Re the point about the 100x idea - there seems to be no such thing - only common ideas and 100 or 1000 decisions to grow the business 1.1x to 10x. Each of those decisions demand a cost, effort or sacrifice of some form or another - and the difference between a startup and a regular business is that these decisions are made differently.
Ideas are all the same. Social network, payments, search, e-commerce, software, hardware - none of these ideas intrinsic value. Even the iPhone wasn’t a breakthrough - I had full touchscreen phones running modded Linux before that.
Think of every growth curve as a series of choices - YC chooses and teaches founders to make one category of choices, solo / lifestyle founders make a different, often incompatible set of choices. Ideas don’t come into play. Even YC, which invests more than this program, doesn’t care about ideas that much.
> Even YC, which invests more than this program, doesn’t care about ideas that much.
that's incorrect - YC tried a batch for founders without ideas and the results were very bad.
For someone like me, who is overwhelmed with the ideas, I can't even understand how an engineer or a power user can't have any ideas for a large or growing TAM.
EDIT: they're probably have ideas, but think that their ideas are not good enough, or afraid to sound stupid.
Yeah, I think no idea is a negative signal. Too many ideas seems more indicative of a good founder. And YC does still follow the invest in teams, ideas may change motto, I think.
My biggest problem with bootstrapping while still holding a full time job, not to mention a baby, is spreading myself thin on too many ideas, eventually not grinding enough at any of them.
Ideas are all the same. Social network, payments, search, e-commerce, software, hardware - none of these ideas intrinsic value. Even the iPhone wasn’t a breakthrough - I had full touchscreen phones running modded Linux before that.
Think of every growth curve as a series of choices - YC chooses and teaches founders to make one category of choices, solo / lifestyle founders make a different, often incompatible set of choices. Ideas don’t come into play. Even YC, which invests more than this program, doesn’t care about ideas that much.