Former Y Combinator CEO Michael Seibel: You want to solve high-frequency, intense problems

I find a lot of founders think they have a good idea, but they don't do this frequency and intensity analysis. If you have both an infrequent and low intensity problem that you're trying to solve, you're going to have a problem getting a lot of customers even interested in talking to you. All things make. Well, if you graph problems, it's nicer for them to be higher intensity, higher frequency. Let's think about a company like Uber, for example. Usually when you are somewhere and you need to go somewhere else, it's a pretty intense problem. I have to go to work, I have to go to the doctor, I have to go pick up my kids. That's so intense. You might have bought like a $20,000 car to help you do those things. Right. So it's an intense problem. And then when you think about frequency, how often do you move more than a mile more than walking distance? Every day. Happens a lot. And so if you think about that, even though you look at the taxi market and you say, oh, taxis before Uber taxis, that's not that big of a market. If you just look at the customer, you say high intensity problem, that happens very often. There's probably a good business here.