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Ask PG: What Is The Most Frighteningly Ambitious Idea You Have Been Pitched On?
- cperciva 14y agoPosting an "Ask PG" at 3 AM Pacific time seems frighteningly ambitious to me.
- npguy 14y ago:-) 3 AM is not that bad, or is it?
- svs 14y agoIsn't PG on the Maker Schedule?
- nsmartt 14y agoBeing on the Maker schedule doesn't imply being awake at 3 AM.
- ctdonath 14y agoPG writes of the Maker Schedule: "I evolved another trick for partitioning the day. I used to program from dinner till about 3 am every day, because at night no one could interrupt me. Then I'd sleep till about 11 am, and come in and work until dinner on what I called "business stuff." I never thought of it in these terms, but in effect I had two workdays each day, one on the manager's schedule and one on the maker's." Does kinda imply he may very well be awake at 3AM. That said, he's also wrapping things up then and unlikely to take on a public Q&A requiring nontrivial attention.
- philwelch 14y agoNotice the judicious use of the phrase "used to".
- arctangent 14y agoThere is a useful tool to suggest the best times to post a new thread: http://hnpickup.appspot.com http://hnpickup.appspot.com Is anyone aware of something similar which breaks this down by type of thread?
- npguy 14y agoI must have used that for my show HN post. I was wondering why it was almost a dead response, While I have seen good response for similar show HN posts. anyways the post is here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4495098 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4495098
- scott_s 14y agoThere's a large random component to what gets to, and stays on, the front page.
- koglerjs 14y agohttp://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0321657292/ http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0321657292/
- brador 14y agoI guess you're talking about http://skimfeed.com http://skimfeed.com. Imagine a table with a 3 course meal laid out...it's nice. Now imagine a table with a 100 course meal. You'll still eat only three plates of food before you're full but you'd still prefer the 100 course table.
- alpb 14y agoAm I the only one getting some text on gray background without any graphics or charts on this page?
- dpcx 14y agoApparently, there's an error in one of the python scripts that generates the data. It's currently reporting an overquota error.
- smiler 14y agoNot really - PG will see it eventually
- loceng 14y agoEven if he did see it, I don't imagine it's something he'd respond to - or perhaps even could respond to.
- npguy 14y agoMabe he can give an idea of the domain etc. I am sure he can definitely do that ?
- tnorthcutt 14y agomaybe != definitely
- kmfrk 14y agopg doesn't sleep; he waits.
- TeMPOraL 14y agoAnd yet it worked!
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- tribeofone 14y agoNot an idea, but I have to say I was blown away by the first meeting I was in with a company that said they were trying to exit for $1B. This pretty much summed up my reaction: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z1CEbl9cK3o&t=3m7s http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z1CEbl9cK3o&t=3m7s
- markmm 14y agoDid they ever make it?
- tribeofone 14y agoStill working on it. They were serious though. Probably end up short of that, but not by much.
- markmm 14y agoNice, I wan't to exit for 2 Billion, but will settle at 1.5 ;)
- bhousel 14y agoWow, what industry? Healthcare? Telecom? Can't think of too many that could credibly claim a $1B exit.
- hollerith 14y agoHuh? I have been assuming that a large fraction of VC-funded startups try for exits of at least $1 billion. (The more rational ones know they will probably fail, but that does not prevent their sincerely aiming for that target.) I am almost certain their investors want them to aim at least that high. Are you sure you're not confusing billion and trillion? ADDED. I'm not trying to appear bad-ass or hardcore (and in fact, I've never been a founder because I judge that I cannot afford that level of risk of being left with a severely suboptimal monetary reward for my efforts). I am honestly trying to understand VC-funded startups.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- mcartyem 14y agoAlso, what is an idea you have been pitched on that seemed bad to you that you can't tell yet if it's a good idea.
- jtheory 14y ago"Most of them" seems to be the likely answer to this one. Including most of the real winners.
- Wilya 14y agoI don't see any way for him to give an answer to this that wouldn't cause hundreds of people to apply to the next YC with the exact same idea (or with the same idea with tiny meaningless variations). Not sure if that would benefit anyone.
- NameNickHN 14y agoI'm pretty sure that hundreds of people already are applying with the exact same idea. PG's answer wouldn't make much difference.
- darylteo 14y agoSomething Something Something Social Network.
- chmike 14y agoHow would one make the difference between frighteningly ambitious, crazy or stupid ?
- vavb 14y agosuccess :-)
- MPSimmons 14y agoThey all kind of look the same in the beginning, don't they?
- MattGrommes 14y agoThat reminds me of Peter Thiel's Venn diagram of 'Sounds like a bad idea' and 'Is a good idea'. It's a pretty slim area in the middle and the 'Sounds like' part means it's hard to know until you do it.
- Alex3917 14y agoHow would you even know? Sometimes the most ambitious ideas don't require more than a few hundred lines of code. It's often how you want the rest of the world to use your product that makes it ambitious, not the product itself.
- numeromancer 14y agoDFFT FTW!
- bfe 14y ago"We want to make our own rockets and spaceships from scratch. But that's just the beginning, to pave the way to settling Mars and making it affordable for middle-class customers to relocate to Mars." I imagine if Elon Musk had pitched SpaceX for YC, it would be a strong candidate for this.
- api 14y agoYou can't compare comic book superheroes to normal people. :)
- Eliezer 14y agoYou kinda can. Life isn't a comic book, and if you saw Elon Musk when he was 15, he wouldn't have any special aura of destiny glowing around him. I'm not saying that everyone can grow up to be Elon Musk, but he didn't have any sort of special license which allowed him to do it, either. In the end, superheroes are composed of people who try to become superheroes even though the rest of the world spends the first decade thinking they're committing lese majeste because they don't have a superhero license.
- bfe 14y agoGreat point. And if you look at Elon's record, he's shown a pattern of setting increasingly ambitious goals after working his way through (relatively) easier projects -- e.g., going from two software startups into hacking hardware, going from trying to contract with existing Russian rockets to designing and building his own rockets, going from modifying an existing car into an electric to designing and building his own electric car from scratch.
- btilly 14y agoI thought that was meant to be a tongue in cheek reference to the whole Elon Musk = Tony Stark meme. See http://www.latimes.com/business/money/la-fi-mo-elon-musk-tony-stark-20120523,0,2329506.story http://www.latimes.com/business/money/la-fi-mo-elon-musk-ton... for more.
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- patmcguire 14y agoMight not have ever pitched pg, since they're hardware and probably needed a bigger initial investment than YC does to make sense, but Blue River Technologies is probably the most ambitious thing I've heard of. http://techcrunch.com/2012/09/10/blue-river-technology-raises-3-1-million-to-build-robots-to-replace-chemical-herbicides/ http://techcrunch.com/2012/09/10/blue-river-technology-raise... The original product was a robot that zapped weeds with lasers, they switched to a superheated oil because it's cheap enough to be practical.
- kristofer 14y agoa guy who claimed that high speed Internet service could be delivered ove the magnetic field of AC power lines and into homes. wanted USGovt to mandate it because it was so amazing and cheap.
- ig1 14y agoPresumably PG can't answer because of confidentiality, but the the most ambitious one I've heard is a pitch for a company claiming they could build a trillion dollar company. (They were working on a cement/concrete replacement that was cleaner and cheaper)
- mpwh 14y agoWhy does this post have so many points?
- Eliezer 14y agoWe never pitched him on the Singularity Institute (http://singularity.org/research/ http://singularity.org/research/), but I doubt he's ever been seriously pitched on anything more ambitious than "build a recursively self-improving Artificial Intelligence with a stable, specifiable goal system so that it can improve into a superintelligence and do world optimization." If he's been pitched on anything more frightening than that, I'd really like to know what.
- ajuc 14y agoI think "build a recursively self-improving Artificial Intelligence WITHOUT a stable, specifiable goal system so that it can improve into a superintelligence and do world optimization" is more frightening, even if less ambitious :)
- seiji 14y agoHonest question: Does SI actually do anything other than hold conferences and take donations so smart people don't have to get real jobs?
- mikedmiked 14y agoIf thats an honest question: http://singularity.org/what-we-do/ http://singularity.org/what-we-do/ There exists an axis which all institutions lie upon where (i) those that do direct business and support short-term incremental innovations exist on the left hand side, and (ii) abstract research institutes supporting long-term paradigm shifts of innovation exist on the right had side. Both serve the same ultimate purpose. sorry for grammar i'm tired.
- brackin 14y agoTotally agree. Ambitious is not the same as pompous, people forget that. For example: We are building a social platform that will change the way the upper class communicates with a chat-site exclusively for the rich as We are building technology that gets removes the need for cars and allows people to get around faster and safer.
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- pg 14y agoI'm sorry if this is an unsatisfying answer, but if you mean convincingly pitched, I couldn't answer a question like that without disclosing the long-term plans of startups that would prefer to keep them secret. If you mean unconvincingly pitched, it would probably be the applications we get from people who've discovered new power sources that violate the laws of physics.
- npguy 14y agoThanks PG! More or less knew this would be the response :-) Can you at least share the domain e.g. Mobile apps or personal finance etc?
- Eliezer 14y agoCan you say where the scariest and most ambitious convincing pitch was on the following scale? 1) We're going to build the next Facebook! 2) We're going to found the next Apple! 3) Our product will create sweeping political change! This will produce a major economic revolution in at least one country! (Seasteading would be change on this level if it worked; creating a new country successfully is around the same level of change as this.) 4) Our product is the next nuclear weapon. You wouldn't want that in the wrong hands, would you? 5) This is going to be the equivalent of the invention of electricity if it works out. 6) We're going to make an IQ-enhancing drug and produce basic change in the human condition. 7) We're going to build serious Drexler-class molecular nanotechnology. 8) We're going to upload a human brain into a computer. 9) We're going to build a recursively self-improving Artificial Intelligence. 10) We think we've figured out how to hack into the computer our universe is running on.
- runjake 14y agoWas pg ever pitched on Instagram? Because a "picture service that gets sold for $1B" sounds frighteningly ambitious.
- mikeleeorg 14y agoI don't think Instagram set out to be acquired for $1B. That was just a pleasant after-effect. And here's pg's answer on what he would have done had he been pitched on Instagram: "Instagram is the one we'd most likely have missed. It all depends when we'd talked to them. They were a kind of overnight success in traffic. If we'd talked to them even a day after they launched we would certainly have said yes. But before that it might have seemed too speculative." Source: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4497517 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4497517
- 001sky 14y agoThese guys did invest in instagram. But... When we invested in Instagram, it wasn’t actually Instagram. It was a company called Burbn, and the idea was roughly to build a mobile micro blogging service. Technologically, it was also different: an HTML 5 application rather than a native app... Of course you never know what then happens. Instagram pivots to photos, and exits at ~$1B. But... As Kevin iterated on Burbn, we made another investment in an excellent entrepreneur, Dalton Caldwell. Dalton’s company, Mixed Media Labs, initially built a product called PicPlz. PicPlz aime d to be a mobile photo sharing service... Of course, now Dalton (as app.net) is doing what instagram (then as Burbn) set out to do - a micro-blogging service. So, there ya go...the ol' switcheroo ;D
- neurotech1 14y agoI'm going to speculate for a bit, and say that some of the "Frighteningly Ambitious" ideas probably involve hardware or hardware/software combinations. Kickstarter is full of updates on how getting designs into production is harder than expected.
- koglerjs 14y agowell, I don't make any secret that I'm an asshole, but if you got this far... I'm ticked off at HN for: 1) being exactly the hollow echo chamber that leads to bubbles, because amidst the "We're just connecting investors to founders" is the networking, smiling, and meaningless business-talk that leads to Color (Remember Color?) getting funded. And HN would like to distance itself, saying it, too, was skeptical of Color, but Color at least had some hint of being innovative and all too many startups I see here are bad ideas _and_ bland ones. 2) This account got hell-banned, probably because I drunkenly chewed out an asshat. Now, I have two things to say on that score: d'ya think I wouldn't notice? A pathetically childish technical "crowd management" technique that I get around by going to my other account on any other browser I have open for my various Reddit names. I'll give it one credit, though, it spurred me to leave for good for Android+technology+buildapc+programming+javascript. I make a habit of checking back here every so often. Quality's crap. And the actual quality articles get complaints about being poor quality. Also on that score, I'm not really sure I regret going off on that guy. I don't really disagree with anything I said, but at the same time I'm faced with the fact that I'm not at all a nice person. But HN doesn't let you delete comments, which is some sort of redneck backwards, and the way I see it it's not fair to the dude or to me to have that moment enshrined forever. Best I can do is camouflage it a bit. 3) Along the lines of hell-banning, the meta-awareness of this place is so stuffy and clueless. Policies do not constitute meaningful group decisions. Reddit has what, fifteen metacirclebrokes? HN just has occasional rabid debate about problems and whether or not they are problems and then pg does whatever, as well as a constant barrage of "We're not reddit" and various other pretentions. Now I'm a pretty damn pretentious person, but that also comes with a fair amount of self-loathing--and granted, HN has that too (what else is that but this?), but not in any meaningful, sculpted way. 4) My Backbone tech article and in fact all my articles get ignored here. And I'm not being sour grapes about that: I was in fact quite pleased that my first WBH got a handful of HN views. But that Backbone article did _great_ in /r/javascript, and maybe HN has a noise/signal problem, but if so, it's one that means you have to be somebody or you have use friends to be seen. HN is already being gamed. And I don't think it has the capacity to deal with that. It comes with being a part of the Networking Circlejerk. --- So, HN, enjoy your startup launches and your occasional gender-war debacles and your considered harmful considered self-referential.
- johnrgrace 14y agoNow I think I'm going to have to troll some Angel investors I know, shoot for about 4/5
- femto 14y agoI'd like to write a program, which uses Quantum Electrodynamics to simulate an electron in the presence of a point charge (ie. an hydrogen atom). Next, I'd like to run two instances, put them in the same space and see if the simulation spontaneously forms an hydrogen molecule. I'd then like to add a second electron, and see if the result was an Helium atom. Keep adding electrons until the simulation can do 6 and 8 electrons (carbon and hydrogen). Now, I'd like to put all three types of simulated atoms (H,C,O) in the same space and see if the result is organic chemistry. At this point, additional optimisations might be necessary, maybe along the lines of starting the simulation by computing simplified models and using those where full accuracy is not required. I'd then like to continue building the system up, adding optimisations as necessary. Keep adding atoms, and seeing if ever more complex molecules result. Extend to atoms with additional electrons as required (eg. need to add Nitrogen for DNA bases). At some point, custom hardware would be required. First GPUs/FPGAs, then custom silicon, and whatever else is state-of-the-art at the time. See how far the optimise/extend cycle can be pushed. Amino acids, DNA, proteins, cells, organs, organisms? Who knows how far it would get? It might remain an interesting toy, at the 0 level. The closer it is to simulating a human, the closer it is to an 9 or 10 on the "Yudkowsky Ambition Scale". --- update: spelling
- constantin 14y agowe can see the websites? Where started your startup?