ideas separately.
[13] I almost hesitate to raise that point though. Startups are businesses; the point of a business is to make money; and with that additional constraint, you can't expect you'll be able to spend all your time working on what interests you most.
[14] The need has to be a strong one. You can retroactively describe any made-up idea as something you need. But do you really need that recipe site or local event aggregator as much as Drew Houston needed Dropbox, or Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia needed Airbnb?
Quite often at YC I find myself asking founders "Would you use this thing yourself, if you hadn't written it?" and you'd be surprised how often the answer is no.
[15] Paul Buchheit points out that trying to sell something bad can be a source of better ideas:
"The best technique I've found for dealing with YC companies that have bad ideas is to tell them to go sell the product ASAP (before wasting time building it). Not only do they learn that nobody wants what they are building, they very often come back with a real idea that they discovered in the process of trying to sell the bad idea."
[16] Here's a recipe that might produce the next Facebook, if you're college students. If you have a connection to one of the more powerful sororities at your school, approach the queen bees thereof and offer to be their personal IT consultants, building anything they could imagine needing in their social lives that didn't already exist. Anything that got built this way would be very promising, because such users are not just the most demanding but also the perfect point to spread from.
I have no idea whether this would work.
[17] And the reason it used a TV for a monitor is that Steve Wozniak started out by solving his own problems. He, like most of his peers, couldn't afford a monitor.
The way to get startup ideas is not to try to think of startup ideas. It's to look for problems, preferably problems you have yourself.
The very best startup ideas tend to have three things in common: they're something the founders themselves want, that they themselves can build, and that few others realize are worth doing. Microsoft, Apple, Yahoo, Google, and Facebook all began this way.
Problems
Why is it so important to work on a problem you have? Among other things, it ensures the problem really exists. It sounds obvious to say you should only work on problems that exist. And yet by far the most common mistake startups make is to solve problems no one has.
I made it myself. In 1995 I started a company to put art galleries online. But galleries didn't want to be online. It's not how the art business works. So why did I spend 6 months working on this stupid idea? Because I didn't pay attention to users. I invented a model of the world that didn't correspond to reality, and worked from that. I didn't notice my model was wrong until I tried to convince users to pay for what we'd built. Even then I took embarrassingly long to catch on. I was attached to my model of the world, and I'd spent a lot of time on the software. They had to want it!
Why do so many founders build things no one wants? Because they begin by trying to think of startup ideas. That m.o. is doubly dangerous: it doesn't merely yield few good ideas; it yields bad ideas that sound plausible enough to fool you into working on them.
At YC we call these "made-up" or "sitcom" startup ideas. Imagine one of the characters on a TV show was starting a startup. The writers would have to invent something for it to do. But coming up with good startup ideas is hard. It's not something you can do for the asking. So (unless they got amazingly lucky) the writers would come up with an idea that sounded plausible, but was actually bad.
For example, a social network for pet owners. It doesn't sound obviously mistaken. Millions of people have pets. Often they care a lot about their pets and spend a lot of money on them. Surely many of these people would like a site where they could talk to other pet owners. Not all of them perhaps, but if just 2 or 3 percent were regular visitors, you could have millions of users. You could serve them targeted offers, and maybe charge for premium features. [1]
The danger of an idea like this is that when you run it by your friends with pets, they don't say "I would never use this." They say "Yeah, maybe I could see using something like that." Even when the startup launches, it will sound plausible to a lot of people. They don't want to use it themselves, at least not right now, but they could imagine other people wanting it. Sum that reaction across the entire population, and you have zero users. [2]
Well
When a startup launches, there have to be at least some users who really need what they're making—not just people who could see themselves using it one day, but who want it urgently. Usually this initial group of users is small, for the simple reason that if there were something that large numbers of people urgently needed and that could be built with the amount of effort a startup usually puts into a version one, it would probably already exist. Which means you have to compromise on one dimension: you can either build something a large number of people want a small amount, or something a small number of people want a large amount. Choose the latter. Not all ideas of that type are good startup ideas, but nearly all good startup ideas are of that type.
Imagine a graph whose x axis represents all the people who might want what you're making and whose y axis represents how much they want it. If you invert the scale on the y axis, you can envision companies as holes. Google is an immense crater: hundreds of millions of people use it, and they need it a lot. A startup just starting out can't expect to excavate that much volume. So you have two choices about the shape of hole you start with. You can either dig a hole that's broad but shallow, or one that's narrow and deep, like a well.
Made-up startup ideas are usually of the first type. Lots of people are mildly interested in a social network for pet owners.
Nearly all good startup ideas are of the second type. Microsoft was a well when they made Altair Basic. There were only a couple thousand Altair owners, but without this software they were programming in machine language. Thirty years later Facebook had the same shape. Their first site was exclusively for Harvard students, of which there are only a few thousand, but those few thousand users wanted it a lot.
When you have an idea for a startup, ask yourself: who wants this right now? Who wants this so much that they'll use it even when it's a crappy version one made by a two-person startup they've never heard of? If you can't answer that, the idea is probably bad.[3]
You don't need the narrowness of the well per se. It's depth you need; you get narrowness as a byproduct of optimizing for depth (and speed). But you almost always do get it. In practice the link between depth and narrowness is so strong that it's a good sign when you know that an idea will appeal strongly to a specific group or type of user.
But while demand shaped like a well is almost a necessary condition for a good startup idea, it's not a sufficient one. If Mark Zuckerberg had built something that could only ever have appealed to Harvard students, it would not have been a good startup idea. Facebook was a good idea because it started with a small market there was a fast path out of. Colleges are similar enough that if you build a facebook that works at Harvard, it will work at any college. So you spread rapidly through all the colleges. Once you have all the college students, you get everyone else simply by letting them in.
Similarly for Microsoft: Basic for the Altair; Basic for other machines; other languages besides Basic; operating systems; applications; IPO.
Self
How do you tell whether there's a path out of an idea? How do you tell whether something is the germ of a giant company, or just a niche product? Often you can't. The founders of Airbnb didn't realize at first how big a market they were tapping. Initially they had a much narrower idea. They were going to let hosts rent out space on their floors during conventions. They didn't foresee the expansion of this idea; it forced itself upon them gradually. All they knew at first is that they were onto something. That's probably as much as Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg knew at first.
Occasionally it's obvious from the beginning when there's a path out of the initial niche. And sometimes I can see a path that's not immediately obvious; that's one of our specialties at YC. But there are limits to how well this can be done, no matter how much experience you have. The most important thing to understand about paths out of the initial idea is the meta-fact that these are hard to see.
So if you can't predict whether there's a path out of an idea, how do you choose between ideas? The truth is disappointing but interesting: if you're the right sort of person, you have the right sort of hunches. If you're at the leading edge of a field that's changing fast, when you have a hunch that something is worth doing, you're more likely to be right.
In Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig says:
You want to know how to paint a perfect painting? It's easy. Make yourself perfect and then just paint naturally.I've wondered about that passage since I read it in high school. I'm not sure how useful his advice is for painting specifically, but it fits this situation well. Empirically, the way to have good startup ideas is to become the sort of person who has them.
Being at the leading edge of a field doesn't mean you have to be one of the people pushing it forward. You can also be at the leading edge as a user. It was not so much because he was a programmer that Facebook seemed a good idea to Mark Zuckerberg as because he used computers so much. If you'd asked most 40 year olds in 2004 whether they'd like to publish their lives semi-publicly on the Internet, they'd have been horrified at the idea. But Mark already lived online; to him it seemed natural.
Paul Buchheit says that people at the leading edge of a rapidly changing field "live in the future." Combine that with Pirsig and you get:
Live in the future, then build what's missing.That describes the way many if not most of the biggest startups got started. Neither Apple nor Yahoo nor Google nor Facebook were even supposed to be companies at first. They grew out of things their founders built because there seemed a gap in the world.
If you look at the way successful founders have had their ideas, it's generally the result of some external stimulus hitting a prepared mind. Bill Gates and Paul Allen hear about the Altair and think "I bet we could write a Basic interpreter for it." Drew Houston realizes he's forgotten his USB stick and thinks "I really need to make my files live online." Lots of people heard about the Altair. Lots forgot USB sticks. The reason those stimuli caused those founders to start companies was that their experiences had prepared them to notice the opportunities they represented.
The verb you want to be using with respect to startup ideas is not "think up" but "notice." At YC we call ideas that grow naturally out of the founders' own experiences "organic" startup ideas. The most successful startups almost all begin this way.
That may not have been what you wanted to hear. You may have expected recipes for coming up with startup ideas, and instead I'm telling you that the key is to have a mind that's prepared in the right way. But disappointing though it may be, this is the truth. And it is a recipe of a sort, just one that in the worst case takes a year rather than a weekend.
If you're not at the leading edge of some rapidly changing field, you can get to one. For example, anyone reasonably smart can probably get to an edge of programming (e.g. building mobile apps) in a year. Since a successful startup will consume at least 3-5 years of your life, a year's preparation would be a reasonable investment. Especially if you're also looking for a cofounder. [4]
You don't have to learn programming to be at the leading edge of a domain that's changing fast. Other domains change fast. But while learning to hack is not necessary, it is for the forseeable future sufficient. As Marc Andreessen put it, software is eating the world, and this trend has decades left to run.
Knowing how to hack also means that when you have ideas, you'll be able to implement them. That's not absolutely necessary (Jeff Bezos couldn't) but it's an advantage. It's a big advantage, when you're considering an idea like putting a college facebook online, if instead of merely thinking "That's an interesting idea," you can think instead "That's an interesting idea. I'll try building an initial version tonight." It's even better when you're both a programmer and the target user, because then the cycle of generating new versions and testing them on users can happen inside one head.
Noticing
Once you're living in the future in some respect, the way to notice startup ideas is to look for things that seem to be missing. If you're really at the leading edge of a rapidly changing field, there will be things that are obviously missing. What won't be obvious is that they're startup ideas. So if you want to find startup ideas, don't merely turn on the filter "What's missing?" Also turn off every other filter, particularly "Could this be a big company?" There's plenty of time to apply that test later. But if you're thinking about that initially, it may not only filter out lots of good ideas, but also cause you to focus on bad ones.
Most things that are missing will take some time to see. You almost have to trick yourself into seeing the ideas around you.
But you know the ideas are out there. This is not one of those problems where there might not be an answer. It's impossibly unlikely that this is the exact moment when technological progress stops. You can be sure people are going to build things in the next few years that will make you think "What did I do before x?"
And when these problems get solved, they will probably seem flamingly obvious in retrospect. What you need to do is turn off the filters that usually prevent you from seeing them. The most powerful is simply taking the current state of the world for granted. Even the most radically open-minded of us mostly do that. You couldn't get from your bed to the front door if you stopped to question everything.
But if you're looking for startup ideas you can sacrifice some of the efficiency of taking the status quo for granted and start to question things. Why is your inbox overflowing? Because you get a lot of email, or because it's hard to get email out of your inbox? Why do you get so much email? What problems are people trying to solve by sending you email? Are there better ways to solve them? And why is it hard to get emails out of your inbox? Why do you keep emails around after you've read them? Is an inbox the optimal tool for that?
Pay particular attention to things that chafe you. The advantage of taking the status quo for granted is not just that it makes life (locally) more efficient, but also that it makes life more tolerable. If you knew about all the things we'll get in the next 50 years but don't have yet, you'd find present day life pretty constraining, just as someone from the present would if they were sent back 50 years in a time machine. When something annoys you, it could be because you're living in the future.
When you find the right sort of problem, you should probably be able to describe it as obvious, at least to you. When we started Viaweb, all the online stores were built by hand, by web designers making individual HTML pages. It was obvious to us as programmers that these sites would have to be generated by software. [5]
Which means, strangely enough, that coming up with startup ideas is a question of seeing the obvious. That suggests how weird this process is: you're trying to see things that are obvious, and yet that you hadn't seen.
Since what you need to do here is loosen up your own mind, it may be best not to make too much of a direct frontal attack on the problem—i.e. to sit down and try to think of ideas. The best plan may be just to keep a background process running, looking for things that seem to be missing. Work on hard problems, driven mainly by curiousity, but have a second self watching over your shoulder, taking note of gaps and anomalies. [6]
Give yourself some time. You have a lot of control over the rate at which you turn yours into a prepared mind, but you have less control over the stimuli that spark ideas when they hit it. If Bill Gates and Paul Allen had constrained themselves to come up with a startup idea in one month, what if they'd chosen a month before the Altair appeared? They probably would have worked on a less promising idea. Drew Houston did work on a less promising idea before Dropbox: an SAT prep startup. But Dropbox was a much better idea, both in the absolute sense and also as a match for his skills. [7]
A good way to trick yourself into noticing ideas is to work on projects that seem like they'd be cool. If you do that, you'll naturally tend to build things that are missing. It wouldn't seem as interesting to build something that already existed.
Just as trying to think up startup ideas tends to produce bad ones, working on things that could be dismissed as "toys" often produces good ones. When something is described as a toy, that means it has everything an idea needs except being important. It's cool; users love it; it just doesn't matter. But if you're living in the future and you build something cool that users love, it may matter more than outsiders think. Microcomputers seemed like toys when Apple and Microsoft started working on them. I'm old enough to remember that era; the usual term for people with their own microcomputers was "hobbyists." BackRub seemed like an inconsequential science project. The Facebook was just a way for undergrads to stalk one another.
At YC we're excited when we meet startups working on things that we could imagine know-it-alls on forums dismissing as toys. To us that's positive evidence an idea is good.
If you can afford to take a long view (and arguably you can't afford not to), you can turn "Live in the future and build what's missing" into something even better:
Live in the future and build what seems interesting.
School
That's what I'd advise college students to do, rather than trying to learn about "entrepreneurship." "Entrepreneurship" is something you learn best by doing it. The examples of the most successful founders make that clear. What you should be spending your time on in college is ratcheting yourself into the future. College is an incomparable opportunity to do that. What a waste to sacrifice an opportunity to solve the hard part of starting a startup—becoming the sort of person who can have organic startup ideas—by spending time learning about the easy part. Especially since you won't even really learn about it, any more than you'd learn about sex in a class. All you'll learn is the words for things.
The clash of domains is a particularly fruitful source of ideas. If you know a lot about programming and you start learning about some other field, you'll probably see problems that software could solve. In fact, you're doubly likely to find good problems in another domain: (a) the inhabitants of that domain are not as likely as software people to have already solved their problems with software, and (b) since you come into the new domain totally ignorant, you don't even know what the status quo is to take it for granted.
So if you're a CS major and you want to start a startup, instead of taking a class on entrepreneurship you're better off taking a class on, say, genetics. Or better still, go work for a biotech company. CS majors normally get summer jobs at computer hardware or software companies. But if you want to find startup ideas, you might do better to get a summer job in some unrelated field. [8]
Or don't take any extra classes, and just build things. It's no coincidence that Microsoft and Facebook both got started in January. At Harvard that is (or was) Reading Period, when students have no classes to attend because they're supposed to be studying for finals. [9]
But don't feel like you have to build things that will become startups. That's premature optimization. Just build things. Preferably with other students. It's not just the classes that make a university such a good place to crank oneself into the future. You're also surrounded by other people trying to do the same thing. If you work together with them on projects, you'll end up producing not just organic ideas, but organic ideas with organic founding teams—and that, empirically, is the best combination.
Beware of research. If an undergrad writes something all his friends start using, it's quite likely to represent a good startup idea. Whereas a PhD dissertation is extremely unlikely to. For some reason, the more a project has to count as research, the less likely it is to be something that could be turned into a startup. [10] I think the reason is that the subset of ideas that count as research is so narrow that it's unlikely that a project that satisfied that constraint would also satisfy the orthogonal constraint of solving users' problems. Whereas when students (or professors) build something as a side-project, they automatically gravitate toward solving users' problems—perhaps even with an additional energy that comes from being freed from the constraints of research.
Competition
Because a good idea should seem obvious, when you have one you'll tend to feel that you're late. Don't let that deter you. Worrying that you're late is one of the signs of a good idea. Ten minutes of searching the web will usually settle the question. Even if you find someone else working on the same thing, you're probably not too late. It's exceptionally rare for startups to be killed by competitors—so rare that you can almost discount the possibility. So unless you discover a competitor with the sort of lock-in that would prevent users from choosing you, don't discard the idea.
If you're uncertain, ask users. The question of whether you're too late is subsumed by the question of whether anyone urgently needs what you plan to make. If you have something that no competitor does and that some subset of users urgently need, you have a beachhead. [11]
The question then is whether that beachhead is big enough. Or more importantly, who's in it: if the beachhead consists of people doing something lots more people will be doing in the future, then it's probably big enough no matter how small it is. For example, if you're building something differentiated from competitors by the fact that it works on phones, but it only works on the newest phones, that's probably a big enough beachhead.
Err on the side of doing things where you'll face competitors. Inexperienced founders usually give competitors more credit than they deserve. Whether you succeed depends far more on you than on your competitors. So better a good idea with competitors than a bad one without.
You don't need to worry about entering a "crowded market" so long as you have a thesis about what everyone else in it is overlooking. In fact that's a very promising starting point. Google was that type of idea. Your thesis has to be more precise than "we're going to make an x that doesn't suck" though. You have to be able to phrase it in terms of something the incumbents are overlooking. Best of all is when you can say that they didn't have the courage of their convictions, and that your plan is what they'd have done if they'd followed through on their own insights. Google was that type of idea too. The search engines that preceded them shied away from the most radical implications of what they were doing—particularly that the better a job they did, the faster users would leave.
A crowded market is actually a good sign, because it means both that there's demand and that none of the existing solutions are good enough. 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). [12]
Filters
There are two more filters you'll need to turn off if you want to notice startup ideas: the unsexy filter and the schlep filter.
Most programmers wish they could start a startup by just writing some brilliant code, pushing it to a server, and having users pay them lots of money. They'd prefer not to deal with tedious problems or get involved in messy ways with the real world. Which is a reasonable preference, because such things slow you down. But this preference is so widespread that the space of convenient startup ideas has been stripped pretty clean. If you let your mind wander a few blocks down the street to the messy, tedious ideas, you'll find valuable ones just sitting there waiting to be implemented.
The schlep filter is so dangerous that I wrote a separate essay about the condition it induces, which I called schlep blindness. I gave Stripe as an example of a startup that benefited from turning off this filter, and a pretty striking example it is. Thousands of programmers were in a position to see this idea; thousands of programmers knew how painful it was to process payments before Stripe. But when they looked for startup ideas they didn't see this one, because unconsciously they shrank from having to deal with payments. And dealing with payments is a schlep for Stripe, but not an intolerable one. In fact they might have had net less pain; because the fear of dealing with payments kept most people away from this idea, Stripe has had comparatively smooth sailing in other areas that are sometimes painful, like user acquisition. They didn't have to try very hard to make themselves heard by users, because users were desperately waiting for what they were building.
The unsexy filter is similar to the schlep filter, except it keeps you from working on problems you despise rather than ones you fear. We overcame this one to work on Viaweb. There were interesting things about the architecture of our software, but we weren't interested in ecommerce per se. We could see the problem was one that needed to be solved though.
Turning off the schlep filter is more important than turning off the unsexy filter, because the schlep filter is more likely to be an illusion. And even to the degree it isn't, it's a worse form of self-indulgence. Starting a successful startup is going to be fairly laborious no matter what. Even if the product doesn't entail a lot of schleps, you'll still have plenty dealing with investors, hiring and firing people, and so on. So if there's some idea you think would be cool but you're kept away from by fear of the schleps involved, don't worry: any sufficiently good idea will have as many.
The unsexy filter, while still a source of error, is not as entirely useless as the schlep filter. If you're at the leading edge of a field that's changing rapidly, your ideas about what's sexy will be somewhat correlated with what's valuable in practice. Particularly as you get older and more experienced. Plus if you find an idea sexy, you'll work on it more enthusiastically. [13]
Recipes
While the best way to discover startup ideas is to become the sort of person who has them and then build whatever interests you, sometimes you don't have that luxury. Sometimes you need an idea now. For example, if you're working on a startup and your initial idea turns out to be bad.
For the rest of this essay I'll talk about tricks for coming up with startup ideas on demand. Although empirically you're better off using the organic strategy, you could succeed this way. You just have to be more disciplined. When you use the organic method, you don't even notice an idea unless it's evidence that something is truly missing. But when you make a conscious effort to think of startup ideas, you have to replace this natural constraint with self-discipline. You'll see a lot more ideas, most of them bad, so you need to be able to filter them.
One of the biggest dangers of not using the organic method is the example of the organic method. Organic ideas feel like inspirations. There are a lot of stories about successful startups that began when the founders had what seemed a crazy idea but "just knew" it was promising. When you feel that about an idea you've had while trying to come up with startup ideas, you're probably mistaken.
When searching for ideas, look in areas where you have some expertise. If you're a database expert, don't build a chat app for teenagers (unless you're also a teenager). Maybe it's a good idea, but you can't trust your judgment about that, so ignore it. There have to be other ideas that involve databases, and whose quality you can judge. Do you find it hard to come up with good ideas involving databases? That's because your expertise raises your standards. Your ideas about chat apps are just as bad, but you're giving yourself a Dunning-Kruger pass in that domain.
The place to start looking for ideas is things you need. There mustbe things you need. [14]
One good trick is to ask yourself whether in your previous job you ever found yourself saying "Why doesn't someone make x? If someone made x we'd buy it in a second." If you can think of any x people said that about, you probably have an idea. You know there's demand, and people don't say that about things that are impossible to build.
More generally, try asking yourself whether there's something unusual about you that makes your needs different from most other people's. You're probably not the only one. It's especially good if you're different in a way people will increasingly be.
If you're changing ideas, one unusual thing about you is the idea you'd previously been working on. Did you discover any needs while working on it? Several well-known startups began this way. Hotmail began as something its founders wrote to talk about their previous startup idea while they were working at their day jobs. [15]
A particularly promising way to be unusual is to be young. Some of the most valuable new ideas take root first among people in their teens and early twenties. And while young founders are at a disadvantage in some respects, they're the only ones who really understand their peers. It would have been very hard for someone who wasn't a college student to start Facebook. So if you're a young founder (under 23 say), are there things you and your friends would like to do that current technology won't let you?
The next best thing to an unmet need of your own is an unmet need of someone else. Try talking to everyone you can about the gaps they find in the world. What's missing? What would they like to do that they can't? What's tedious or annoying, particularly in their work? Let the conversation get general; don't be trying too hard to find startup ideas. You're just looking for something to spark a thought. Maybe you'll notice a problem they didn't consciously realize they had, because you know how to solve it.
When you find an unmet need that isn't your own, it may be somewhat blurry at first. The person who needs something may not know exactly what they need. In that case I often recommend that founders act like consultants—that they do what they'd do if they'd been retained to solve the problems of this one user. People's problems are similar enough that nearly all the code you write this way will be reusable, and whatever isn't will be a small price to start out certain that you've reached the bottom of the well. [16]
One way to ensure you do a good job solving other people's problems is to make them your own. When Rajat Suri of E la Carte decided to write software for restaurants, he got a job as a waiter to learn how restaurants worked. That may seem like taking things to extremes, but startups are extreme. We love it when founders do such things.
In fact, one strategy I recommend to people who need a new idea is not merely to turn off their schlep and unsexy filters, but to seek out ideas that are unsexy or involve schleps. Don't try to start Twitter. Those ideas are so rare that you can't find them by looking for them. Make something unsexy that people will pay you for.
A good trick for bypassing the schlep and to some extent the unsexy filter is to ask what you wish someone else would build, so that you could use it. What would you pay for right now?
Since startups often garbage-collect broken companies and industries, it can be a good trick to look for those that are dying, or deserve to, and try to imagine what kind of company would profit from their demise. For example, journalism is in free fall at the moment. But there may still be money to be made from something like journalism. What sort of company might cause people in the future to say "this replaced journalism" on some axis?
But imagine asking that in the future, not now. When one company or industry replaces another, it usually comes in from the side. So don't look for a replacement for x; look for something that people will later say turned out to be a replacement for x. And be imaginative about the axis along which the replacement occurs. Traditional journalism, for example, is a way for readers to get information and to kill time, a way for writers to make money and to get attention, and a vehicle for several different types of advertising. It could be replaced on any of these axes (it has already started to be on most).
When startups consume incumbents, they usually start by serving some small but important market that the big players ignore. It's particularly good if there's an admixture of disdain in the big players' attitude, because that often misleads them. For example, after Steve Wozniak built the computer that became the Apple I, he felt obliged to give his then-employer Hewlett-Packard the option to produce it. Fortunately for him, they turned it down, and one of the reasons they did was that it used a TV for a monitor, which seemed intolerably déclassé to a high-end hardware company like HP was at the time. [17]
Are there groups of scruffy but sophisticated users like the early microcomputer "hobbyists" that are currently being ignored by the big players? A startup with its sights set on bigger things can often capture a small market easily by expending an effort that wouldn't be justified by that market alone.
Similarly, since the most successful startups generally ride some wave bigger than themselves, it could be a good trick to look for waves and ask how one could benefit from them. The prices of gene sequencing and 3D printing are both experiencing Moore's Law-like declines. What new things will we be able to do in the new world we'll have in a few years? What are we unconsciously ruling out as impossible that will soon be possible?
Organic
But talking about looking explicitly for waves makes it clear that such recipes are plan B for getting startup ideas. Looking for waves is essentially a way to simulate the organic method. If you're at the leading edge of some rapidly changing field, you don't have to look for waves; you are the wave.
Finding startup ideas is a subtle business, and that's why most people who try fail so miserably. It doesn't work well simply to try to think of startup ideas. If you do that, you get bad ones that sound dangerously plausible. The best approach is more indirect: if you have the right sort of background, good startup ideas will seem obvious to you. But even then, not immediately. It takes time to come across situations where you notice something missing. And often these gaps won't seem to be ideas for companies, just things that would be interesting to build. Which is why it's good to have the time and the inclination to build things just because they're interesting.
Live in the future and build what seems interesting. Strange as it sounds, that's the real recipe.
Notes
[1] This form of bad idea has been around as long as the web. It was common in the 1990s, except then people who had it used to say they were going to create a portal for x instead of a social network for x. Structurally the idea is stone soup: you post a sign saying "this is the place for people interested in x," and all those people show up and you make money from them. What lures founders into this sort of idea are statistics about the millions of people who might be interested in each type of x. What they forget is that any given person might have 20 affinities by this standard, and no one is going to visit 20 different communities regularly.
[2] I'm not saying, incidentally, that I know for sure a social network for pet owners is a bad idea. I know it's a bad idea the way I know randomly generated DNA would not produce a viable organism. The set of plausible sounding startup ideas is many times larger than the set of good ones, and many of the good ones don't even sound that plausible. So if all you know about a startup idea is that it sounds plausible, you have to assume it's bad.
[3] More precisely, the users' need has to give them sufficient activation energy to start using whatever you make, which can vary a lot. For example, the activation energy for enterprise software sold through traditional channels is very high, so you'd have to be a lot better to get users to switch. Whereas the activation energy required to switch to a new search engine is low. Which in turn is why search engines are so much better than enterprise software.
[4] This gets harder as you get older. While the space of ideas doesn't have dangerous local maxima, the space of careers does. There are fairly high walls between most of the paths people take through life, and the older you get, the higher the walls become.
[5] It was also obvious to us that the web was going to be a big deal. Few non-programmers grasped that in 1995, but the programmers had seen what GUIs had done for desktop computers.
[6] Maybe it would work to have this second self keep a journal, and each night to make a brief entry listing the gaps and anomalies you'd noticed that day. Not startup ideas, just the raw gaps and anomalies.
[7] Sam Altman points out that taking time to come up with an idea is not merely a better strategy in an absolute sense, but also like an undervalued stock in that so few founders do it.
There's comparatively little competition for the best ideas, because few founders are willing to put in the time required to notice them. Whereas there is a great deal of competition for mediocre ideas, because when people make up startup ideas, they tend to make up the same ones.
[8] For the computer hardware and software companies, summer jobs are the first phase of the recruiting funnel. But if you're good you can skip the first phase. If you're good you'll have no trouble getting hired by these companies when you graduate, regardless of how you spent your summers.
[9] The empirical evidence suggests that if colleges want to help their students start startups, the best thing they can do is leave them alone in the right way.
[10] I'm speaking here of IT startups; in biotech things are different.
[11] This is an instance of a more general rule: focus on users, not competitors. The most important information about competitors is what you learn via users anyway.
[12] In practice most successful startups have elements of both. And you can describe each strategy in terms of the other by adjusting the boundaries of what you call the market. But it's useful to consider these two ideas separately.
[13] I almost hesitate to raise that point though. Startups are businesses; the point of a business is to make money; and with that additional constraint, you can't expect you'll be able to spend all your time working on what interests you most.
[14] The need has to be a strong one. You can retroactively describe any made-up idea as something you need. But do you really need that recipe site or local event aggregator as much as Drew Houston needed Dropbox, or Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia needed Airbnb?
Quite often at YC I find myself asking founders "Would you use this thing yourself, if you hadn't written it?" and you'd be surprised how often the answer is no.
[15] Paul Buchheit points out that trying to sell something bad can be a source of better ideas:
"The best technique I've found for dealing with YC companies that have bad ideas is to tell them to go sell the product ASAP (before wasting time building it). Not only do they learn that nobody wants what they are building, they very often come back with a real idea that they discovered in the process of trying to sell the bad idea."
[16] Here's a recipe that might produce the next Facebook, if you're college students. If you have a connection to one of the more powerful sororities at your school, approach the queen bees thereof and offer to be their personal IT consultants, building anything they could imagine needing in their social lives that didn't already exist. Anything that got built this way would be very promising, because such users are not just the most demanding but also the perfect point to spread from.
I have no idea whether this would work.
[17] And the reason it used a TV for a monitor is that Steve Wozniak started out by solving his own problems. He, like most of his peers, couldn't afford a monitor.
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