> YC once tried an experiment of funding seemingly good founders with no ideas. I think every company in this no-idea track failed. How many people did they tr

> YC once tried an experiment of funding seemingly good founders with no ideas. I think every company in this no-idea track failed. How many people did they try this with? Most startups fail, so it will be interesting to see whether they funded enough of these. I think there's a rule of thumb about the upper limit on a probability that isn't observed, but I can't remember what it is. As for generating ideas, the founders I've come across have tended to know some industry well enough to understand some of the problems. Often this is very specific industry stuff, including understanding which experts are needed and what customers to focus on. Of course there's plenty of people who have grown up in some industry, but I think the other ingredient you need is enough general knowledge about business to be able to put some pieces together: how to get funding, what a corporate structure is, how to do certain mundane things like pay taxes. The intersection can be smaller than you think, because a lot of corporate types are comfortable where they are, plus they feel (rightly or not) that the job is providing a fair bit of the business infrastructure they need to use their expertise.