Black Swan Farming

This doesn't seem quite right to me. Yes, if you're going to succeed big, it helps to have a startup idea that everyone else thinks is bad. But this seems like only one of many factors that goes in to succeeding big. I'm inclined to agree with Jared Diamond: "We tend to seek easy, single-factor explanations of success. For most important things, though, success actually requires avoiding many separate possible causes of failure."

I'm not an expert on any of Facebook, Dropbox, or Airbnb, but I've heard about competitors for all of them, including some rather early-seeming competitors. Was being first-to-market really the single, crucial factor in the success of all three? Or is there some other advantage, not related to being first-to-market, that having a crazy-seeming idea brings that I'm missing?

Additionally, Paul doesn't mention another way to be first-to-market: Come up with something so original that few others have thought of it. This could be another way to avoid competition, right? It's not obvious to me that wildly original ideas will always seem bad.

My take: Reality is a complicated place and reliable generalizations are few and far between :)

I don't think we can say much about what it takes to be a big success because there's so little data.

see: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4497461