121–130 of 146 posts
- And have that murine sense of when to leave the sinking ship when this disregard backfires.
> (By the way, it’s useful to get good at differentiating between real trends and fake trends. A key differentiator is if the new platform is used a lot by a small number of people, or used a little by a lot of people.) As a one-time founder, I feel embarrassed to have to ask this; but in the spirit of no-stupid-question and also that there's gotta be someone else wondering the same -- which one is the real trend and…
But our same day-dream happy brains are absolutely terrible at helping us execute on those ideas. Finding the most effective and efficient ways at making ideas come to fruition. And the millions of ways that an idea, no matter how great it may sound, may never come to pass.
This is a "how to day dream better" post. Which maybe some people need I suppose.
But I'd rather see a "how to make your dreams a reality" post.
Legit surprised Sam didn't recommend using an AI to generate ideas. :P
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you have any killer examples that aren’t, um, totally illegal?
Having reliable, auditable, public protocols which can operate without the blessing of the world’s existing governments is precisely the point. Killer examples include any products or services which would provide a net positive value to society but are currently outlawed within various geographic territories for superstitious reasons and/or to protect existing industries from competition. Prediction markets are an ex…
Source(s) for this?
I know prediction markets will have far-reaching consequences when they aren’t or can’t be constrained anymore.
The mere presence of a payout for low-probability is a broad change. Maybe I’m not being paid to kill someone via the market directly, but I am naturally incentivized to collect information about the world, gain power, and then use my power to bet on and make low-probability events happen.
Another question - How do we solve the decentralized oracle problem without relying on decentralized votes that could be biased due to past voting behavior or their vested interest in the outcome of a truth vote?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>grocery delivery I think the USA implementation is poor not the idea is bad. Here Finland K-ryhmä[1] did really nailed implementation and it is like 10x better than going to the supermarket. My mom and aunt both in their 70 started using this separately and both are saying they are not going to back in supermarkets after covid19. [1] https://www.k-ruoka.fi/kauppa
That's interesting - I live right next to a K-Market and I'm not in a risk demographic so not had the need, but when I moved from the UK to Finland some 10 years ago one thing I missed was that the UK supermarkets at the time had excellent online delivery systems (they're buckling under the strain of the current crisis due to surge in demand, but back then they worked well enough). Finland didn't seem to have anythin…
> (By the way, it’s useful to get good at differentiating between real trends and fake trends. A key differentiator is if the new platform is used a lot by a small number of people, or used a little by a lot of people.) As a one-time founder, I feel embarrassed to have to ask this; but in the spirit of no-stupid-question and also that there's gotta be someone else wondering the same -- which one is the real trend and…
There's two competing lenses of thought that bookend your struggle: On one hand, Sam's point is basically described by Paul Graham's essay on "Narrow and Deep" ideas [1]. You want an idea to have a few passionate users rather than lots of lukewarm users, because there's an activation energy to building a habit and if you're only lukewarm you're not going to get over it. As PG put it, "Sum that reaction over a whole p…
Interesting way to judge those who don't hop on every new fad. Maybe they have a longer attention span and are filtering out the noise. They don't get caught in new gadgets and apps because they may be pursuing something larger scale in their life, like building stability for their family or studying deep for college or helping out the local community or training for athletic performance or whatever.
Its only in the start-up bubble that someone who is not an early adopter of Uber or Airbnb or Dropbox or whatever "huge" thing is seen as just selfish and ignorant.
Seen from a wider perspective, yeah these apps have significance but not that much in the daily lives of people. Yeah now I sometimes book my vacation through the airbnb app, instead of booking a hostel or hotel, but it doesn't radically change my vacationing habits. Sometimes I call an Uber instead of a taxi. Has upsides and downsides but it's not some new age of mankind.
Perspective, people.
Am I the only one with a list of over 1000 ideas that would all become billion dollar companies if I just had the time to do them all?
The retrospective view is somewhat illusionary. It's hard to capture what really happened att. I think a lot of the insight is in the first few paragraphs. Ideas in the "startup idea" sense, aren't one idea. They're a lot of ideas had over time. AirBnB couldn't have given their idea, like Tolkien couldn't have given middle earth to another writer.
Spotting trends is similarly hard, and similarly treacherous. Retrospective examples (eg mobile phones) seem way easier than they are.
One major pitfall for spotting trends is timelines. The whole 90s dotcom bubble, in hindsight, was mostly wrong about timelines. Browsers are important platforms, and controlling one does kind of make you "a microsoft." Moving early and grabbing market share is very important. Online markets do tend to be winner-take-all. They were just 10 years early.