Tap Into Y Combinator's Contrarian Thinking | Hacker News Reader

Tap Into Y Combinator's Contrarian Thinking

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65 pointskn0thing20 comments

While I appreciate the promotion of contrarian thought and motivating people to think different, act different, dare to be different, these example do not look at all to me contrarian. At best one could argue, that they identify existing phenomenons that were repackaged into a scalable, investable product.

AirBnB: normal people would never be willing to rent out their place--or a single room in their place--to strangers.

B&Bs have been around forever. Roomsharing, Couchsurfing, etc. The idea has been around for a long time, just not as a scalable platform.

Tutorspree: Having a human being on the other end radically reduced the time needed to set up tutoring

Well sure, maybe it is by now "contrariant" for tech companies that a decent phone support can resolve problems quicker and is better for customer retention than online support ticket systems...

FlightCar: Travelers get a free car wash, and don't have to pay $18/day for airport parking.

I like the idea, but it seems to me just a frequent flier version of similar peer-to-peer car sharing systems (RelayRides, Getaround, etc).

B&Bs are dedicated businesses though. AirBnB's tenants don't really meet that requirement (on average, though I imagine there are people who just rent out their place on AirBnB).

I can't agree more. I had 'the idea' for Airbnb years ago, after couch surfing happily many times.

I'm sure thousands of people had 'the idea' and knew 'not X'. It was really clear to those who had tried the unpaid version there was vast untapped potential in the market for a paid Couch Surfing.

What counted was setting up a system that made the matching process simple, safe, and had critical mass.

At best one could argue, that they identify existing phenomenons that were repackaged into a scalable, investable product.

And how is that an issue? That is being different. Just on a different level than the one you focus on. AirBnB challenges the hotel establishment. Yes, it is illegal in some places, and opens up a lot of issues for its users, but change does not come from settling with the status quo. You have to be challenging in order to achieve something.

I disagree. While you may feel that the points you made were valid, they are in fact not valid for a variety of reasons.

I like the core of Peter Thiel's comment. If you're not in the business, "Most people think X, I know 'Not X'" then you're not really an entrepreneur. Anything that is un-contrarian (maybe status quo is the better word) can be done at a large company better.

If Excel is the optimal spreadsheet, work at Microsoft.

If hotels are pretty good, work at Hilton.

If airlines just need some tweaking around the edges, go work at American Air. (Yikes!)

One can argue exactly how bold these places were in their contrarianism, but they still bucked the status quo. I couldn't have dreamed that AirBnB would have pulled it off.

Is it a good thing or a bad thing that Y Combinator's two biggest home run successes - Airbnb and Dropbox - both did not seem to fit Y Combinator's typical selection criteria at the time?

Yes, the Airbnb founders have always been "relentlessly resourceful", but 2 of their 3 cofounders were not hackers, which as far as I know is generally a big red flag for YC. And as someone else mentioned, PG thought their idea was terrible and only chose them because he liked their grit.

Drew Houston does seem to fit the mold of a prototypical YC founder, but it can't be stressed enough that he was rejected the first time he applied to YC. If Drew Houston had decided to not apply again and decided to get funded by someone else, the way we view YC today might be significantly different. Of course, maybe Dropbox wouldn't be where it is today without YC's help, but I don't wanna delve too much into counterfactuals.

My point is, seeing as YC's two biggest successes came from two teams that normally were rejected by their model, should YC be criticized for being too narrow in the way they evaluate startups, or should they be lauded for being willing to be contrarians against their own model when it came to Airbnb and Dropbox?

Hmm, not sure Airbnb was the best example to start off with to support that YC has contrarian thinking. PG thought Airbnb was a stupid idea, and only agreed to invest on them on a whim. It was a Black Swan event how Airbnb ended up at YC through Michael Seibel. Tutorspree makes sense, I don't see it as crazy in the same way that Airbnb was. Same goes for Flightcar, but great startup idea. YC is generally investing in growth/traction at this stage and not crazy ideas or founders. PG alluded to this in Farming for Black Swans. I believe they were looking for certain types of founders in 2008-2009, but that has changed. Not fully convinced that YC is driven by contrarian thinking today.

Correlation vs. causation seems weak here... while you might view some of these companies as contrary to some sort of popular wisdom or historical trends, it doesn't follow that "contrarian thinking" is necessarily an effective way to build a company, nor does it suggest such a thing as a requirement or even asset in establishing new businesses.

All it does say is that you can sometimes be successful by doing things other people are not doing... not exactly a breakthrough. :)

I'm not saying it's a bad thing -- in some, perhaps many, cases I'd say it's pretty useful -- just that it's not a necessary or sufficient thing for this kind of success.

It's certainly not sufficient, but it's close to necessary for startups, because startups generally have to do something no one else is already doing.

Counterpoint: Dropbox.

("Better" is obviously a form of "different", but I don't think that's the implication of your comment.)

I would say that the counterthinking was to insist on something that a lot of people (including some big players) were doing, without any real success.

But I admit there is some wishfull thinking there, as I am in this position. My startup is a private social network, a field with a lot of high profile players (Path and some YC companies), and still no one nailed it.

Great article! Looking at a lot of successful companies (apple, tesla, spacex, amazon, etc.), it seems like the founders believed that such a thing should exist so strongly that they made the rest of the world follow them.

When iPhone launched (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eywi0h_Y5_U)

The thing that strikes me is some of the best ideas were not necessarily "Not X" ideas. I also don't think the contrarian thinking is as binary as "X vs Not X" implies.

For instance, it's not like everybody in the world was thinking "a clean and concise search engine will never work" or "a social network catered towards college students will never work."

Perhaps people thought "we don't need another search engine" or "we don't need another social network," but those thoughts do not necessarily make Google and Facebook "Not X" ideas. Both fixed very specific weaknesses with the then current solutions and have since evolved.

Airbnb is different than Google and Facebook in that they created a market. But like I mentioned earlier, I don't think the world was thinking "I will never rent out a room in my house, if given the opportunity." More likely that thought had never crossed their mind prior to Airbnb.

"Airbnb, Tutorspree, and FlightCar have all shown that a contrarian nature is necessary to succeed."

a contrarian nature suggests that you are opposed to standard view. Yes, all the companies mentioned are contrarian in the sense that they do not follow the majority view of their respective markets. It's really a matter of semantics, but I would say what article is calling contrarian is at it's heart just disruptive innovation.

This may go against the popular opinion around these traps, but does anyone else feel like the premise of success arising from the pursuit of "not X" a little flawed in that for every AirBnb story that makes frontpage, a hundred other "not X" ventures never see the light of day?

Re Airbnb.

> Thus was born a multi-billion-dollar business that is one of the most meaningful new start-ups to emerge in the past decade.

This seems a bit over hyped plus vrbo.com and friends have been around for a while.

I hate to be "that guy", but... the site does't work at all for me on Android. It redirects me to some mobile version and then displays an empty page.

Not quite sure I follow the "Not X" of the FlightCar example.

What was the X? The traditional rental car & parking arrangement?

Ycombinator startups are examples of contrarian thinking? Not really, although I've grown to admire some of them. The article reads more like a suckup-atorial.

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