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Comment by rchiba | Hacker News Reader

> Ultimately, the reason that the startup died was because I did not do the due diligence in discerning whether this was a problem that I genuinely wanted to solve with my entire being. That's the bar for creating a successful startup, you need to find a problem that you're willing to dedicate yourself entirely to solving.

My own startup journey has led me to a contrary belief: At the earliest stages of building a business, being flexible and continuously re-evaluating your assumptions in order to find real market opportunities is more useful than having a lot of passion solving a single problem.

If anything, I've met many many founders who have had too much passion about a single problem, which hurts them gravely when they refuse to consider the possibility that the problem they are passionate about is not a problem at all and they need to pivot.

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I think these are two very distinct mindsets.

(1) "I want to solve this problem, I find it important, and I think I can make enough money while solving it to run a company, and live off it, maybe even get rich."

(2) "I want to run a company and make it big / get something self-sustaining so that I could forget about working for a salary; if solving this problem does not lead to that goal, I'll pivot to solving that problem, or another."

The only similarity between them is running a company that solves some customers' problem, which as generic as it gets. The motivations have little in common though.

Agreed.

And to reference the idea of flexibility- the ideal scenario in my mind is to love the problem, and possibly just as important, love the customer you're going to be serving for years, and be very dispassionate about the solution until you find a way to solve the problem in such a way that your ideal customers value it highly.

It's completely possible to simply be interested in finding a solvable problem with a good "market" and a clear path to making money, but I think really great companies typically reflect at least some level of passion for the problem space they are in (or were in as they became a success). If there are counter-examples, I am interested.

Great patent trolls? Counter example

I think something similar as you.

Don't get married to a position. That includes things you purchased to sell at a higher price, as well as things you created to sell at a higher price. So it doesn't matter to me that I printed shares on a sheet of paper, I don't treat it differently. If the position doesn't work, move on.

As far as the actual operation goes, I treat it like a precision drone strike. or perhaps an expedition. I don't need to be passionate about it, I just need to recognize the alpha and value extractable. We're going to sail to the New World, get the gold, and distribute the gold when we get back. The end! Pre-plan what is involved and do that thing, don't pursue things more complicated than that, just rule them out and wait for the next idea. Too many people covet an idea because they view it as their one opportunity ever. Its too bad if that's actually true for them.

IMO it still has to be something you’re okay with doing for, like, 10 years. Don’t fall so in love with an idea that you can’t give it up and pivot, but also don’t get stuck doing something you hate.

Make money faster and rule out things where you:

a) cant do that b) and are not able to have a succession plan when you get tired of it

Here is a 1997 interview with Jeff Bezos that I like where he talks about why he created Amazon - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rWRbTnE1PEM. He describes a purely logical explanation of seeing data about internet growth and identifying books as being a uniquely good product to sell on the internet.

Which is not to say he wasn't "willing to dedicate [himself] entirely to solving the problem", but I think it agrees with your take about finding market opportunities rather than following a passion.

> At the earliest stages of building a business, being flexible and continuously re-evaluating your assumptions in order to find real market opportunities is more useful than having a lot of passion solving a single problem.

This. I helped a friend develop the software for his start-up, and everything has been continuously growing for 10+ yrs now. When doing so, I have no special passion for it. The project gets my full attention when I am working on it as any other project would get. Of course, I am kind of proud of what I did. But this satisfaction comes more from the impression that I did a good job, not from the enthusiasam that I am following a big vision or whatever.

I feel the same about every project I've worked on: I love engaging with the work, but I am never passionate about the vision/mission of whatever I am doing.

I wonder if I haven't found a vision that I am passionate about yet or I simply don't have the entrepreneur mind.

I rather think, that an "entrepreneur mind" is neither necessary nor sufficient to start an innovative company. It just gives a better story for the media. Or it works like the No True Scotsman falacy: everything that does not fit into the narrative is droped as not being relevant.

In other words: I will not deny that there are many success stories in which entrepreneurial thinking plays a role, but there seem to be a large number of hidden champions in which it did not play a central role and a lot of other cases in which people with an overconfidence in their entrepreneurial thinking failed due to a lack of other skills. I myself have witnessed both in my immediate vicinity.

To your point on being flexible and checking assumptions, I advocate founders to “fall in love with the problem” and clearly articulate why they want to become become experts on this specific problem.

This is great advice - I'm not a founder but I consult and one of the tricks to keep me motivated for each project is to make myself passionate about each project and what I can do. This might seem like circular logic, but becoming passionate about things is a muscle you can develop and it makes things so much easier!

I'm curious to hear more about what kinds of intentional action you take to develop your passion. What does that look like practically?

I think it would be harder to challenge deep assumptions once you fall in love with a problem. It seems like all of your questions and answers would resolve around the base assumption that the problem exists, rather than questioning what the world might look like if it didn't exist. Instead of adding something to solve the problem in the current world, a small shift could eliminate it completely... and thus make the company obsolete, but the world better.

I find the most motivation when I hate the problem and I want to eliminate it from my life. Then it's not, "how can I make this better", it's "how can I eliminate this so I never have to hear about it or think about it again".

I kinda question what the author is thinking of as the "problem". He says:

> unfortunately what we had built had only marginal improvements to what was being offered by other platforms

... Is it really a problem if there are already solutions?

As you say:

> I've met many many founders who have had too much passion about a single problem

I wonder if it might also be about the narrowness of the defined problem? That is, if you can define a problem in more abstract or general terms (such as "help people more easily do XYZ"), you can, assuming that still interests you, give yourself plenty of room to be flexible without needing to completely abandon the problem of interest.

I think this is a per-person issue. I personally am a “I need to care deeply about what I’m working on” kind of person; I’m not motivated by problem-solving for its own sake. Some people are. I suspect that there are many successful entrepreneurs in both categories, but the kinds of problems they solve and the kinds of companies they build are likely somewhat different.

I'm both. I need to deeply care in order to work on it at all and I also need to regularly pivot and re-evaluate. The two go hand-in-hand: the frequent pivoting is how I discover something that I both deeply care about and which I think there might actually be demand for. It's like an evolutionary exploration algorithm.

Like the parent wrote, I think "deeply care, but no viable business plan/market" is a very common failure mode. You need to kill your darlings. Caring deeply is a very necessary but very much not sufficient condition for me. Also, you'll end up caring about something even more if way more people care about it and are happy to have found your product/service. Like how you'll care about cooking even more if other people are happy to eat your food. It's a mutualistic cycle.

The main downside is this can lead to extreme indecisiveness and uncertainty and instability; but I've decided to accept this risk in the trade-off against the risk of building a ladder against the wrong wall.

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