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Comment by callmeed | Hacker News Reader

I don't know. I have to say, most startup origin stories I've heard seem to begin with personal pain. Kalanick and Camp started Uber because they had problems getting a cab in Paris. Zuckerberg created Facebook/mash to have a central Harvard student directory. Stripe because Patrick C had so much trouble setting up payments for other projects.

At the very least, another person's pain causes you pain via empathy or some sort of chain reaction. I had a successful website business that was born solely out of a friend's constant requests for updates. I hacked a CMS together and a business was born. His pain was getting his website updated–my pain was him bugging me.

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Those stories are usually made up after the fact. People naturally have the tendency to create interesting narratives to explain phenomenon in their lives. It's also just better PR. I know this sounds cynical, but it's more often than not true.

Kalanick may have had a hard time hailing a cab...but that probably wasn't inconvenient enough to want him to devote his entire life to building a company solving that one specific problem that he randomly had in his life.

Is that really so hard to believe? Building a social network or a ride sharing app is something you do in a couple of months maybe a year. When it takes off though, that's when you make the decision to dedicate your life to it for the years to come.

Trevor Blackwell has a good article (https://web.archive.org/web/20070602193754/http://tlb.org/fo...) on founder stories.

This is a great post.

"Early on, when a reporter asked me how I came up with the idea for Anybots, I answered honestly that I made a list of all the ideas I thought might really change the world in the next 20 years, and picked the one I thought I could contribute most to. His eyes glazed over. It's unprintable."

A lot of people seem to take the "romantic origin story" as a template to follow, and waste a lot of time as a result.

"I have to say, most startup origin stories I've heard seem to begin with personal pain."

Personal pain or recognition of a pattern of problem(s) that could be solved? This is an interesting point because if you limit yourself to simply solving your personal problems, these problems have to be experienced by either a large number of people (usually peers). Otherwise there is no real chance of a business.

I'd prefer to put this as, "solving a personal problem that many* other people face"*.

> This is an interesting point because if you limit yourself to simply solving your personal problems

Uhh, we're all the same species living in one of a handful of large societies. Our personal or work problems are likely shared by thousands, millions, possibly even billions of other people.

No one is that weird or special of a snowflake.

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