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Crazy New Ideas

paulgraham.com

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Re: Crazy New Ideas

#501

Post by ahstilde »

graycat wrote: post #210
gustavo-fring wrote: post #39

Graham's obviously inspired by some Kuhnian paradigms here, but in Grahamiam fashion, he doesn't cite anything to back it up. What I find interesting where he calls most people conservative is how when I'm discussing VCs, YC, etc with non SV people is we talk about how conservative they are. YC's business model for years was predicated on finding talent (kids) that was undervalued, underpaying them (10k was the initi…

"Crazy new ideas"? A VC, Graham, is praising crazy new ideas? After I sent some hundreds of emails to Silicon Valley, NY, and Boston venture capital firms with nearly no positive feedback and nearly no feedback at all, I concluded several points: (1) VCs won't invest in, consider, look at, or pay attention to crazy new ideas. Might guess that one reason can be that when the ideas are deep technically the VCs don't ha…

> I can believe: The $500 million is too small for VCs to care, and the 200 times $10 billion is too big for them to believe.

This is actually true. The model of VCs requires that they take extremely high risk with extremely high upside. But their job is to derisk as much as possible. They derisk market risk, technical risk, and operational risk.

Get the traction, and the money will follow.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#502

Post by bilater »

Great article. What most people are not taking into account with Mighty is that new ideas like this rarely stay the same...who knows what product/use case it morphs into? Maybe the browser implementation takes off, maybe it pivots to an OS rather than just Chrome...maybe becomes a backup / cross device solution. Maybe something that we haven't even thought of yet becomes possible with new technologies like 5G coming on board. We don't know.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#503

Post by easton »

bmmayer1 wrote: post #493
dvt wrote: post #440

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's when technical people look at what seems like a groundbreaking idea, seem unimpressed, and say "couldn't you just _____", were the blank is filled with something a nontechnical person doesn't understand or considers very cumbersome. This is basically putting the cart before the horse and pretty much the definition of hindsight bias. We all know the BrandonM/Dropbox quip, but that's just a fun anecdote, not som…

What is the BrandonM/Dropbox quip?

This one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#504

Post by emrah »

geebee wrote: post #388

Lots of comments already, but I'll chime on in. I realized this very late in life, but I have a test for when it's time to pay attention to a new technology. It's when technical people look at what seems like a groundbreaking idea, seem unimpressed, and say "couldn't you just _____", were the blank is filled with something a nontechnical person doesn't understand or considers very cumbersome. The web: couldn't you ju…

Yes exactly. Technical people suffer from curse of knowledge and miss great opportunities. Or the idea has to boil the ocean or it's a bust.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#505

Post by KineticLensman »

bmmayer1 wrote: post #493
dvt wrote: post #440

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's when technical people look at what seems like a groundbreaking idea, seem unimpressed, and say "couldn't you just _____", were the blank is filled with something a nontechnical person doesn't understand or considers very cumbersome. This is basically putting the cart before the horse and pretty much the definition of hindsight bias. We all know the BrandonM/Dropbox quip, but that's just a fun anecdote, not som…

What is the BrandonM/Dropbox quip?

"For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software."

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#506

Post by franga2000 »

Sanzig wrote: post #356
_ot4t wrote: post #222

This post seems to be in response to the recent Mighty app. To me, the main problem lies in what VCs think pass as 'tech'. The mighty app website made it sound it like it was some novel revolutionary app. I was hoping it was really something clever like what the Cloudflare people or even game streaming companies do. But nope. It's significantly worse: it's literally slapping together existing tech and calling it nove…

Unpopular opinion: the use of "tech" or "high tech" to describe many of today's tech companies is a misnomer. For me, a tech company is a company that leverages advances in applied sciences and mathematics (computer science included) to create new, innovative solutions. While there are certainly companies that are innovating in fundamental technologies and making that a cornerstone of their businesses, the vast major…

I definitely agree, but with one exception: a fair amount of these companies have reached such a scale that they actually have to invent or at least develop new tech in order to run their business. Facebook and Twitter, for example, aren't primarily "tech" companies, but because they operate at such an insane scale, they regularly develop new tech that allows them to continue and grow. So the tech part is more or less vertical integration - not their primary business, but also definitely not negligible in terms of innovation.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#507

Post by fillskills »

bilater wrote: post #502

Great article. What most people are not taking into account with Mighty is that new ideas like this rarely stay the same...who knows what product/use case it morphs into? Maybe the browser implementation takes off, maybe it pivots to an OS rather than just Chrome...maybe becomes a backup / cross device solution. Maybe something that we haven't even thought of yet becomes possible with new technologies like 5G coming…

Let my people try - humbly, a startup founder

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#508

Post by justicezyx »

merwanedr wrote: post #225

HN comment section pessimism is a new metric for evaluating your odds of success. "It's too expensive" or "Nobody needs it because we have X" on a project lead by a domain expert is not constructive criticism or conservatism, it's pure envy. PG isn't defending Mighty, Dropbox or Coinbase because he has skin in the game, but because he knows what the teams have achieved and what they could potentially achieve. I don't…

> PG isn't defending Mighty, Dropbox or Coinbase

Those are not needing defense. Those are quite mundane business.

Dropbox for one, everyone thinks it's useful. The controversial part is whether or not it's a good business. Turns out Dropbox is not so great a business. I mean, if Dropbox is in China, it will be crushed by copycats and die very quickly.

Similarly for coinbase. It's useful. The question was whether or not btc and crypto currency will be big enough for coinbase to be a great business. Of course, given the success in crypto currency, coinbase is a great business.

But neither of these are “crazy new ideas”. They are not even new ideas...

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#509

Post by splithalf »

geebee wrote: post #388

Lots of comments already, but I'll chime on in. I realized this very late in life, but I have a test for when it's time to pay attention to a new technology. It's when technical people look at what seems like a groundbreaking idea, seem unimpressed, and say "couldn't you just _____", were the blank is filled with something a nontechnical person doesn't understand or considers very cumbersome. The web: couldn't you ju…

In other words, “we were promised flying cars but ...” You might as well celebrate stock buybacks.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#510

Post by dd36 »

geebee wrote: post #388

Lots of comments already, but I'll chime on in. I realized this very late in life, but I have a test for when it's time to pay attention to a new technology. It's when technical people look at what seems like a groundbreaking idea, seem unimpressed, and say "couldn't you just _____", were the blank is filled with something a nontechnical person doesn't understand or considers very cumbersome. The web: couldn't you ju…

Pretty much everything you listed is a free consumer product.
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