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Comment by dschobel | Hacker News Reader

2. How much startups' ideas change. As usual, by Demo Day about half the startups were doing something significantly different than they started with.

If this is really true (and I fully believe that it is), why not just interview individuals like a job interview rather than have them pitch ideas?

If you know the resulting product is almost certainly not going to look anything like what they're proposing, I would just try to swing some on-campus interviews at Stanford and UC Berkeley, hire the kids based on smarts & personality and then put them in a room and only then start talking about ideas.

Why bother reviewing their initial ideas at all (other than as an indicator of the aforementioned smarts & personality)?

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Ah you see, your premise is wrong. To go looking for someone is the polar opposite of how to find capable founders, very simply because it implies they need to be found. Don't take this the wrong way, but I think your ideas are too academic. You don't just "go to a college and find entrepreneurs".

There certainly is value in the effort one engages in when self-developing, self-formulating, self-revising, self-actualizing, self-motivating, self-preserving and finally self-sticking-your-neck-out, which is what the YC process is sort of about.

In Summary:

Being a doer aint easy.

I was thinking of something along the lines of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton but for computer scientists & entrepreneurs.

In short: Interesting things happen when you put smart people in a room without any constraint and a little bit of funding.

Although I freely admit the IAS is fairly controversial and some people hate the model.

Why bother reviewing their initial ideas at all (other than as an indicator of the aforementioned smarts & personality)?

That is in fact about how we think of the idea, if it's still just an idea. Sometimes, as e.g. with a company like Bump, there's a real product to judge, but that's rarely the case.

Having an idea gives you something to talk about. It grants candidates many opportunities to prove (or disprove) their ability to operate within a problem domain. If they just dropped the idea-specialized interviews, it would be paradoxically harder to find "stem cell" founders who can take on any task.

Having someone that's actually working on a problem also helps weed out those who are competent but unable to self-motivate and focus (like me, unfortunately) both of which are needed for startups.

If you know the resulting product is almost certainly not going to look anything like what they're proposing

Big difference between "about half" and "almost certainly not".

Semantics notwithstanding, 50% is still a significant rate of death for a process which is focussed heavily on the incipient idea.

"other than as an indicator of the aforementioned smarts & personality"

Shouldn't that be enough? Having an idea gives you a starting point from which to iterate.

Good question. I would be interested to know if there's a correlation between startups who stuck to their ideas, and startups who failed

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