- Webvan vs Instacart. Prior to Instacart, the conventional wisdom was that grocery delivery doesn't work as a standalone business, and that hypothesis was based on the Webvan data point.
- GM vs Tesla. GM's failure with their EV1 was frequently used against Tesla in their early stages. But GM's decision to abandon their project had nothing to do with market demand, and was instead entirely a politically driven decision.
- Concorde vs Boom. Building a supersonic commercial airliner was assumed to be a futile exercise for over 50 years, despite massive changes in regulations, advancements in technology, and overall market demand.
There are so many more, but these are the ones that instantly came to my mind.
An unrelated point that might be worth making: two of those startups are from YC, and the third one was funded by a guy with $100m burning a hole in his pocket. So while going against conventional wisdom has its merits, it does seem that the funding might turn out to be more difficult than for more conventional startups. I suppose this has to do with many VC funds' focus on certain investment themes, which are used to raise their funds and serves as a de facto contract with the GPs. One only has to look at the funding history of Airbnb - even USV couldn't wrap their head around the concept, and Sequoia bought into the concept but then struggled to match them with one of their existing investment themes (I forgot how they finally did it, but I recall it was a bit of a stretch).
There's certainly at least as many opinions about business as there are people working in the private sector, and most are probably wrong, but the fundamental workings of business aren't entirely a random number generator. You can use tools of business to determine the viability of a particular approach, at which point you're left with figuring out the timing and execution of that idea.
Still, not as solid by any means as science.
Is Instacart profitable?
A lot starting researchers (such as PhD students) that are left without adequate supervision are likely to reach a dead-end someone previously encountered but did not publish anything about.
Nobody is looking for wrong answers, there are simply many uninteresting ways to screw things up. If you are able to publish a wrong result in a worthwhile journal, a lot of right results have to be in it, which I guess makes your work “right”.
I know of people who researched topic X with the assumption to find Y. But they did not find Y and rather found out that their setup was insufficient to provide meaningful answers. So they wrote and explained about why this setup did not work for the original question and published it and moved on.
And this makes sense, because they achieved novel information the next student could improve on. So published about a dead end, or not?
Understanding the conceptual model behind a SaaS business plan, the kind of metrics that people find valuable and concrete techniques that other companies have found effective seems worth doing even if you have your own theory or approach that's explicitly different—for the same reasons lisper mentioned for scientific knowledge, just at a smaller scale.
I single out SaaS not because it's necessarily more systematic than other tech business plans—I suspect that it is, but don't have a real basis for that—but because I've read more about that than other kinds of companies. I'm sure there is a lot of valuable collective knowledge for any sort of product or company you want to build and the advantages you get from learning that should outweigh any priming effect the knowledge has, as long as you are intentional in deviating from the "conventional" path.
This suggests to me many/most are started by people looking for a relatively conventional experience, just with a bit more appetite for risk. None of the attributes for these positions are required in much greater degree than elsewhere in tech - curiosity, resistance to being told what to think, or fastidiousness to truth. Perhaps it's a testament to YC's success that the choice to found a startup is more accessible to 'conventional thinkers' these days. No value judgment - we should let a thousand flowers bloom! - but the conflation of startups to the above attributes of 'independent thinkers' is perhaps overblown.