Mike Maples argues that great startup ideas come from "living in the future" and noticing what is missing there, not from trying to "think of a startup." He explains that only people who have been living in parts of the future have valid opinions about what to build, and evaluates pitches by asking "Is this from the future?" He illustrates the point with Marc Andreessen building Mosaic to make the web useful for his team and Matty Hall founding Living Carbon after following trends (corporate carbon spending and improving genetic engineering) that made engineered trees viable.
Chapters
Most people think that the way you come up with good startup ideas is try to think of a startup. And I like to say, no, that's exactly wrong. What you do to come up with great startup ideas is you live in the future and you notice what's missing in the future. If you're living in the future, there will be unbuilt missing things, because if it was all built, you'd be living in the present. And so if you're. If you're living in the future and you notice what's missing, your intuition about what to build is far more likely to be right. Andreessen didn't do the Mosaic browser because he thought there was a market for browsers. He was trying to make the Internet immediately more useful for him and his team. And his intuition about what to build was very good because he was building the thing he wanted that was missing in the world. William Gibson was right, you know, when he said, the future is already here. It's just not evenly distributed. And this is a question that I always ask when I'm pitched. Is this from the future? Some people will say to me, like, hey, I have a mental health startup. Mental health is a huge problem. It needs to be solved. And I'll say, why is your idea from the future? Well, in the future, I believe mental health needs to be solved. I'm like, that's not what I'm asking. I'm asking, what part of the future have you been living in that gives you the right to have an opinion about the future? So, right. I like to say if you're not living in the future, you don't. Your opinion about it isn't valid. It's kind of like saying, I think a customer will do X. And you've never talked to a customer. I'm like, okay, your opinion's interesting, but irrelevant. The only relevant opinions about the future come from people who are living in it and coming from people who understand what's new about it in a very visceral way. And, you know, there are people who do a good job of this, right? Like Matty hall, who started Living Carbon. She was working at Zenefit, and at first she tried to think of a startup, and she had ideas that weren't that good. She had a laser tag idea and a few other things. But then she decided to go follow Sam Altman for a year and be his chief of staff. And Sam Altman visits the future multiple times a day with people. And so that's what led her to this idea that for living carbon, which does genetically modified trees. But, I mean, couldn't be farther away from Zenefit, right? But like she saw, Microsoft was about to spend a lot of money, a bunch of other companies about to spend a lot of money on carbon takeout. She saw that the genetic engineering technology was getting good enough that you could engineer these trees. She married the inflections with the need, and then off she went.
