Ask HN: We have a great team and capital but can't find a good idea • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: We have a great team and capital but can't find a good idea

#461

Post by Lordarminius » Tue, Oct 31, 2017, 9:19 AM UTC

isaaclyman wrote: post #328

7alman wrote: post #175

If you have a hard time coming up with ideas, you probably shouldn't start a company.

This is harsh, but true. I've never heard a successful founder say "I don't know, I just wanted to start a company with my friends and get rich." Every dang middle-schooler in the US wants that. Companies are a means, not an end. Successful ones always start with someone who's passionate about a very specific problem. This really comes out in corporate mission statements. Even if you're Xerox, your mission statement…

> I've never heard a successful founder say "I don't know, I just wanted to start a company with my friends and get rich."

I could not disagree more. Companies are started by all sorts of people: some founders have a definite idea that is a perfect fit for the market(Stripe,Heroku), some go over many iterations of their original idea and may even end up abandoning it for something entirely unrelated(Reddit), the last type of founder simply wants to be in business and does not even know what his product is yet(Steve Jobs before he joined Pixar). The only trait all founders share is drive and ambition.

Re: Ask HN: We have a great team and capital but can't find a good idea

#462

Post by icebraining » Tue, Oct 31, 2017, 9:22 AM UTC

Theodores wrote: post #320

Animats wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are lots of people who need jobs and need someone to tell them where to go and what to do. This could be a real winner. Call it "Slaves 2.0".

The slavery we know from history, i.e. the triangular trade between the Caribbean, Liverpool and Guinea, that was actually 'Slaves 2.0'. Before 'Slaves 2.0' there was 'Slaves 1.0'. This existed in Africa and before white men and guns were involved it wasn't a bad system at all. If you did something seriously wrong then you were not sent to prison, instead you were sold into slavery. The idea was that you worked off y…

What you described is what already is supposed to happen, although it doesn't always due to corruption of the system. You're not supposed to go to prison based on debts, especially civil debts. Instead, either have assets seized or you work off your debt, by having the court garnish your wages.

Re: Ask HN: We have a great team and capital but can't find a good idea

#463

Post by Lordarminius » Tue, Oct 31, 2017, 9:22 AM UTC

greyfox wrote: post #176

Funny, i have 2-3 really good ideas that i feel are genuine and have large profit potential, yet i have no team and hardly any programming skills to launch them.

There are many programmers and programming teams for hire out there. Don't let that stop you

Re: Ask HN: We have a great team and capital but can't find a good idea

#464

Post by TrickyRick » Tue, Oct 31, 2017, 9:24 AM UTC

icebraining wrote: post #444

0xbear wrote: post #406

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People who start companies are typically looking to increase “wealth inequality”.

Not really, most companies are small and don't pay more than a decent income even for the founders. VC-funded startups are an exception, not the rule. Even among software companies, I'd say, if you look beyond the US.

But (One of) the ambition(s) is usually to make money, thereby increasing inequality. I have yet to find a startup with the ambition to pay everyone median salary and donate the rest to low-income households. Nothing wrong with that, just a fact :)

Re: Ask HN: We have a great team and capital but can't find a good idea

#465

Post by icebraining » Tue, Oct 31, 2017, 9:29 AM UTC

Gargoyle wrote: post #165

TheTaytay wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I concur. I needed a ditch dug a couple of weeks ago, and everyone was recommending that I drive to Home Depot and pick some guys up waiting for work. There has _got_ to be a better way. Note that this felt different to me than hiring a handyman or any other skilled trade, which feels like a semi-solved problem. Sometimes I just need some extra hands, and learning the unspoken rules around how to hire guys on a stree…

I moved last year and ended up using some street corner guys. Cost me the same as pros, more or less, but just easier for me personally. They're largely undocumented workers and a strictly cash business, though, so app-izing them would be difficult if not impossible. However- I did also learn that it's easy to hire professional movers to just help you load a u-haul for a couple if that's what you want. Working with t…

However- I did also learn that it's easy to hire professional movers to just help you load a u-haul for a couple if that's what you want. Working with those companies and app-izing that labor is something that should be possible.

It is: https://www.uship.com/

(There's even a reality show around it, that's how I know about it)

Re: Ask HN: We have a great team and capital but can't find a good idea

#466

Post by icebraining » Tue, Oct 31, 2017, 9:32 AM UTC

TrickyRick wrote: post #464

icebraining wrote: post #444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really, most companies are small and don't pay more than a decent income even for the founders. VC-funded startups are an exception, not the rule. Even among software companies, I'd say, if you look beyond the US.

But (One of) the ambition(s) is usually to make money, thereby increasing inequality. I have yet to find a startup with the ambition to pay everyone median salary and donate the rest to low-income households. Nothing wrong with that, just a fact :)

The company I worked for previously paid decent (but not extravagant) salaries, and profits in the order of the low dozens of thousands annually. Meanwhile, our job consisted of outbidding and replacing SAP and Oracle solutions costing $$$$.

Paying $10 to an SMB owner instead of $100 to Bill Gates et all reduces inequality, it doesn't increase it.

Re: Ask HN: We have a great team and capital but can't find a good idea

#467

Post by mooreds » Tue, Oct 31, 2017, 9:33 AM UTC

TrickyRick wrote: post #459

babaganoosh89 wrote: post #451

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Usually you want someone who’s also a domain expert and knows the market inside and out. More than just a vision that hasn’t been market tested.

So a domain expert with vision. What would he need this team for apart from maybe their money, which out of the three is probably the easiest to acquire?

A team that can execute is worth something too. The original comment stated (correctly in my opinion) that you want the person with vision to be in charge. But a domain expert with vision may or may not be able to execute against that vision effectively. If they are for real they'll have started, even if it just a manual process or horrible looking MVP. But if this team got together with someone with vision (and were able to check their egos at the door, not a small ask) they could really execute against that vision and bring a great product to market.

Re: Ask HN: We have a great team and capital but can't find a good idea

#468

Post by mooreds » Tue, Oct 31, 2017, 9:34 AM UTC

dandr01d wrote: post #434

fapjacks wrote: post #402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah these are the people I like to talk to. I've built some great apps based on things I've been told by these folks.

Finding these people is a big challenge in itself...

Try the local chamber of commerce or any non technical forum or Facebook group.

Re: Ask HN: We have a great team and capital but can't find a good idea

#469

Post by adityapurwa » Tue, Oct 31, 2017, 9:37 AM UTC

In Indonesia, e-commerce is growing, a lot of people trade items online, the problem with so many e-commerce platform is we have to insert our product to those platform one by one.

I wanted to implement something like Buffer, but for posting product on e-commerce platform. However, not all e-commerce platform in Indonesia provides API for you to do so.

Re: Ask HN: We have a great team and capital but can't find a good idea

#470

Post by georgewsinger » Tue, Oct 31, 2017, 9:55 AM UTC

I'd like to argue something contrarian in this thread: you could be on the right path. Some facts to keep in mind:

- There are on the order of 20,000 new startups each year; most of the other people in this thread are from this pool.

- Only 2-5 of those 20,000 startups will end up mattering (i.e., will reach a high enough valuation/impact on the world to move a needle).

- Of these 2-5 startups that matter per year, almost none of them were pivots (Twitter is LoudCloud are the only examples I can think of).

- The conventional wisdom is to take an incremental idea and run with it; "ideas don't matter and execution is everything"; run sprints and use the Lean Startup methodology to pull the market out of an idea (or pivot), and reach a local maxima.

- This will only get you the result that 20,000 startups a year typically get: incrementalism, small victories, and/or failure.

- There's also lottery ticket mentality to this conventional style of thinking: you're no different than anyone else, so stop ideating and start doing, and maybe you'll get lucky.

If you've been at it for a year and haven't found anything good enough to give your life to, it could mean you are different than the average HNer. It could mean you have a calling to think bigger than most people do.

Here is some material you may be interested in which bolsters this viewpoint:

- Alan Kay's "The Future Doesn't Have to be Incremental": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gTAghAJcO1o&t=1830s

- Peter Thiel's book Zero to One. Among other things, this book discusses the importance of avoiding competition and commoditized markets (unless you have something 10x better; i.e., Google's Page Rank).

- Listen to interviews with Elon Musk, who claims he started by thinking about HUGE problems that humanity faces and worked backwards. Instead of thinking incrementally, Musk thinks extremely large and seems to plan for years in advance: https://www.tesla.com/blog/secret-tesla-motors-master-plan-j...

At some point, of course, you have to interact with reality, and that could involve interacting with negative people on HN (and especially real customers, etc). When Reid Hoffman started LinkedIn, he talked with dozens of people in his network and more than 2/3 said negative things about his idea. It's part of the process of getting calibrated with reality. But this shouldn't be your starting point; it should be what you do after you find something that actually moves you.

Finally, I want to say that me and a friend were in a similar boat to you and your friends several months ago: we had been reading about technologies and problems for months and had rejected incremental ideas that didn't move us. It looked like we had just fucked around for several months and had nothing to show for it.

We ended up working on a experimental VR Window Manager as an attempt to bring Linux to a new computing platform (i.e., VR): https://github.com/SimulaVR/Simula

Here was our rationale for this idea when we started: https://gist.github.com/georgewsinger/46ea8d6b16fb8bf3249358...

It's very much in the spirit of the advice I just gave you. Lord knows we could be wrong, but one problem we don't have is in doubting whether our project could matter if we pulled it off.

Good luck.