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> The idea for a company is an artificial barrier to becoming an entrepreneur

Oh really? How many successful entrepreneurs have you heard of without ideas, just totally empty heads and whole bunch of hustle? Do they just hack away at nothing? Do they hustle without any purpose at all? And how many companies have you heard of without any ideas behind them? Don't be silly.. of course ideas matter. YC recognizes that individuals that work hard can come up with great ideas. Of course an entrepreneur must have an idea before they start working on something. Can that idea fail miserably? Sure, but great entrepreneurs will keep going. The failed idea/company will be ripped into bits, and the good parts will be funneled into a new idea. Over and over and over again. YC is banking on their ability to identify people who can come up with ideas and execute them.

> It's simple: what makes Apple or Google special, or more specifically, what made them special when they were starting out? It almost always boils down to their approach to a problem instead of just the problem they were trying to solve.

An "approach to a problem"? Oh, you mean an... idea for a solution to a problem? Yeah. Ideas matter.

> How many successful entrepreneurs have you heard of without ideas, just totally empty heads and whole bunch of hustle?

We'll find out after this next YC round. Besides, I think the point is that pg is looking for people that are the antithesis of empty heads. Startup ideas mutate, and if you can find driven people with fertile minds and place them in a setting where product ideas can be brainstormed and hashed out with the guidance of the YC team, then they stand a much better chance of success then the typical entrepreneur who might try this on their own.

Don't get me wrong - I love the 'no idea' concept and hope it works out, and I love the fact that YC is ballsy enough to experiment and innovate. They key here, though, is that ideas still matter. YC will simply help generate and execute those ideas.

I agree. Ideas do matter. Being accepted into YC with no idea will place the startups in a creative pressure cooker. Just for fun, I think I'll try an experiment tomorrow => I'll go for a walk and not let myself come home until I come up with 5 product ideas. (Luckily I don't mind long walks.)

Coming up with a decent product idea is hard for most people. But I have to wonder, is it hard because they expect the ideas to come easily and have never spent the time to really focus in on it?

Coming up with product ideas is easy. Coming up with a real business model around that idea, as well as understanding the market, not so much. Granted, half the industry thinks the product is all that matters. Acquisition is not a business model. It's gambling.

> We'll find out after this next YC round.

The lessons learned will be meaningless that quickly. It will take more time than that to discern the real impact.

Maybe, but that really for pg & co. to decide. I'm not going to presume anything.

I guess it depends on what we mean by success, idea and entrepreneurs. Do they have to be successful on their first product? If their first product morphs into something completely different from their original idea does that mean the idea was pointless? If they're not successful until their 2nd, 3rd, 4th or 60th product what's the difference between starting with no idea and starting with an idea that gets abandoned?

Some examples:

Id, shipped 3 games before Wolfenstein Flickr started as an MMO company Rovio shipped 60+ games before Angry Birds Twitter's first project was a podcast directory

I'm sure there's hundreds of other examples.

Hey.. Commander Keen was awesome. Don't knock early iD. :)

Microsoft. They've never had an overarching product idea that defines their business, they just created software trying to see what would stick.

Overarching product idea? So it's not an idea unless it's overarching? They've had plenty of ideas. Not all the ideas panned out. It's not like they stumbled, fell on a keyboard, and out popped Windows 95.

It's still a counterexample to all the startups that had one big unifying vision from the outset. Obviously you need some idea before you start making a product, that much is a tautology, but it's equally clear that Microsoft more or less winged it from there.

I didn't see the GP ask about a big, unifying vision. He was asking about ideas.

> Obviously you need some idea before you start making a product

That's not the discussion though.

>> The idea for a company is an artificial barrier to becoming an entrepreneur > Oh really? How many successful entrepreneurs have you heard of without ideas, just totally empty heads and whole bunch of hustle?

Can you be an entrepreneur without an idea? Obviously not.

And even Microsoft had an idea for a product (starting with the BASIC interpreter for the Altair). That was, after all, where it all started.

At that point it's not really a question, just a tautology. My apologies for trying to interpret the question more generously.

> Oh really? How many successful entrepreneurs have you heard of without ideas, just totally empty heads and whole bunch of hustle?

This is because we are going about it backwards. A successful entrepreneur obviously became successful by executing on some idea. That says little about what came first: the desire to strike out on their own or the flash of an idea. My guess is that there is a fair percentage of both these cases plus the third case where someone was forced into being an entrepreneur (I put Google in that category).

So yes, ideas matter but when used as a criteria to decide whether to startup or not, they are an artificial barrier.

Y combinator seems to have focused on people that have hustle and a decent idea. I don't think they're lowering the requirement, a 22 year old with hustle and no experience and no idea isn't a great investment. Instead I suspect they're changing the requirement to get a different batch of people in the door, as evidenced by the "as shown by what they've done in the past". Someone with more experience or a more proven record could certainly have "no idea" and be the type of person where if you stick them in a room with other skilled/experienced people, things will happen.

I know more than a few people where we could sit in a room and brainstorm some decent business ideas. Maybe not even ones we want to work on, but a building full of these people, with ideas coming out of one room, being refined in another, maybe being executed in yet another? I think that could lead to something.

>"How many successful entrepreneurs have you heard of without ideas, just totally empty heads and whole bunch of hustle?"

Other than the empty heads part, it's pretty common. That's why we will probably see millions of smartphone apps within a few years.

IMO, YC focuses on a particular type of entrepreneur. One of their features is that they don't place a high value on bootstrapping and place more value on working within a collaborative ecosystem. Those traits indicate flexibility.

Most of the ideas that YC companies pursue are not visionary in a way that correlates to the type of passion underlying an Apple or Oracle. They're usually more practical, limited and don't require a Jobs or Ellison.

This misleading idea is perpetuated by PR departments, who like to make up bogus creation myths. Example:

  *A former bakery owner and professional bicyclist, he was choking down PowerBars
  for energy in the middle of a daylong 175-mile ride. "I couldn't make the last
  one go down, and that's when I had an epiphany -- make a product that actually
  tasted good."*

  -- Gary Erickson, founder and CEO of Clif Bar.
  Quoted in Fortune Small Business, October 2003.

I've read (at least) that section of Raising the Bar -- which part of that story is false? That he wasn't actually a bakery owner and professional bicyclist but just an amateur baker and bicycle junkie?

which part of that story is false

The part about making a product that tastes good?

"The idea for a company is an artificial barrier to becoming an entrepreneur"

This is when I decided this must be a parody.

Quick question: if I want to start a company, why do I necessarily need an idea first? There are tons of real-world problems that can be solved through startups, and I'm very sure that just because the founder of a company doesn't come up with the idea by his or her self, the company can still be very successful if they execute well.

Why does the idea for my company have to be my own idea? We could potentially have really talented founders who simply haven't had enough exposure in the right ecosystem (let's face it: not every place in the world is like the Bay Area) to have an idea for a startup yet.

> talk is cheap and ideas are cheap, but people are really expensive [...] because the idea will change over time anyway.

I largely agree with this sentiment in general. However, all ideas are not created equal. Most successful companies seem to make 2nd order corrections and refinements to their ideas, but not change them all that much. Case in point, facebook hasn't changed that much in terms of vision and what it provides for its users since it started. Same for google, apple, airbnb, heroku, dropbox, reddit, mint, basecamp, ...

[i don't mean to say that those are the same type of success, just illustrating that what i said applies to a lot of very different types of successes]

I think the utility of this approach is unproven, so we'll see how successful it is. I view it completely as an code-factory type experiment.

Those examples are huge, beyond-your-wildest-dream successes, For every one of these there are a tons of made-me-rich pivots.

Facebook started as hot or not for college students

Google started as a search company (now an advertising company, which offers search, phones etc)

Apple started as a computer company (now a consumer electronics company)

Airnb started as air beds on occupied flat floors, not renting empty flats

Of course some companies have a great idea, execute, and stay true to it (perhaps like some of the others on your list like dropbox for example), and for those above you can trace their origins in the preoccupations of many of these companies today (Apple still tries to bring computing to the masses, Google still has search as its focus, and arguably makes advertising money because of good search), but often they have moved quite far from their original inspiration, and they have often made their money in unrelated areas (e.g. Apple is now making far far more from iPhones than it ever did from computers).

I do think ideas and plans matter less than execution, because ideas tend to change so much when they come into contact with the real world and real users, and you can come across plenty of great ideas (or even get them for free from your users) as you create solutions and learn about a particular area.

> I do think ideas and plans matter less than execution, because ideas tend to change so much when they come into contact with the real world and real users

I smell a logical fallacy. The fact the ideas tend change shows that they actually matter, otherwise they would not change. If ideas didn't matter Nokia would still be selling rubber boots.

matter less != does not matter

Or maybe the reason we don't have enough entrepreneurs ...

We don't have enough entrepreneurs?

Of course we don't have enough entrepreneurs.

People talk about the "tech bubble" all the time, and that's a debate you can have, but that's always related to social web sites.

We really don't have enough entrepreneurs, because entire industries (healthcare and education are two good examples) are lagging and not taking full advantage of today's technology. So yes, perhaps Instagram could have been overvalued (or any other big acquisition for that matter), but that only emphasizes how much progress we need to make in other industries.

> (It's simple: what makes Apple or Google special, or more specifically, what made them special when they were starting out?).

A couple guys had an idea for a cheap computer and a great search engine, respectively. And they executed it well. You're kidding yourself if you think the Steves sat around and said, "what is it we should do with our lives? We need an idea." They knew what they wanted to do, and did it, and continued to believe in it (in Steve Jobs's case, for his entire life).

It was their passion for the ideas that determined how successful their respective companies were, perhaps combined with traits about themselves. Do you think Apple will ever be as successful without Jobs's dedication? Maybe successful, but not innovative, and doomed to eventually run out of steam. Google is already failing because they are losing focus on the idea that made them great.

I don't think a company can be truly successful unless the people founding it truly believe that the idea will change the world (and how can you truly believe in an idea that you haven't discovered yet, and that you have to go to an incubator to work on?). Of course, this is meaningless in today's perceived-value bubble, which might be why Y Combinator is trying it.

In the end, and I hope I'm wrong, I suspect this will draw out people who are just looking for a cash-out vehicle. "I heard there was money to be made in Silicon Valley, but I don't know what company to start. Help me find an idea!"

Jeff Bezos is a counter example to your representation of Steve Jobs. Bezos knew that the internet was going to be big and knew he wanted to be an entrepreneur -- and that was about it!

From the way he tells it, there was no "Aha! I must sell books on the internet because books are my passion!" moment. Instead, he went methodologically looking for something to sell online, and books had widespread appeal, were easy to ship, and lent themselves to being searched on a website.

Your telling is overly simplistic.

> One day that spring, Jeffrey Bezos observed that Internet usage was increasing by 2,300 percent a year. He saw an opportunity for a new sphere of business, and immediately began considering the possibilities.

> In typically methodical fashion, Bezos reviewed the top 20 mail order businesses, and asked himself which could be conducted more efficiently over the Internet than by traditional means.[1]

Idea: Build a better mail-order business using the Internet. He saw the potential for the efficiency of the Internet and automation to make mail-order businesses obsolete. He didn't look at the Internet and say, "gee, I want to be an entrepreneur, what company can I start here?"

[1]: http://www.achievement.org/autodoc/page/bez0bio-1

> He didn't look at the Internet and say, "gee, I want to be an entrepreneur, what company can I start here?"

By your own quoting, he did exactly that. Maybe rephrased slightly, so as to frame "I wanna be an entrepreneur" as "I saw an opportunity", et c.

The point is, Bezos wasn't suddenly awestruck with the epiphany that the Internet was going to change selling books, which incidentally was one of his great passions.

"... books had widespread appeal, were easy to ship, and lent themselves to being searched on a website ..."

And one product that was not well represented on the Internet. This made books & publishing ripe for disruption.

at the time, very little was represented on the internet.

lol "we don't have enough entreprenuers?" What does "enough" mean? Looks to me like we've got thousands of kids trying to make the FaceTube.ly+ 3.0, which is more than enough for me, personally.

Meanwhile, cancer is uncured, the moon is lonely, etc.

Cancer & populating the moon are monumentally difficult problems. Comparing curing cancer w/ 'kids' trying to build 'FaceTube.ly+ 3.0' is beyond silly.

By the bye, there are thousands of researchers & doctors around the world trying to cure cancer. As for the moon, it's not exactly the most compelling place to live.

"If you want a solid company, the people matter more than the idea, because the idea will change over time anyway."

So how exactly does that idea change? In itself? Like magically? Or is it perhaps so that somebody needs to come up with that idea? So if there's nobody in your company who can come up with an idea then what? Because in the beginning Uncle Paul gave to you an idea. Because you where so dumb brick that you couldn't come up with anything while applying to the YC. So now you are implementing it at it does not work out, ideas change, you know. So you pick up the phone and call Uncle Paul in need of a new idea? To pivot in the billion dollar business. Really? But hey, first, to come up with and idea to call Uncle Paul for a new bllion dollar idea you need an idea that the current idea does not work and you need an idea to call Uncle Paul. Now what?