John Collison: Startups Begin Small

And one phenomenon I think is really interesting about startups is they tend over time to get higher and higher up in how they describe themselves. And that's okay, and that makes sense. But the sneaky thing they do is they pretend that that's how they viewed themselves all along. And so you have this great Silicon Valley phenomenon of the founding myth that we set out to revolutionize app discovery. I mean, what does that even. And one of my favorite examples of this is I saw an interview with Elon Musk. And I mean, Elon Musk is clearly an incredible entrepreneur and he's someone I respect a lot. But he was giving this interview and the interviewer was asking him, payments, electric cars, space travel, what connects these? And Elon looked very thoughtful. And he's like, well, when I was in college, I thought the three biggest opportunities for mankind were the Internet, interplanetary space travel and clean energy. It's like really that visionary. And so what that means is, as you're trying to think, is this a valid startup idea? Maybe you've identified a problem, but it seems very tactical. You don't know what the broader vision is. One stark counter example here is I really enjoyed Travis Kalnick in describing Uber recently. Uber's latest tagline is transportation as reliable as running water available to everyone. But Travis, I remember in a while ago described in an interview, someone asked him why he started Uber and he said it was a lifestyle thing. Me, my co founder and our 100 friends could roll around San Francisco like ballers in Mercedes S classes. So that's maybe a little before the, you know, the transportation as reliable as running water. And so I guess the point I'm trying to make here is that you don't always know in the early days what the largest thing.