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Frighteningly Unambitious Startup Ideas

179 points by HelgeSeetzen 15y ago

woohoo 15y ago
I think the idea of describing a startup as "like X for Y" is OK for some but in general I agree that it comes across as not being particularly innovative. I think it makes sense to give prospects a frame of reference for an offering but there are other ways of doing it aside from defining your entire company in comparison to another one.
- ndcrandall 15y ago
  I agree. People want to know very quickly what the idea is and what it's comparable to. I believe that it gets the audience more engaged in the fact they don't need to make the connection while learning about the product throughout the presentation.
alasano 15y ago
There was a TC post encouraging startups to pitch their slogan in a concise format which did not follow the x for y pattern. In a few more words they mostly avoided the problem you are presenting here. http://techcrunch.com/2011/12/30/startups-give-us-your-best-one-sentence-pitch/ http://techcrunch.com/2011/12/30/startups-give-us-your-best-... I thought that most of them did quite well even if some ideas were unambitious even when presented in this manner.
eurleif 15y ago
> I feel confident in assuming Steve Jobs didn’t pitch OS X by saying “It’s like Windows for Apple Computers.” Um, maybe not, but Bill Gates definitely pitched Windows as like a Mac, but for IBM compatible PCs. Seems like a bad example.
the_bear 15y ago
I had the exact same reaction when reading coverage of the demo day. Hopefully the ideas seem underwhelming because of the last part of Paul Graham's essay. In the "tactics" section he says, "If you want to take on a problem as big as the ones I've discussed, don't make a direct frontal attack on it." Maybe these YCombinator startups actually do have ambitious ideas, but they're starting out with something small and seemingly unimportant. Maybe in five years some of these companies will be reinventing education and communication.
marcusf 15y ago
I'm not sure what the value of this post is? Would you honestly expect every company or even every demo day to contain a frighteningly ambitious idea? And if they were frighteningly, scarily ambitious, would TC really hype them? The sane response seems to be to write them off instead as far too ambitious. I guess I just don't get what the skepticism here brings to the table? I'm open to input about that.
- the_bear 15y ago
  I would imagine that the point is to encourage future entrepreneurs to avoid the two trends pointed out in the post. YCombinator and TechCrunch are both trendsetters, so it makes sense to express skepticism if you have a problem with the types of ideas TechCrunch is covering from demo day.
- sbt 15y ago
  I don't expect the batch to contain all frighteningly ambitious ideas, but it would be fun if at least one was. I'm sure YC would be receptive to such a plan if the founders were smart.
- 27182818284 15y ago
  I've sent the list of companies from the latest batch to several non-tech friends and not a single person has been impressed with anything on the list. That's not a good sign. With things like Dropbox and Reddit not only did my eyes light up, but the eyes of non-tech friends lit up. Same with Hipmunk. Hipmunk I didn't even have to show someone, I could just say "not shitty airline search" and they were intrigued. I think the point to this submission and others like it are that a lot of people are scratching their heads over this current batch. Nobody expects every company to be "Wow!" but generally there are a few.
Detrus 15y ago
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 beachhead, it should be one that can grow. Apple started with a PC, to grow they made more and better PCs. Microsoft/Gates started with BASIC then pivoted drastically to an idea that could grow, an OS for PCs. What will Dropbox grow or pivot to in order to be an Apple size company? Hard to imagine backups for teams or iCloud but OS independent will be the ticket.
- dailyllama 15y ago
  Something I've seen clearly is that if you haven't talked quietly with the founders of a startup, you might not know what they're doing. I'm building a company right now that intends to have three major Acts in it's lifetime, the first of which is unimpressive but designed to get us customers and base knowledge for use while executing Act II, which we then intend to apply to additional verticals as part of Act III. But Act I will likely look like something that two guys could put together in their garage in a year. And that's exactly what it is.
- mikk0j 15y ago
  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).
  - Detrus 15y ago
    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?
jrkelly 15y ago
This was exactly my thoughts when reading the demo-day list. I wonder how pg reconciles this? Seems like an emerging strategic weakness for YC.
kenkam 15y ago
"If I were Paul Graham, these types of companies simply would not satisfy me (despite what look to be very lucrative payoffs)" There's a difference in investing in companies expecting some kind of a return and throwing money at really ambitious ideas in the hope that one of those gets really successful. I cannot see how investing carefully and getting returns (ie. making money) is not satisfying.
3pt14159 15y ago
The hard ones don't get press for years. Look at upvertr, sure it could be described as git + electronic software + parts sourcing, but it will take them a while to build this to the point where everyone will see how amazing and useful it is.
pwf 15y ago
Be aware, you've linked directly to the home page of your tumblr instead of linking to the post itself. Your HN submission will become very confusing after you make another tumblr post.
mhartl 15y ago
Those who disparage "X for Y" descriptions misunderstand their use. When you have only a few minutes (or seconds) to pitch your idea, being X for Y or the X of Y is an effective way to give people the gist and pique their interest. Only then does it make sense to go into more detail and explain the full scope of your ambitions.
- anateus 15y ago
  Exactly. Only a minority of companies that use those pitches used the same phrasing in their initial creation process. The goal is to solve a problem someone has, the "X for Y" is a shorthand for "don't take my word for it that people have this kind of problem, look at this very similar situation".
uberPhil 15y ago
A wise man once said "Nothing is original. There is nothing new under the Sun. It's never what you do but how it's done". While I agree that saying "My Product X is like Y on steroids" is somewhat unoriginal and maybe even uninspiring, the simple fact is that every idea is pretty much an evolution of a previous idea. That being said, I'm not to sure what the point of the article was :)
debacle 15y ago
A problem I see with many of these ideas is what I would call the profitability mirage. The general belief is that the flow is: $founder->getStartup()->iterate()->getUsers()->monetize(), with a AcquiredException thrown somewhere in one of those method calls. The problem is that so many of these startup ideas (that don't happily see an AcquiredException before monetize() is called) will fail at the monetize step because there is steep competition in many of these markets right now, and the burgeoning startup mentality means that someone else is probably doing exactly what you do, slightly better or worse, but they're at a point in their business cycle that they don't need to call monetize() just yet. Thus, you may have a mass exodus of users at precisely the point where you try and bring your ARPU above zero.
- dxbydt 15y ago
  If the default behavior of a program is to throw an AcquiredException after a few iterations, I wouldn't call it an Exception in the first place. imho, the real exception here is the monetizeException.
wtvanhest 15y ago
If you can't pitch your business as x for y you haven't boiled down your idea enough yet.
ChuckMcM 15y ago
"With the press these companies are getting, I expect they will make investors and founding teams a hefty profit, but they certainly do not speak to me as signs of brilliant, innovative thinking." This is something I've seen several times, I don't believe anyone has shown that 'press coverage' was a causative agent in a successful exit. I believe 'delivering a useful product' (which happens to generate press coverage as a side effect) is the missing piece here. You want a brain dead stupid IOs App I would buy that is derivative? Instapaper for Printers. Which is to say I would love an App where I could launch it on my iPad and then 'print' to it across the network from my Mac or Windows machine. I don't care if it dropped the printout into iBooks or created its own 'space' (I could imagine a designer would have fun with the old 20th century printout distribution bins). But basically there are times when I wish I could print something out and then read it on the road later. It was a capability discussed for the old Plastic Logic Reader that never saw the light of day. And yes, I still do 'listings' when I'm studying old code or dumping a bunch of numbers and charts.
notatoad 15y ago
it's be good if somebody with powers could change the link to the permalink instead of the base blog url: http://ardenthoughts.tumblr.com/post/20053064127/frighteningly-un-ambitious-startup-ideas http://ardenthoughts.tumblr.com/post/20053064127/frightening...
outside1234 15y ago
the only problem with this post is that Google was like Yahoo but that search actually worked, Microsoft was like IBM (the software bits) but software for the masses. There are a lot of counterexamples where starting with something existing provides a beachhead for the ambitious.
caublestone 15y ago
The problem is press coverage. The press needs to be able to write a story. In order to write that story, they have to understand (quickly) what they are writing about and deliver it to readers in a way they can understand (quickly). So if someone demo's a way for doctors to track medical records and an algorithm that uses all of this data to improve point of care diagnostics, what do you call that in a headline? Google for Doctors? The reason why I bring the medical example up is because there is a team here that has a frighteningly ambitious start up (not idea yet). Medigram is a stacked team that is going after the medical industry in a way that no one else wants to. Starting with a messaging app that complies with regulators, they are planting the seed of trust with the medical industry. When they move up to records, they get data. When they get data, they use that math heavy team to solve the ambitious idea of making diagnosis more accurate. Then who knows? A tiny pill that you can swallow that transmits blood test data back to a central server and diagnose your issues instantly? I don't know, but they had to start somewhere.
NDizzle 15y ago
Unambitious startup ideas can be conjured up by a small team and sold to a big company later with hardly any up front dollars. If you want ambitious you should look outside the realm of 100% tech startups. Specifically, you should look in the food/tech realm - but don't look at the worthless calorie counters. Disclaimer: I work for a struggling startup in the food/tech realm.
fleitz 15y ago
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 competitors. Techcrunch 1969: "Wal-Mart: Sears for people who like to pay less" Impressive algorithms don't make money, businesses that satisfy customers do. You're not going to 'change the world' unless your customers are happy.
- tptacek 15y ago
  Walmart is a world-class innovator in supply chain management, retail engineering, shipping logistics, inventory tracking... the list just goes on and on. Walmart is one of those things that is just so effective and so pervasive that we forget how important its original ideas are. It's like learning to like music in 2003 and hearing the Pixies for the first time and not getting it; you don't realize that virtually all of pop/rock music for the last 20 years is built on stuff they popularized. But unlike the Pixies, Walmart has ruthlessly refined and improved their systems instead of breaking up the band with a faxed message from Black Francis. Point being: innovation isn't always easy to spot in a simple paragraph on a message board.
- ericabiz 15y ago
  "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 read one before assuming that Wal-Mart "didn't invent anything new"!
  - fleitz 15y ago
    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.
tptacek 15y ago
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 article seriously after it suggests that "Airbnbing" auto mechanics is unambitious. It's possible that most Americans have routine car service done at dealerships where they're being routinely fleeced, and that the current crappy system of servicing vehicles is driving talent either out of the businesses or to those giant dealership shops. Have you ever tried to find a reliable mechanic? I drive an old Audi. It's painful.
- daredevildave 15y ago
  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 type of computing device; replacing huge incumbent companies (telcos, oil); reducing home electricity usage by >50%; inventing a new human-computer interface. Etc.
  - tptacek 15y ago
    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.
  - tesseractive 15y ago
    Let's say I wanted to solve a really big problem. Not something comparatively simple like "new kind of computing device", but really big. Global. Like the fact that we tear through so many natural resources because people go out and buy new equipment so often instead of getting old equipment repaired. That is a major ecological problem of the 21st Century right? So I look into it and I discover that one of the main reasons that people replace a broken device is because it's really easy to go buy a new piece of gear (everyone wants to sell you one!), and much more trouble to track down someone who will repair an old one (properly!) and go deal with whatever's involved in getting it done. OK, that's an interesting problem to solve, right? But if people are throwing away devices, how do you get everyone to change their behavior? That's really hard, especially for a startup with limited resources. So what's a minimum viable product to get started with? Well, what if you started with a way to let people get their cars repaired more easily? People already get their cars repaired, and the user experience is terrible. Solve the part of the problem that people know they need solved first (car repair), then move on to convincing them they want other things repaired too. That they don't need a new gadget every two years, they just need an easy way for someone to help them keep their old one in good repair. And if it works, that's tons (as a measurement of weight) of working devices that don't go into landfills, and tons of natural resources that aren't used up making devices to replace them. Is that ambitious enough for you? (Note: I have no idea if this is what the founders are actually thinking or not. I just know that you can't judge the ambition of a startup from their first product.)
alain94040 15y ago
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 would use the site, and still not have any meaningful impact. Cheaper cars. More efficient market. But still, in the end, cheaper cars. Am I missing something?
- Estragon 15y ago
  What is the best-case endgame for dropbox? I like it, but I don't understand why everyone's so excited about its potential.
  - azylman 15y ago
    I think this is the best illustration I've seen of what makes Dropbox so great: http://xkcd.com/949/ http://xkcd.com/949/
    - Detrus 15y ago
      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.
      - tesseractive 15y ago
        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.
edawerd 15y ago
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.
- Philadelphia 15y ago
  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.
bryanh 15y ago
Myspace for Harvard students.
monsterix 15y ago
Well everybody has an opinion, and a choice to tread on a path that feels "right". For a moment you might think these ideas are unambitious, but when you dig-deep you'll discover a lot of gems underneath. One wouldn't expect a frightening execution, speak or quality within six months of a startup. That's probably a picture only big daddies like Apple can show to the world. For example on another thread you can already see DuckDuckGo revealing their ambitious face after a perceivable unambitious journey of two years! Also another thing that probably we all miss is that the next big thing might not necessarily be anything from the ones ever listed - ambitious or unambitious. None of the big names like Facebook or Google or Apple were frighteningly ambitious ideas to the world until they kicked butts of everyone. On second part: Suggestions on choosing a worthwhile domain name is really nice, but looking at how much has been squatted out there, there doesn't seem much of a choice or harm with the current trend of choosing twin word names. There are fewer cheap options at disposal of entrepreneurs and so it is for the rest of the world.
samstave 15y ago
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 is more than the funding of YC - and I would not be able to take ~150K and divide it among multiple founders -- let alone have that funding cover, you know, actual startup expenses. I feel I am in this catch-22 limbo area -- too old and too ambitious of an idea to fit the YC mold. Personally, I see YC as being fairly myopic in the type of people they fund, and it is frustrating because I think YC is incredible! Sure, there are tons of opportunities for nifty apps that serve a silo of a need (even if that silo is infinitely deep) -- but the idea I have to revolutionize the hospital space can't feasibly be built on 150K - unless I take that funding whilst retaining my full time job to pay for me and have that 150K go directly to the product.
- pyoung 15y ago
  From what I recall, only one founder is required to attend YC. So you could theoretically find a younger founder who could attend, while you kept at your full-time job.
- mhartl 15y ago
  Many entrepreneurs dip into personal savings in the initial startup phase. This can be stressful, which is one reason I focused on creating a passive income stream after my own YC startup shut down. So, I'd recommend either accumulating a nest egg or creating a passive income stream (or both) before rolling the dice on a startup.
- damoncali 15y ago
  What makes you think there is a connection between your old salary and what you can make as the founder of a new company? That's not how it works.
  - ohashi 15y ago
    He has a family to provide for which does need to eat and their well being probably plays a huge role in his decision making. Giving up a comfortable salary to pursue something ambitious may be an easy decision on a personal level, but it may be very difficult on the rest of the family. The connection to old salary is simply family expectations/lifestyle. That's a real decision and I can imagine dissuades a lot of people. I would be more risk averse if my outcome affected other people I cared about.
iamwil 15y ago
Ideas change. Apple didn't start with iPhone or iPad. They started with the Apple I, which was just a circuit board. Microsoft didn't start with Windows 7. They started with BASIC for the Altair. Paypal didn't start with online payments. They started as money transfer between PDAs. As for the criticism about "X for Y", the problem is not with them, but with the rest of us. Most people (smart or not) have a hard time grasping completely original ideas, and they don't have the time to dive deep into it. "X for Y" is simply a low bandwidth way of transferring a core idea. It's the MVP of communicating your vision. If you have to take more than a sentence to convey your idea/startup, you're going to have a hard hard uphill battle. But chances are, you don't have a clear understanding of what problem you're solving.
mikk0j 15y ago
The “we’re X for Y” is awesome because it is a simple, powerful positioning. That's also why it can be misunderstood so easily. The same model is used in pitching screenplays and movies. Alien, famously, was pitched as "Jaws in space". It works because it sticks, but doesn't define the field (the plot etc) too much. Similarly, startups using the “we’re X for Y” are giving themselves a quick mental positioning in the mind of the listener, but without carving an exact niche. It is easier to work up or broaden from defining the idea ('the beachhead') that way. The way to misunderstand it is think that they mean to do exactly that. "What, they're taking a giant shark onto a spaceship?"
keeptrying 15y ago
I dont think PG's essay had anything to do with his investment thesis or rather its the not the most important thing he looks for. The ideas he backs are basically about the team.
cpt1138 15y ago
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.
Elepsis 15y ago
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.
pg 15y ago
"If I were Paul Graham, these types of companies simply would not satisfy me (despite what look to be very lucrative payoffs)." That's hilarious, because I'm the one who wrote all the summaries of the startups that she's judging them by. I deliberately express startup ideas as x for y whenever possible because that's the most efficient way to describe a startup in a few words. Airbnb, for example, was in its day "eBay for space." On Demo Day we accompany each startup's name with a brief summary of what they're doing. The goal of these summaries is not to convey the full breadth of a startup's eventual ambitions, or even what they're currently doing, but just to help investors watching 65 presentations remember which company is doing what. TechCrunch reused these descriptions, as reporters often do. And now this woman has read the summaries printed in TechCrunch and is treating them as if that were all there was to know about the startup. It's like a game of Telephone (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_whispers http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_whispers). My standard advice to startups presenting to investors is that it's better to start with an overly narrow description of what you do, so that investors at least know what you're talking about, and then expand from there. See http://paulgraham.com/investors.html http://paulgraham.com/investors.html, particularly items 1 and 14. It's surprising to me that someone who wasn't even at Demo Day would feel confident enough to judge the startups' originality based on the 3-5 word summaries we use on the schedule to help investors keep them straight in their heads. I was about to say that it's also surprising that people would upvote such a post. But on reflection it's not that surprising.
- jrkelly 15y ago
  I wasn't at the Demo Day, but it's hard to consider making car repair more efficient to be a problem that really matters. Not saying it can't be a decent business, but your essay about ambitious ideas was pushing people to do better.
  - ajju 15y ago
    Every car owner wastes time and money at repair shops that tend to be so opaque and corrupt that there are sitcoms about it. Most mechanics employed by these shops get paid much lower than they can charge as an independent mechanic. Yet, the middlemen who run the shops make many times more than the sum of the cost of labor and parts. Are you saying that trying to fix this for the 250M+ car owners in America is a problem that doesn't really matter?
yelongren 15y ago
I don't think anyone can realistically expect to find a google-scale diamond in the rough at every single YC batch. "Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas" I suppose is about a process of collective unconscious iteration that would yield such a diamond every 5 or 10 years.
ajratner 15y ago
Cool article! I think a broader question raised is one I have thought about a lot: what is the optimum trade-off between narrow clarity of function/purpose and broad ambition/expansiveness/spread of features? On the one hand: we obviously admire and use things that are ambitious and full-featured (google, facebook, etc. etc. etc.) On the other hand though: HS points out that the narrowed "X for Y" model makes a better YC pitch... but more importantly, it might make a better consumer pitch. E.g. sometimes I wonder why I don't use wolfram alpha more often... and I think one of the answers is that I don't quite know what it does. It possibly covers TOO much area and I might- at a moment of quick snap judgement- pick the far more limited service with the easily comprehensible/memorable single feature claim... Thoughts?
jaysonelliot 15y ago
FTA: I feel confident in assuming Steve Jobs didn’t pitch OS X by saying “It’s like Windows for Apple Computers.” True, although Windows was originally pitched as "it's like the Macintosh OS for IBM PC-compatibles."
lominming 15y ago
Let's just imagine the one-liner of the big companies today: - Google: Yahoo with PageRank - Facebook: Friendster for colleges - Dropbox: Files sharing made easy - Yelp: User reviews for restaurants All ideas seem small and narrow at the start. It is true that you should recognize the possible direction the startup could go, but as PG said before, it is important to first make something that a group of users really really love. From there, you start growing into something bigger. The main point is that you may not know what it will grow and evolve to when you first start the company.
sskates 15y ago
I'll take being "Siri on Steroids".
movingahead 15y ago
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.

179 points by HelgeSeetzen 15y ago

I think the idea of describing a startup as "like X for Y" is OK for some but in general I agree that it comes across as not being particularly innovative. I think it makes sense to give prospects a frame of reference for an offering but there are other ways of doing it aside from defining your entire company in comparison to another one.

ndcrandall 15y ago
I agree. People want to know very quickly what the idea is and what it's comparable to. I believe that it gets the audience more engaged in the fact they don't need to make the connection while learning about the product throughout the presentation.

alasano 15y ago

There was a TC post encouraging startups to pitch their slogan in a concise format which did not follow the x for y pattern. In a few more words they mostly avoided the problem you are presenting here. http://techcrunch.com/2011/12/30/startups-give-us-your-best-one-sentence-pitch/ http://techcrunch.com/2011/12/30/startups-give-us-your-best-... I thought that most of them did quite well even if some ideas were unambitious even when presented in this manner.

eurleif 15y ago

> I feel confident in assuming Steve Jobs didn’t pitch OS X by saying “It’s like Windows for Apple Computers.” Um, maybe not, but Bill Gates definitely pitched Windows as like a Mac, but for IBM compatible PCs. Seems like a bad example.

the_bear 15y ago

I had the exact same reaction when reading coverage of the demo day. Hopefully the ideas seem underwhelming because of the last part of Paul Graham's essay. In the "tactics" section he says, "If you want to take on a problem as big as the ones I've discussed, don't make a direct frontal attack on it." Maybe these YCombinator startups actually do have ambitious ideas, but they're starting out with something small and seemingly unimportant. Maybe in five years some of these companies will be reinventing education and communication.

marcusf 15y ago

I'm not sure what the value of this post is? Would you honestly expect every company or even every demo day to contain a frighteningly ambitious idea? And if they were frighteningly, scarily ambitious, would TC really hype them? The sane response seems to be to write them off instead as far too ambitious. I guess I just don't get what the skepticism here brings to the table? I'm open to input about that.

the_bear 15y ago
I would imagine that the point is to encourage future entrepreneurs to avoid the two trends pointed out in the post. YCombinator and TechCrunch are both trendsetters, so it makes sense to express skepticism if you have a problem with the types of ideas TechCrunch is covering from demo day.
sbt 15y ago
I don't expect the batch to contain all frighteningly ambitious ideas, but it would be fun if at least one was. I'm sure YC would be receptive to such a plan if the founders were smart.
27182818284 15y ago
I've sent the list of companies from the latest batch to several non-tech friends and not a single person has been impressed with anything on the list. That's not a good sign. With things like Dropbox and Reddit not only did my eyes light up, but the eyes of non-tech friends lit up. Same with Hipmunk. Hipmunk I didn't even have to show someone, I could just say "not shitty airline search" and they were intrigued. I think the point to this submission and others like it are that a lot of people are scratching their heads over this current batch. Nobody expects every company to be "Wow!" but generally there are a few.

Detrus 15y ago

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 beachhead, it should be one that can grow. Apple started with a PC, to grow they made more and better PCs. Microsoft/Gates started with BASIC then pivoted drastically to an idea that could grow, an OS for PCs. What will Dropbox grow or pivot to in order to be an Apple size company? Hard to imagine backups for teams or iCloud but OS independent will be the ticket.

dailyllama 15y ago
Something I've seen clearly is that if you haven't talked quietly with the founders of a startup, you might not know what they're doing. I'm building a company right now that intends to have three major Acts in it's lifetime, the first of which is unimpressive but designed to get us customers and base knowledge for use while executing Act II, which we then intend to apply to additional verticals as part of Act III. But Act I will likely look like something that two guys could put together in their garage in a year. And that's exactly what it is.
mikk0j 15y ago
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).
- Detrus 15y ago
  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?

jrkelly 15y ago

This was exactly my thoughts when reading the demo-day list. I wonder how pg reconciles this? Seems like an emerging strategic weakness for YC.

kenkam 15y ago

"If I were Paul Graham, these types of companies simply would not satisfy me (despite what look to be very lucrative payoffs)" There's a difference in investing in companies expecting some kind of a return and throwing money at really ambitious ideas in the hope that one of those gets really successful. I cannot see how investing carefully and getting returns (ie. making money) is not satisfying.

3pt14159 15y ago

The hard ones don't get press for years. Look at upvertr, sure it could be described as git + electronic software + parts sourcing, but it will take them a while to build this to the point where everyone will see how amazing and useful it is.

pwf 15y ago

Be aware, you've linked directly to the home page of your tumblr instead of linking to the post itself. Your HN submission will become very confusing after you make another tumblr post.

mhartl 15y ago

Those who disparage "X for Y" descriptions misunderstand their use. When you have only a few minutes (or seconds) to pitch your idea, being X for Y or the X of Y is an effective way to give people the gist and pique their interest. Only then does it make sense to go into more detail and explain the full scope of your ambitions.

anateus 15y ago
Exactly. Only a minority of companies that use those pitches used the same phrasing in their initial creation process. The goal is to solve a problem someone has, the "X for Y" is a shorthand for "don't take my word for it that people have this kind of problem, look at this very similar situation".

uberPhil 15y ago

A wise man once said "Nothing is original. There is nothing new under the Sun. It's never what you do but how it's done". While I agree that saying "My Product X is like Y on steroids" is somewhat unoriginal and maybe even uninspiring, the simple fact is that every idea is pretty much an evolution of a previous idea. That being said, I'm not to sure what the point of the article was :)

debacle 15y ago

A problem I see with many of these ideas is what I would call the profitability mirage. The general belief is that the flow is: $founder->getStartup()->iterate()->getUsers()->monetize(), with a AcquiredException thrown somewhere in one of those method calls. The problem is that so many of these startup ideas (that don't happily see an AcquiredException before monetize() is called) will fail at the monetize step because there is steep competition in many of these markets right now, and the burgeoning startup mentality means that someone else is probably doing exactly what you do, slightly better or worse, but they're at a point in their business cycle that they don't need to call monetize() just yet. Thus, you may have a mass exodus of users at precisely the point where you try and bring your ARPU above zero.

dxbydt 15y ago
If the default behavior of a program is to throw an AcquiredException after a few iterations, I wouldn't call it an Exception in the first place. imho, the real exception here is the monetizeException.

wtvanhest 15y ago

If you can't pitch your business as x for y you haven't boiled down your idea enough yet.

ChuckMcM 15y ago

"With the press these companies are getting, I expect they will make investors and founding teams a hefty profit, but they certainly do not speak to me as signs of brilliant, innovative thinking." This is something I've seen several times, I don't believe anyone has shown that 'press coverage' was a causative agent in a successful exit. I believe 'delivering a useful product' (which happens to generate press coverage as a side effect) is the missing piece here. You want a brain dead stupid IOs App I would buy that is derivative? Instapaper for Printers. Which is to say I would love an App where I could launch it on my iPad and then 'print' to it across the network from my Mac or Windows machine. I don't care if it dropped the printout into iBooks or created its own 'space' (I could imagine a designer would have fun with the old 20th century printout distribution bins). But basically there are times when I wish I could print something out and then read it on the road later. It was a capability discussed for the old Plastic Logic Reader that never saw the light of day. And yes, I still do 'listings' when I'm studying old code or dumping a bunch of numbers and charts.

notatoad 15y ago

it's be good if somebody with powers could change the link to the permalink instead of the base blog url: http://ardenthoughts.tumblr.com/post/20053064127/frighteningly-un-ambitious-startup-ideas http://ardenthoughts.tumblr.com/post/20053064127/frightening...

outside1234 15y ago

the only problem with this post is that Google was like Yahoo but that search actually worked, Microsoft was like IBM (the software bits) but software for the masses. There are a lot of counterexamples where starting with something existing provides a beachhead for the ambitious.

caublestone 15y ago

The problem is press coverage. The press needs to be able to write a story. In order to write that story, they have to understand (quickly) what they are writing about and deliver it to readers in a way they can understand (quickly). So if someone demo's a way for doctors to track medical records and an algorithm that uses all of this data to improve point of care diagnostics, what do you call that in a headline? Google for Doctors? The reason why I bring the medical example up is because there is a team here that has a frighteningly ambitious start up (not idea yet). Medigram is a stacked team that is going after the medical industry in a way that no one else wants to. Starting with a messaging app that complies with regulators, they are planting the seed of trust with the medical industry. When they move up to records, they get data. When they get data, they use that math heavy team to solve the ambitious idea of making diagnosis more accurate. Then who knows? A tiny pill that you can swallow that transmits blood test data back to a central server and diagnose your issues instantly? I don't know, but they had to start somewhere.

NDizzle 15y ago

Unambitious startup ideas can be conjured up by a small team and sold to a big company later with hardly any up front dollars. If you want ambitious you should look outside the realm of 100% tech startups. Specifically, you should look in the food/tech realm - but don't look at the worthless calorie counters. Disclaimer: I work for a struggling startup in the food/tech realm.

fleitz 15y ago

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 competitors. Techcrunch 1969: "Wal-Mart: Sears for people who like to pay less" Impressive algorithms don't make money, businesses that satisfy customers do. You're not going to 'change the world' unless your customers are happy.

tptacek 15y ago
Walmart is a world-class innovator in supply chain management, retail engineering, shipping logistics, inventory tracking... the list just goes on and on. Walmart is one of those things that is just so effective and so pervasive that we forget how important its original ideas are. It's like learning to like music in 2003 and hearing the Pixies for the first time and not getting it; you don't realize that virtually all of pop/rock music for the last 20 years is built on stuff they popularized. But unlike the Pixies, Walmart has ruthlessly refined and improved their systems instead of breaking up the band with a faxed message from Black Francis. Point being: innovation isn't always easy to spot in a simple paragraph on a message board.
ericabiz 15y ago
"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 read one before assuming that Wal-Mart "didn't invent anything new"!
- fleitz 15y ago
  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.

tptacek 15y ago

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 article seriously after it suggests that "Airbnbing" auto mechanics is unambitious. It's possible that most Americans have routine car service done at dealerships where they're being routinely fleeced, and that the current crappy system of servicing vehicles is driving talent either out of the businesses or to those giant dealership shops. Have you ever tried to find a reliable mechanic? I drive an old Audi. It's painful.

daredevildave 15y ago
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 type of computing device; replacing huge incumbent companies (telcos, oil); reducing home electricity usage by >50%; inventing a new human-computer interface. Etc.
- tptacek 15y ago
  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.
- tesseractive 15y ago
  Let's say I wanted to solve a really big problem. Not something comparatively simple like "new kind of computing device", but really big. Global. Like the fact that we tear through so many natural resources because people go out and buy new equipment so often instead of getting old equipment repaired. That is a major ecological problem of the 21st Century right? So I look into it and I discover that one of the main reasons that people replace a broken device is because it's really easy to go buy a new piece of gear (everyone wants to sell you one!), and much more trouble to track down someone who will repair an old one (properly!) and go deal with whatever's involved in getting it done. OK, that's an interesting problem to solve, right? But if people are throwing away devices, how do you get everyone to change their behavior? That's really hard, especially for a startup with limited resources. So what's a minimum viable product to get started with? Well, what if you started with a way to let people get their cars repaired more easily? People already get their cars repaired, and the user experience is terrible. Solve the part of the problem that people know they need solved first (car repair), then move on to convincing them they want other things repaired too. That they don't need a new gadget every two years, they just need an easy way for someone to help them keep their old one in good repair. And if it works, that's tons (as a measurement of weight) of working devices that don't go into landfills, and tons of natural resources that aren't used up making devices to replace them. Is that ambitious enough for you? (Note: I have no idea if this is what the founders are actually thinking or not. I just know that you can't judge the ambition of a startup from their first product.)

alain94040 15y ago

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 would use the site, and still not have any meaningful impact. Cheaper cars. More efficient market. But still, in the end, cheaper cars. Am I missing something?

Estragon 15y ago
What is the best-case endgame for dropbox? I like it, but I don't understand why everyone's so excited about its potential.
- azylman 15y ago
  I think this is the best illustration I've seen of what makes Dropbox so great: http://xkcd.com/949/ http://xkcd.com/949/
  - Detrus 15y ago
    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.
    - tesseractive 15y ago
      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.

edawerd 15y ago

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.

Philadelphia 15y ago
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.

bryanh 15y ago

Myspace for Harvard students.

monsterix 15y ago

Well everybody has an opinion, and a choice to tread on a path that feels "right". For a moment you might think these ideas are unambitious, but when you dig-deep you'll discover a lot of gems underneath. One wouldn't expect a frightening execution, speak or quality within six months of a startup. That's probably a picture only big daddies like Apple can show to the world. For example on another thread you can already see DuckDuckGo revealing their ambitious face after a perceivable unambitious journey of two years! Also another thing that probably we all miss is that the next big thing might not necessarily be anything from the ones ever listed - ambitious or unambitious. None of the big names like Facebook or Google or Apple were frighteningly ambitious ideas to the world until they kicked butts of everyone. On second part: Suggestions on choosing a worthwhile domain name is really nice, but looking at how much has been squatted out there, there doesn't seem much of a choice or harm with the current trend of choosing twin word names. There are fewer cheap options at disposal of entrepreneurs and so it is for the rest of the world.

samstave 15y ago

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 is more than the funding of YC - and I would not be able to take ~150K and divide it among multiple founders -- let alone have that funding cover, you know, actual startup expenses. I feel I am in this catch-22 limbo area -- too old and too ambitious of an idea to fit the YC mold. Personally, I see YC as being fairly myopic in the type of people they fund, and it is frustrating because I think YC is incredible! Sure, there are tons of opportunities for nifty apps that serve a silo of a need (even if that silo is infinitely deep) -- but the idea I have to revolutionize the hospital space can't feasibly be built on 150K - unless I take that funding whilst retaining my full time job to pay for me and have that 150K go directly to the product.

pyoung 15y ago
From what I recall, only one founder is required to attend YC. So you could theoretically find a younger founder who could attend, while you kept at your full-time job.
mhartl 15y ago
Many entrepreneurs dip into personal savings in the initial startup phase. This can be stressful, which is one reason I focused on creating a passive income stream after my own YC startup shut down. So, I'd recommend either accumulating a nest egg or creating a passive income stream (or both) before rolling the dice on a startup.
damoncali 15y ago
What makes you think there is a connection between your old salary and what you can make as the founder of a new company? That's not how it works.
- ohashi 15y ago
  He has a family to provide for which does need to eat and their well being probably plays a huge role in his decision making. Giving up a comfortable salary to pursue something ambitious may be an easy decision on a personal level, but it may be very difficult on the rest of the family. The connection to old salary is simply family expectations/lifestyle. That's a real decision and I can imagine dissuades a lot of people. I would be more risk averse if my outcome affected other people I cared about.

iamwil 15y ago

Ideas change. Apple didn't start with iPhone or iPad. They started with the Apple I, which was just a circuit board. Microsoft didn't start with Windows 7. They started with BASIC for the Altair. Paypal didn't start with online payments. They started as money transfer between PDAs. As for the criticism about "X for Y", the problem is not with them, but with the rest of us. Most people (smart or not) have a hard time grasping completely original ideas, and they don't have the time to dive deep into it. "X for Y" is simply a low bandwidth way of transferring a core idea. It's the MVP of communicating your vision. If you have to take more than a sentence to convey your idea/startup, you're going to have a hard hard uphill battle. But chances are, you don't have a clear understanding of what problem you're solving.

mikk0j 15y ago

The “we’re X for Y” is awesome because it is a simple, powerful positioning. That's also why it can be misunderstood so easily. The same model is used in pitching screenplays and movies. Alien, famously, was pitched as "Jaws in space". It works because it sticks, but doesn't define the field (the plot etc) too much. Similarly, startups using the “we’re X for Y” are giving themselves a quick mental positioning in the mind of the listener, but without carving an exact niche. It is easier to work up or broaden from defining the idea ('the beachhead') that way. The way to misunderstand it is think that they mean to do exactly that. "What, they're taking a giant shark onto a spaceship?"

keeptrying 15y ago

I dont think PG's essay had anything to do with his investment thesis or rather its the not the most important thing he looks for. The ideas he backs are basically about the team.

cpt1138 15y ago

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.

Elepsis 15y ago

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.

pg 15y ago

"If I were Paul Graham, these types of companies simply would not satisfy me (despite what look to be very lucrative payoffs)." That's hilarious, because I'm the one who wrote all the summaries of the startups that she's judging them by. I deliberately express startup ideas as x for y whenever possible because that's the most efficient way to describe a startup in a few words. Airbnb, for example, was in its day "eBay for space." On Demo Day we accompany each startup's name with a brief summary of what they're doing. The goal of these summaries is not to convey the full breadth of a startup's eventual ambitions, or even what they're currently doing, but just to help investors watching 65 presentations remember which company is doing what. TechCrunch reused these descriptions, as reporters often do. And now this woman has read the summaries printed in TechCrunch and is treating them as if that were all there was to know about the startup. It's like a game of Telephone (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_whispers http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_whispers). My standard advice to startups presenting to investors is that it's better to start with an overly narrow description of what you do, so that investors at least know what you're talking about, and then expand from there. See http://paulgraham.com/investors.html http://paulgraham.com/investors.html, particularly items 1 and 14. It's surprising to me that someone who wasn't even at Demo Day would feel confident enough to judge the startups' originality based on the 3-5 word summaries we use on the schedule to help investors keep them straight in their heads. I was about to say that it's also surprising that people would upvote such a post. But on reflection it's not that surprising.

jrkelly 15y ago
I wasn't at the Demo Day, but it's hard to consider making car repair more efficient to be a problem that really matters. Not saying it can't be a decent business, but your essay about ambitious ideas was pushing people to do better.
- ajju 15y ago
  Every car owner wastes time and money at repair shops that tend to be so opaque and corrupt that there are sitcoms about it. Most mechanics employed by these shops get paid much lower than they can charge as an independent mechanic. Yet, the middlemen who run the shops make many times more than the sum of the cost of labor and parts. Are you saying that trying to fix this for the 250M+ car owners in America is a problem that doesn't really matter?

yelongren 15y ago

I don't think anyone can realistically expect to find a google-scale diamond in the rough at every single YC batch. "Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas" I suppose is about a process of collective unconscious iteration that would yield such a diamond every 5 or 10 years.

ajratner 15y ago

Cool article! I think a broader question raised is one I have thought about a lot: what is the optimum trade-off between narrow clarity of function/purpose and broad ambition/expansiveness/spread of features? On the one hand: we obviously admire and use things that are ambitious and full-featured (google, facebook, etc. etc. etc.) On the other hand though: HS points out that the narrowed "X for Y" model makes a better YC pitch... but more importantly, it might make a better consumer pitch. E.g. sometimes I wonder why I don't use wolfram alpha more often... and I think one of the answers is that I don't quite know what it does. It possibly covers TOO much area and I might- at a moment of quick snap judgement- pick the far more limited service with the easily comprehensible/memorable single feature claim... Thoughts?

jaysonelliot 15y ago

FTA: I feel confident in assuming Steve Jobs didn’t pitch OS X by saying “It’s like Windows for Apple Computers.” True, although Windows was originally pitched as "it's like the Macintosh OS for IBM PC-compatibles."

lominming 15y ago

Let's just imagine the one-liner of the big companies today: - Google: Yahoo with PageRank - Facebook: Friendster for colleges - Dropbox: Files sharing made easy - Yelp: User reviews for restaurants All ideas seem small and narrow at the start. It is true that you should recognize the possible direction the startup could go, but as PG said before, it is important to first make something that a group of users really really love. From there, you start growing into something bigger. The main point is that you may not know what it will grow and evolve to when you first start the company.

sskates 15y ago

I'll take being "Siri on Steroids".

movingahead 15y ago

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.