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> Most people are very lazy. They don't want to take the time to think through new ideas or look at them in a new light. Once they've made up their minds about

> Most people are very lazy. They don't want to take the time to think through new ideas or look at them in a new light. Once they've made up their minds about something, they don't change them. That's generally why most people don't come up with ideas for new or great things. This is cynical and arrogant. Different people manifest creativity in different ways. Not everybody is interested in coming up with "ideas for new or great things", which in the author's world clearly equates to "tech startup." Also worth noting is that lots of people who do have great ideas: 1. Have great ideas that aren't of a commercial nature. 2. Don't have the know-how, relationships or financial ability to take their ideas further on their own. 3. Contribute those ideas to their employers. > This is also true for many venture capitalists. In fact, it's at the root of a very common question that founders get asked: "Well, isn't so and so doing this?" To be fair, this question isn't necessarily sparked by laziness. It's also sparked by ego - the VC wants to show how familiar they are with the market. They say "Look! I know about things and there's someone else who had the same idea you had." The implicit criticism here is that, because someone else had the idea first, your idea is somehow worse. Later, Harris writes: > Even though the question might seem dumb, it's one of my favorites. It's also a great question to get as a founder. I ask it of almost every founder I meet, because it's very rare to find a truly new idea. The answer I'm looking for is nearly always "of course someone else has tried this before." But that's not enough. The question begs for a deeper answer, one that talks about why, even though other people have tried the same idea, they're still leaving billions of dollars on the table. It's an opportunity to demonstrate depth of thought and originality. It's that framework of thinking and level of insight that makes greatness. So other venture capitalists ask the "Well, isn't so and so doing this?" question because they're lazy and want to stroke their egos but Aaron Harris asks it because he wants to provide founders with "an opportunity to demonstrate depth of thought and originality"? C'mon. Besides telling us that everybody else is lazy and egotistical, I have no idea what the point of this post was. It reads like an anti-advertisement for YC to me.

zo1 12y ago
>"Besides telling us that everybody else is lazy and egotistical, I have no idea what the point of this post was. It reads like an anti-advertisement for YC to me. " He's on the YCombinator people list page: https://www.ycombinator.com/people/ https://www.ycombinator.com/people/ >"Aaron Harris was cofounder of Tutorspree, which was funded by Y Combinator in 2011. Before Tutorspree he worked at Bridgewater Associates, where he managed product and operations for an analytics group. He has an AB in History and Literature from Harvard."
graycat 12y ago
> I have no idea what the point of this post was. Well, as in my post elsewhere in this thread, the title of this thread is just flatly, literally wrong, as in not true, as in false. But, I will try to explain, maybe, "the point" of the original post: In venture capital, the claim in the title is commonly made: So, maybe, "the point" is just to discuss the claim and related thoughts. But, he continues and makes another mistake: He has, > The answer I'm looking for is nearly always "of course someone else has tried this before." I see two things wrong here: (1) With the qualification "nearly always", along with his comment about "lazy", we have to conclude that he's been talking to the wrong entrepreneurs. (2) His "this" as an "idea" is wrong: As we have covered on HN before, it appears that in Silicon Valley what is meant by an "idea" is just some vague, short, maybe one sentence statement of what the product/service would look like to a customer on a first glance. So, with this meaning of an idea there is nothing to patent, protect with a trade secret, use as Ph.D. dissertation, publish in a peer-reviewed journal of original research in, say, a STEM field, etc. Or, an idea is like "I want to fly to the moon" where we can ask who the heck first thought of that and then conclude who the heck cares. So, for people doing advanced work in STEM fields and looking for business success with, also, say, a technological barrier to entry, his concept of an idea is nearly trivial. He's got an entrepreneur and wants to talk trivialities? Gads. His mistake is to be looking for something nearly trivial. Instead for ideas he should be looking for something, to borrow, "new, correct, and significant", and, of course, for start-ups how to make money. So, in his work with ideas, he's looking for the wrong stuff. In case I rub some fur the wrong way, I highly value and respect my view of ideas -- e.g., my Ph.D. dissertation was mostly just ideas, and they weren't just one or a few sentences and trivial. More broadly I have another concern for information technology start-ups, venture capital, and our economy more generally: In short, the concern is that we are shooting ourselves in the gut. Or, earlier this week I happened to look at the Web site of Polaris Partners, and there I saw the backgrounds of the partners: Several, maybe all, the partners interested in biotechnology had biotechnology Ph.D. degrees. No partner interested in information had a Ph.D. degree. And that Web site is not the only such. In my career, nearly always I had my technical work, and since I quite mowing grass for a few dollars as a teenager all of my work has been technical, reviewed by someone who had the qualifications to understand it and did understand it. Then I looked at the Web sites of some venture firms and the backgrounds of the partners interested in information technology: I have a tough time finding a Ph.D. or even a BS STEM major. Gotta tell ya, it would be one heck of an amazing BA major in English and history who would or could understand or review any of my technical work. Several professions have professional peer review, and I doubt that any of them, law, medicine, engineering, tenure committees, have BA English and history majors. But, wait, it gets worse: If I accept an equity check I will report to a Board of Directors (BoD) that can fire me at anytime for any reason or no reason, deny me my unvested stock, get me in hot water with my illiquid vested stock, etc. So, first BoD scenario: The company is up and running, good revenue, first earnings, and I, as founder, CEO, come to the BoD meeting with the budget and list of projects. There is a major new project, and I cover how it will go. It's based on some original work, I did, in applied mathematics with some advanced prerequisites. Essentially all of my high confidence in the project is based squarely on the mathematics. So, I cover the mathematics. The project has to do with, say, ad targeting? As I learned as a first year graduate student in seminars with some of the best mathematicians in the world, there is little so painful as listening to and trying to understand some advanced mathematics while missing most of the prerequisites -- were talking an unanesthetized, upper molar root canal procedure along with a barbed wire enema while being flogged with a cat of nine tails and standing on a charcoal fire. What the fun in that? I can see nearly all the English and history majors running, screaming from the board room directly, do not pass GO, do not collect $100, to the little boys room for blowing all tubes at both ends. Some BoD meeting. I see that disaster coming right at me like an 80 MPH freight train 50 yards away. Bummer. BoD meeting over. In information technology venture firms, can we have some basic technical competence, please, pretty please? Else that must have been one heck of an English and history major. Gee, they covered the Gleason bound for heap sort and O(n ln(n)) notation right along with Hamlet? And they explained the importance of P vs NP just before the Council of Trent? And cache concurrency in multi-core processors was, sure, along with Henry James, 'The Golden Bowl' -- from the Prince. For the Internet, they connected that with the principle of The Great Natural Order? Recursion in software connected with the "child is the father of the man"? And in the paper I published solving an old problem in the constraint qualifications of the Kuhn-Tucker conditions, I was not the first with the ideas because Sir Francis Bacon just had to have known all that all along? And that every closed, convex subset has a unique element of minimum norm, that was from Hammurabi, right? Where does our technology get such nonsense? Does this really mean that soon we will be doing abdominal surgery with smoking incense and rusty pocket knives? That's enough -- I'm going to upchuck.

zo1 12y ago

>"Besides telling us that everybody else is lazy and egotistical, I have no idea what the point of this post was. It reads like an anti-advertisement for YC to me. " He's on the YCombinator people list page: https://www.ycombinator.com/people/ https://www.ycombinator.com/people/ >"Aaron Harris was cofounder of Tutorspree, which was funded by Y Combinator in 2011. Before Tutorspree he worked at Bridgewater Associates, where he managed product and operations for an analytics group. He has an AB in History and Literature from Harvard."

graycat 12y ago

> I have no idea what the point of this post was. Well, as in my post elsewhere in this thread, the title of this thread is just flatly, literally wrong, as in not true, as in false. But, I will try to explain, maybe, "the point" of the original post: In venture capital, the claim in the title is commonly made: So, maybe, "the point" is just to discuss the claim and related thoughts. But, he continues and makes another mistake: He has, > The answer I'm looking for is nearly always "of course someone else has tried this before." I see two things wrong here: (1) With the qualification "nearly always", along with his comment about "lazy", we have to conclude that he's been talking to the wrong entrepreneurs. (2) His "this" as an "idea" is wrong: As we have covered on HN before, it appears that in Silicon Valley what is meant by an "idea" is just some vague, short, maybe one sentence statement of what the product/service would look like to a customer on a first glance. So, with this meaning of an idea there is nothing to patent, protect with a trade secret, use as Ph.D. dissertation, publish in a peer-reviewed journal of original research in, say, a STEM field, etc. Or, an idea is like "I want to fly to the moon" where we can ask who the heck first thought of that and then conclude who the heck cares. So, for people doing advanced work in STEM fields and looking for business success with, also, say, a technological barrier to entry, his concept of an idea is nearly trivial. He's got an entrepreneur and wants to talk trivialities? Gads. His mistake is to be looking for something nearly trivial. Instead for ideas he should be looking for something, to borrow, "new, correct, and significant", and, of course, for start-ups how to make money. So, in his work with ideas, he's looking for the wrong stuff. In case I rub some fur the wrong way, I highly value and respect my view of ideas -- e.g., my Ph.D. dissertation was mostly just ideas, and they weren't just one or a few sentences and trivial. More broadly I have another concern for information technology start-ups, venture capital, and our economy more generally: In short, the concern is that we are shooting ourselves in the gut. Or, earlier this week I happened to look at the Web site of Polaris Partners, and there I saw the backgrounds of the partners: Several, maybe all, the partners interested in biotechnology had biotechnology Ph.D. degrees. No partner interested in information had a Ph.D. degree. And that Web site is not the only such. In my career, nearly always I had my technical work, and since I quite mowing grass for a few dollars as a teenager all of my work has been technical, reviewed by someone who had the qualifications to understand it and did understand it. Then I looked at the Web sites of some venture firms and the backgrounds of the partners interested in information technology: I have a tough time finding a Ph.D. or even a BS STEM major. Gotta tell ya, it would be one heck of an amazing BA major in English and history who would or could understand or review any of my technical work. Several professions have professional peer review, and I doubt that any of them, law, medicine, engineering, tenure committees, have BA English and history majors. But, wait, it gets worse: If I accept an equity check I will report to a Board of Directors (BoD) that can fire me at anytime for any reason or no reason, deny me my unvested stock, get me in hot water with my illiquid vested stock, etc. So, first BoD scenario: The company is up and running, good revenue, first earnings, and I, as founder, CEO, come to the BoD meeting with the budget and list of projects. There is a major new project, and I cover how it will go. It's based on some original work, I did, in applied mathematics with some advanced prerequisites. Essentially all of my high confidence in the project is based squarely on the mathematics. So, I cover the mathematics. The project has to do with, say, ad targeting? As I learned as a first year graduate student in seminars with some of the best mathematicians in the world, there is little so painful as listening to and trying to understand some advanced mathematics while missing most of the prerequisites -- were talking an unanesthetized, upper molar root canal procedure along with a barbed wire enema while being flogged with a cat of nine tails and standing on a charcoal fire. What the fun in that? I can see nearly all the English and history majors running, screaming from the board room directly, do not pass GO, do not collect $100, to the little boys room for blowing all tubes at both ends. Some BoD meeting. I see that disaster coming right at me like an 80 MPH freight train 50 yards away. Bummer. BoD meeting over. In information technology venture firms, can we have some basic technical competence, please, pretty please? Else that must have been one heck of an English and history major. Gee, they covered the Gleason bound for heap sort and O(n ln(n)) notation right along with Hamlet? And they explained the importance of P vs NP just before the Council of Trent? And cache concurrency in multi-core processors was, sure, along with Henry James, 'The Golden Bowl' -- from the Prince. For the Internet, they connected that with the principle of The Great Natural Order? Recursion in software connected with the "child is the father of the man"? And in the paper I published solving an old problem in the constraint qualifications of the Kuhn-Tucker conditions, I was not the first with the ideas because Sir Francis Bacon just had to have known all that all along? And that every closed, convex subset has a unique element of minimum norm, that was from Hammurabi, right? Where does our technology get such nonsense? Does this really mean that soon we will be doing abdominal surgery with smoking incense and rusty pocket knives? That's enough -- I'm going to upchuck.