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Comment by austincheney | Hacker News Reader

I have always found that entire scenario very odd. How are you a start up founder if you don’t know what you want to start up?

I always look at that like a soldier jacked up on adrenaline wearing an arsenal of ammunition ready to destroy the enemy having forgotten to ask who the enemy is or where they are. Lost. Maybe if they just start spraying ammo at everybody the enemy will suddenly make themselves known and something will stick.

This entire scenario is completely at odds with Indie Hackers who continually stress to refine a good idea until you have both revenue and product/market fit before quitting your day job. This advise is well suited to people who have the reality of personal finances and time constraints, so I guess there are some people who have unlimited funding and time to burn in search of something they should already have.

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The problem with this way of thinking is that existing markets are probably efficient enough - meaning all easy ways to make a lot of money have already been exhausted. This means that any idea that you generate by encountering a problem and thinking of a solution is probably either too hard to implement or will generate relatively puny revenue stream (nothing to sneeze at, but probably not of much interest to VCs and founders chasing big bucks).

What's the alternative? To wait for tectonic shifts in overall environment and circumstances, look for vacant ecological niches and pounce when you see one. To the outside view this will look exactly like a founder who doesn't know what to start up.

Here is an example I like: John Carmack. The conventional view is that he is a brilliant game programmer (which is undoubtedly true). But the alternative point of view is that his shtick was to capitalize on the period of incredible advances in consumer hardware. Each of his games fully showcased what the best hardware of that time was capable of (order of magnitude more than the previous generation) which made them instant hits. Not coincidentally, he quit making games around the time this period of advancement stopped.

Here is a post by @defmacro making a similar point: http://www.defmacro.org/2015/02/25/startup-ideas.html

John Carmack's success is due to id Software incubated at Softdisk. The reality of that success, at least in the beginning, was an already established stream of revenue, a ready assembled team, and proper leadership. The brilliance and innovation of Carmack came later. They had day jobs, revenue, and product/market fit already established before spinning out of Softdisk to launch id. That isn't enough to account for the super stellar success they would later enjoy, but it fully explains launching a successful business. There isn't any magic or secret sauce there.

> The problem with this way of thinking is that existing markets are probably efficient enough

Oh, that's certainly not true. The challenge there is the expertise to see the current dysfunction versus the risk of solving for it. Solving for the dysfunction often comes at competition for the limited resources required for current practice of art and rejection from just about everybody. Knowing this there is a choice to be made:

1. Sustain the current practice with current income and no change in risk

2. Proceed with the solution knowing that failure is probable and that a startup begins with a financial valley of death (burns cash without the revenue to make up for it) while knowing the greatness of the idea is financially irrelevant.

I say the greatness of the idea is financially irrelevant, because disruption requires some degree of originality and originality scares the shit out of people. That means the idea will burn money churning in frequent rejection until it achieves some manner of market assistance.

> John Carmack's success is due to id Software incubated at Softdisk. The reality of that success, at least in the beginning, was an already established stream of revenue, a ready assembled team, and proper leadership. The brilliance and innovation of Carmack came later. They had day jobs, revenue, and product/market fit already established before spinning out of Softdisk to launch id. That isn't enough to account for the super stellar success they would later enjoy, but it fully explains launching a successful business. There isn't any magic or secret sauce there.

The point is that they could have all this, but without them capitalizing on the incredible wave of rising hardware performance we wouldn't be talking about them now. Big opportunities arise when the situation is dynamic.

> > The problem with this way of thinking is that existing markets are probably efficient enough > Oh, that's certainly not true. The challenge there is the expertise to see the current dysfunction versus the risk of solving for it.

Notice that I didn't state that there is no dysfunction, only that there are no easy opportunities to exploit it. The reality is that the world is full of dysfunctions but they persist not because people are lazy to fix them, but because our systems are stuck in the bad equilibria which are hard to get out of. Take healthcare for example. To anyone who went to a doctor even once the dysfunction is obvious. The system can probably be made 10x more efficient with fairly simple tweaks! But good luck implementing them - you will be stuck in the molasses created by regulation, incumbents and simple inertia of people unwilling to experiment with their health.

Agree. I think it's a very bad sign if someone asks for ideas. You don't ask for ideas, you encounter problems and based on those problems you make ideas on how to solve them.

That's also the reason why one should make a prototype very fast and validate by a potential user/customer that you solve the problem the right way.

It’s a form of entitlement. Similar to calling oneself a “keynote speaker” absent any mention of one’s area of expertise. To consider one’s self a founder without an idea is to ignore the importance of vision. Might be ok for a franchise, but these are always the same people talking about disrupting this and that.

And ignores the importance of execution altogether. It’s hard to do $thing before you even know what it is.

That's a funny cultural thing about silicon valley. You're not incidentally an entrepreneur only if you've started something, you're an entrepreneur simply because you're the type of person who entrepreneues.

I knew I wanted to build my own company before I had a good idea for one. When I was in grad school I went out and executed a themed bottle opener which at best guess could make a few thousand dollars simply for practice and experience.

Regardless of whether you are a founder or not, figuring out the important problems to solve is important to ones career.

> I always look at that like a soldier jacked up on adrenaline wearing an arsenal of ammunition ready to destroy the enemy having forgotten to ask who the enemy is or where they are. Lost. Maybe if they just start spraying ammo at everybody the enemy will suddenly make themselves known and something will stick.

That is about the most American way of putting it.

It also describes America in the middle East and lots of Africa. Weapons had to be sold and/or money had to be made. So people were attacked and when people started shooting back, suddenly there was a reason to invade.

I am sceptical too but it's not an unusual idea to think that perhaps you can just put smart people together and they'll work something out.

God knows that much of that attitude is often lauded on HN for other things.

Kind of.

I am entering my fifth military deployment so I can speak to the nature of spontaneously formed teams of strangers. Intelligence is largely, but not completely, irrelevant. You learn to identify that a team is strongest due to a mix of good discipline and putting the proper personalities in the correct positions and then codifying a single common purpose. I recommend reading the book Good To Great for further examination.

Agreed, I work in an environment with a lot of really smart people, but not everyone thinks outside the box or is ambitious in that way

> Stay away from people who are world-weary and belittle your ambitions.

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