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Frighteningly Unambitious Startup Ideas

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Re: Frighteningly Unambitious Startup Ideas

#51

Post by tptacek »

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…

If reconfiguring a huge chunk of the automotive industry seems unambitious to you, and the only thing that will truly impress you is orbital death rays and zero point energy, there's not a whole lot for us to discuss.

This is a silly argument. It will always be possible to name something more ambitious for a startup to do. What, you're only taking tourists into suborbital space? A truly ambitious startup would build MOON BASES.

Re: Frighteningly Unambitious Startup Ideas

#52

Post by Detrus »

mikk0j wrote: post #34
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…

This beachhead thinking is key. The trouble is that it is harder to represent in the “we’re X for Y” way, which is usually the thing that sticks with the audience (which is also the reason why it works so well).

But an X for Y beachhead doesn't make the current idea scalable. Perhaps it's a beachhead for the founder to get a reputation so maybe one day he can try a scalable idea, either in the current company or some future one. But it doesn't mean the pivot will be related to the current X for Y.

It worked out for Microsoft. But somewhat contradictory to this scenario Paul Graham also said to start chipping at the ambitious idea because starting companies is hard anyway.

So looking at seemingly dull ideas of YC, is there some way for them to scale without pivoting as far as Microsoft did?

Re: Frighteningly Unambitious Startup Ideas

#53

Post by cpt1138 »

We've been told countless times that the only thing VC's will fund is ideas that are already being done. The reason's given are so when the entire niche fails they can point and say "see, everyone else failed, its not our fault." The reason nothing innovative is ever done is because no one is willing to take the risks.

Re: Frighteningly Unambitious Startup Ideas

#54

Post by jamroom »

samstave wrote: post #33

The reason why I think that it is difficult to say a frighteningly ambitious startup idea is actually something that is expected to come through YC, is that the funding that YC provides is miniscule, and will cover hardly an annual salary for a single, accomplished person who has a lot of domain knowledge in a field they may want to disrupt. As someone in the medical space who is 37, married with 2 kids - My salary i…

I'm 41, married, and have 3 kids - my "cofounder" and I have just applied to YC for Summer 2012. I've been running in "start up" mode since around 2000, so my lifestyle has adjusted to a much lower level of pay than I would expect had I continued working in the fortune 500 as a developer, but I don't regret a single moment of it.

Even though your idea is ambitious, you might consider nights/weekends to work on it - you know the whole "a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step" - get something together and see if you can raise some funding - you never know. There's a lot of money being throw around right now.

I think YC is setup so it attracts those who are willing to go out on a limb for an idea, since (and this is a guess) they might be the most likely to persevere through the rough patches and stick with their idea until it succeeds.

Re: Frighteningly Unambitious Startup Ideas

#55

Post by Philadelphia »

edawerd wrote: post #29

Don't forget that Airbnb once pitched themselves as "EBay for space", just as Your Mechanic now dub themselves the "Airbnb for car repair" What once seemed like a niche, unambitious company now is frighteningly ambitious.

As an ordinary person outside of the VC world, I literally have no idea what Airbnb is. Never heard of them once. Ever. I think there may be a mismatch between what people who read Techcrunch consider exciting and what actually has traction with the public at large.

Re: Frighteningly Unambitious Startup Ideas

#56

Post by vecter »

Estragon wrote: post #35
alain94040 wrote: post #28

Even Twitter wouldn't sound ambitious if you say "we are group SMS for the world". To better understand how ambitious a startup is, assume that its adoption is 100%. If everyone is using it, does it change lives? If everyone chats on Twitter, does it impact politics? If everyone is on Facebook, do you reconnect with old friends? Etc. Dropbox is in that category too. With used cars purchases, I can see how everyone wo…

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

They can become the file system for the internet. If they're successful, many futures apps (mobile or desktop) will sit on top of Dropbox software to sync files and app state for their users. That is an incredibly powerful vision.

Re: Frighteningly Unambitious Startup Ideas

#57

Post by fleitz »

ericabiz wrote: post #47
fleitz wrote: post #25

I fail to see why companies that make money would fail to satisfy an investor? Is there something about the YC model that makes companies that go on to turn modest profits not generate returns for the investor? A business like Wal-Mart wouldn't satisfy you as an investor? I wouldn't have any problems taking 8% of Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart didn't invent anything new, they just did it a little bit better than their competitor…

"Wal-Mart didn't invent anything new..." Whoa! Wal-Mart revolutionized the supply chain. And Wal-Mart also started with a revolutionary idea: We can make stores in rural areas so people don't have to drive to the big city to shop. Every other chain considered those same rural areas unprofitable. It turned out to be a gold mine. There are several books out there about how revolutionary Wal-Mart has been. I suggest you…

I don't disagree that wal mart is an innovator and that their innovations allowed them to crush their competitors, but from the perspective of Wal-Mart in 1969 they aren't doing anything new. At that point they're "Sears for people who want to pay less" which illustrates the silliness of OPs POV.

Fundamentally though Wal-Mart's business model is "big truck - small truck" it's just a specialization of Sears business model, similar to how all the businesses on TC are X for Y.

Re: Frighteningly Unambitious Startup Ideas

#58

Post by Elepsis »

I think this is another in a long series of articles that mistakes the press coverage for the vision. When journalists say "we're x for y" that's their way of conveying the information in a way that makes sense to us, by relating it to something we already understand (at least usually: I've seen TechCrunch use increasingly esoteric examples for "x" of late).

In some cases the companies themselves use that line in their pitch. This isn't surprising, given that it's such a fast and powerful way to give people a rough idea of what you're doing and how short each presentation at YC demo day is.

But that doesn't change the fact that in either case, this is just shorthand and isn't reflective of the grand vision of any of these companies.

Re: Frighteningly Unambitious Startup Ideas

#59

Post by darklajid »

jamroom wrote: post #54
samstave wrote: post #33

The reason why I think that it is difficult to say a frighteningly ambitious startup idea is actually something that is expected to come through YC, is that the funding that YC provides is miniscule, and will cover hardly an annual salary for a single, accomplished person who has a lot of domain knowledge in a field they may want to disrupt. As someone in the medical space who is 37, married with 2 kids - My salary i…

I'm 41, married, and have 3 kids - my "cofounder" and I have just applied to YC for Summer 2012. I've been running in "start up" mode since around 2000, so my lifestyle has adjusted to a much lower level of pay than I would expect had I continued working in the fortune 500 as a developer, but I don't regret a single moment of it. Even though your idea is ambitious, you might consider nights/weekends to work on it - y…

Thank you. Your voice was missing here for a while.

32, married. As of yet I have no offspring, but that's going to be corrected. Still, I lurked and commented here, always with the 'Ahhh.. If I'd be without ties and responsibilities once more' thought.

I cannot tell you how glad I am to read that someone with arguably more responsibilities in life and a bit older than me (another point that is rarely coming up here) gives a damn about conventions and prejudices and just joins the otherwise ramen-eating, single, < 27 crowd.

Re: Frighteningly Unambitious Startup Ideas

#60

Post by tesseractive »

Detrus wrote: post #43
azylman wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is the best illustration I've seen of what makes Dropbox so great: http://xkcd.com/949/

If you miss you just need to make an account and install the.. Dropbox should be a feature of the OS. Otherwise it can only get one part of the UX right, drag and drop.

That's fine when everyone everywhere uses the same OS or all OSs automatically connect to the same back end. But if I want to share files between a Windows box, an iPad, and an Android phone, it's unlikely that anything useful for my purposes will be built into the OS anytime soon.

And even if I insist on buying nothing but Apple (or whatever) products, if I want to share files with my dad or my next door neighbor, now I have to worry about what OS they're running too.

You install Dropbox once per device. After that, it's trivially easy.

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