Most startup ideas are non-obvious in their very early phase. If there was already proof one way or another that they were good or bad, they would be already done, or already dropped, respectively.
Also, the founders have much more knowledge about their startup. You have what you got from that one paragraph description you read. That's a huge asymmetry of information.
PG's essay explicitly calls us out:
"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."
A C-level position at a YC startup will grant you a 100k+ salary at a YC company that did manage to make it to a series A afterwards even if your company didn’t make it that far.
It’s a self accommodating industry (IMO).
If you're a developer you can make that anyway, isn't that basically an entry level salary in SF?
I'm very curious how much you can pay yourself as a YC founder after your first round, is there any data on this? Must be more than 75k.
If one can deliver real value to end-users, and the growth takes a phenomenal turn, then different kind of non-viable thoughts would emerge, I'm sure.
And no, what the person he's responding to is saying aren't objective truths.
Alternatively, a strategy could fund the ones that are building a terrible, but profitable future, and using the money you make to live somewhere else.
It almost seems like a prisoner's dilemma sort of situation. If you don't fund the baddies, and someone else does, then you'll be poor in a terrible future.
The lowest hanging fruit in tech has already been taken years ago and the human needs haven't changed that much. We need to communicate, we need to listen to music, we need to move around, etc.
I've personally seen many times how companies prefer doing those hand processes, even after having paid me for developing a solution to solves that. Humans are strange creatures.
The big problems that most people want solved and can indeed be solved have already been solved. For the most part we're now in the phase of solving small problems, refining current solutions, and maybe creating new problems with its own set of solutions.
Of course there are many big problems that haven't been solved because those are extremely difficult and expensive to solve which falls outside of the realm of startups. For example an HIV vaccine, super efficient solar cells, cold fusion, efficient energy storage, brain computer interface, dark energy, dark matter, etc.
Hard problems like self driving cars and natural language interfaces are way beyond the capabilities of a small startup.
But anyway, the point is that there are a lot of new opportunities opening up because of that new enabling tech, and many of them are accessible to small companies.
Facebook had a similiar idea to others. But they limited it to Harvard. So anyone who joined was part of a social club that they saw in real life. That gave them trust and people more freely posted. Next they rolled out to only ivy league schools. Next all colleges. Then highschools. When they released to the public the colleges still had semi-private networks allowing them more freedom. Then facebook did something no one thought was possible, they allowed you to login to hotmail import your contacts. Now you are friends with people you may not have talk to in years.
The original idea only shaped a broadvision. Each decision really provided the vision and a path for growth.
The original vision is important. If you tried to take a dating app and follow the Harvard facebook roll-out it wouldn't work because people wouldn't want to be seen as looking for a mate. Dating sites try to connect strangers.