Not one of them has passed my test..
This is a bad checklist to start with, because your right. 99.9% of ideas start off bad. The founders of Airbnb originally required each host to serve breakfast and expected each host to use airbeds in their living room. That was the original idea. They went to investors and explained the market size by counting the number of airbeds sold.
There is a good YC essay on building a toy. Start by building a toy that has meaning to you. Then if it morphs into a real business and you think your ready to raise capital: this form will be useful. Also, play with this form now. It will help you think about ideas but don’t buy into it too early. Focus on meaning at early stages.
To half of the stuff there my reaction was "people actually pay for this?".
Your ideas might be better than you think.
Of course provided they aren't something like yet another time management app.
That he destroyed the Republic was something of a side-effect. If anyone was the entrepreneur in this analogy, it was Augustus, who both founded the Empire, having a brilliant command of public relations, denied having done so.
Bringing legions to Rome as part of political struggle had already been common practice for centuries, but it had never fully destroyed the Republic. Caesar himself witnessed several such occasions by Sulla and Marius.
Edit: responding to edit, my point is that Caesar was not fighting to gain. "Crossing the Rubicon" means taking a risk, but I don't think using it to describe creating a startup really fits.
He was fighting (illegally, it might be added) to defend himself against the political tactics of his Senatorial opponents. While he held an Imperium he could not be brought into court for his actions in holding it, but the Senate had voted to make him lay it down. Their intention was to bring him to the courts and ruin him politically and financially. Caesar was simply too proud and too arrogant to allow that ruin; that he was the foremost general of his age meant that he was in a position to pull it off.
Who knows? I believe you are right that he was forced into action when the Senate pulled him back from Gaul [1] with the intention of bringing him to court. If he did not have a plan to set himself up as a dictator, at least he pivoted beautifully once he saw the opportunity and Pompey folded. That at least was a true startup move. 1. edit: Gaul not Germany
This has been a fun side conversation, thankyou.
Sometimes, what you think are, terrible ideas can be legitimately life changing for other people.
Almost any startup idea can end up being successful with the right team behind it as long as they can avoid bad luck.
Very few startups manage to both assemble the right team and dodge bad luck.
This!
Every successful thing I ever worked on was primed to succeed no matter how incompetent we were!