Frighteningly Unambitious Startup Ideas • Hacker News Board

Re: Frighteningly Unambitious Startup Ideas

#121

Post by pbreit » Fri, Mar 30, 2012, 5:33 AM UTC

evgen wrote: post #119

pbreit wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1) They are probably going to try and address most or all of your questions. 2) If they are successful in one industry, they might be able to apply the model to many/all industries.

If they are even mildly successful in this one niche they are going to see four me-too startups in three months (one of which will be bought by a national auto parts chain before the year is out) and see the core idea applied to five other niches before they close an A round.

Possibly. But not a given that the copycats will be successful. Can you point to any examples of your thesis?

Re: Frighteningly Unambitious Startup Ideas

#122

Post by Estragon » Fri, Mar 30, 2012, 8:13 AM UTC

dreamdu5t wrote: post #66

Estragon wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is the best-case endgame for dropbox? I like it, but I don't understand why everyone's so excited about its potential.

Why can't the end-game be a profitable backup/storage company? I don't get it.

Fine by me, but I believe people involved with it value it at well over $200 million, which suggests a grander plan.

Re: Frighteningly Unambitious Startup Ideas

#123

Post by hef19898 » Fri, Mar 30, 2012, 9:03 AM UTC

samstave wrote: post #83

tptacek wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being simultaneously unable to walk away from a six-figure salaried income and unable to bootstrap a company probably doesn't correlate well with "likely success as company founder". You'd make a more compelling point if it was "I think the small amount of funding is going to prevent YC from generating ambitious companies because it was easier for me to start $COMPANY_I_CURRENTLY_RUN without YC". But anecdotally, it'…

Either I didnt articulate my point well enough, or you misunderstood it. The idea that YC can fund a web-app, mobile-app or completely web-based feature-as-a-service for 150K is well founded. My point is that within the realm of "ridiculously ambitious ideas" are those that would require a shitload more seed capital to build out. Do you think that SpaceX, which is obviously ridiculously ambitious, was seeded with sim…

If I remeber well the funding principles of YC, if you can call them like that, that's exactly the reason why they don't fund biotech start-ups for example. "Those are still ridicolously exapnsive" I think were the exact words used. The real value I see YC is providing to founders, no matter of the age, is access to a incredible network and contacts, funding that gets you over the three months of the programm plus the 150k $ you get without a lot of trouble. This way they take away a lot of pain in ther initial funding process. Combine with the access to top tier VCs and your money problem should become considerably smaller.

That said, it's true thats it's way easier if you are young with out a family, but still not impossible. The best scenario I could dream of is a year long payed sabatical while you are in YC. If you have an employer who's offering you that...

Re: Frighteningly Unambitious Startup Ideas

#124

Post by mattmanser » Fri, Mar 30, 2012, 9:24 AM UTC

justin wrote: post #113

tlogan wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I will explain what I think from the point of view of an engineer: none of the companies inspired me to apply for a job to work for them. Probably the problem is that I'm not smart enough to see the grand vision: the vision of these companies is just not clear for mortals like me. For example, I was hoping to see something like Word Lens on iPhone: I can see how they can rule the world. That is something frighteningl…

How has Word Lens taken over the world? It is an awesome technology, but there are many awesome technologies, and not many of them become amazing businesses. (However, that said, there are awesome technologies like the Word Lens in this class of YC). When Facebook started off people just said it was MySpace for college students. Those with imagination that joined early now reap the benefits of vision.

Vision? For a third generation social network?

I certainly wouldn't use that word. You wouldn't say a dating site had vision. Facebook falls in that category. Awesome achievement, but no real vision and it's going into no other fields, like google did for example.

Re: Frighteningly Unambitious Startup Ideas

#125

Post by netcan » Fri, Mar 30, 2012, 9:43 AM UTC

daredevildave wrote: post #49

tptacek wrote: post #27

X for Y, where X = "Airbnb" and Y = "Large existing market poorly served by technology", is in fact a good shorthand for "frighteningly ambitious". Literally. Airbnb is a frighteningly ambitious company. It is explosively generating value and we don't know how it's going to play out long term. It could end up with us living in caves with dogs watching out for the Terminators. It is hard for me to take the rest of the…

I'm not sure, maybe you have a different definition of 'frighteningly ambitious' to me. What is the largest possible outcome from making it slightly easier or cheaper to repair your car? It saves a few million Americans a few hundred dollars? My definition would be more like: sending ordinary people into space; making a mass-production electric vehicle; cheap solar power; curing flu/the common cold; inventing a new t…

Impactful changes will often significant because of their nth order, not just their direct effects.

For example, Google Adwords has completely changed how customers are acquired for a lot of industries. This changes how companies are structured, which companies succeed and how they are built. That's a big change.

Lets stretch the mechanic example. If people got better, cheaper, easier mechanics this could make them hold on to cars for longer. This could in turn change the way cars are built and change the structure of this giant industry.

Re: Frighteningly Unambitious Startup Ideas

#126

Post by movingahead » Fri, Mar 30, 2012, 9:44 AM UTC

This is delirious. The OP should have just read pg's essay on how to apply to Y Combinator. He clearly explains there (and here again) why the X for Y representation helps in getting a foothold.

Also, what does OP expect founders to do? Declare their complete vision beforehand to impress the audience. The purpose of a vision is not to get popular with the tech press, but to guide the founders.

Re: Frighteningly Unambitious Startup Ideas

#127

Post by philwelch » Fri, Mar 30, 2012, 10:00 AM UTC

daredevildave wrote: post #49

tptacek wrote: post #27

X for Y, where X = "Airbnb" and Y = "Large existing market poorly served by technology", is in fact a good shorthand for "frighteningly ambitious". Literally. Airbnb is a frighteningly ambitious company. It is explosively generating value and we don't know how it's going to play out long term. It could end up with us living in caves with dogs watching out for the Terminators. It is hard for me to take the rest of the…

I'm not sure, maybe you have a different definition of 'frighteningly ambitious' to me. What is the largest possible outcome from making it slightly easier or cheaper to repair your car? It saves a few million Americans a few hundred dollars? My definition would be more like: sending ordinary people into space; making a mass-production electric vehicle; cheap solar power; curing flu/the common cold; inventing a new t…

No startup could tackle those tasks, not on YC's scale. Any one of those is so capital intensive or research intensive you'd have to either get rich at a boring pay-people-over-the-Internet startup or be a huge corporation with research labs like Bell Labs or Xerox PARC.

A few hundred dollars for a few million Americans is a billion dollars of economic impact per year.

Re: Frighteningly Unambitious Startup Ideas

#128

Post by Schwolop » Fri, Mar 30, 2012, 10:22 AM UTC

tptacek wrote: post #118

Schwolop wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with what you say for later rounds of VC funding (and this is valuable advice for naïve founders!), but I'm talking about YC and other seed rounds/incubators. The idea of this seed stage is to validate the business, getting it to the point where the founders can get more funding from elsewhere. If YC paid much more than $20k then the three months of hacking around might start to look like quite an attractive…

Strong disagree. As evidence for my argument: the extremely short duration of YC sessions, and the fact that so many YC companies immediately proceed to grab follow-on funding and market salaries.

We're miscommunicating, because I don't see how that invalidates what I said.

Roughly speaking, the original guy to whom I replied said "YC doesn't provide enough money, so I can't solve hospital care through them." I suggested that this wasn't the point of YC, that the money was appropriate for three months, and that if the idea was really so good, YC would help him get subsequent funding (with which he could pay himself properly).

Re: Frighteningly Unambitious Startup Ideas

#129

Post by simonw » Fri, Mar 30, 2012, 12:20 PM UTC

evgen wrote: post #119

pbreit wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1) They are probably going to try and address most or all of your questions. 2) If they are successful in one industry, they might be able to apply the model to many/all industries.

If they are even mildly successful in this one niche they are going to see four me-too startups in three months (one of which will be bought by a national auto parts chain before the year is out) and see the core idea applied to five other niches before they close an A round.

Are you saying that they shouldn't bother because if they are succesful someone else might copy them?

Re: Frighteningly Unambitious Startup Ideas

#130

Post by anthonyb » Fri, Mar 30, 2012, 12:20 PM UTC

Detrus wrote: post #8

Paul Graham said don't attack the problem head on. Make a beachhead. Supposedly these seemingly dull ideas are beachheads. That was covered in a previous HN discussion about a similar article questioning YC startup ideas in practice. But something like Dropbox seems to have a hard time scaling out, exploring other ideas, and that's with a founder who wants to build a big company like Apple. Even if you start with a b…

dailyllama, looks like you've been hellbanned. None of your comments are out of order or trolling, so I thought I'd let you know. You might be able to contact someone at ycombinator and get yourself re-instated.

If ever someone wants to know why hellbanning is stupid, you can point them here...