Transcript of a short talk by Paul Graham describing how to generate good startup ideas. He argues against consciously trying to invent startup ideas and instead recommends learning deeply, working on interesting problems (especially at the leading edge of technology), and collaborating with people you respect; he concludes with the two-word mantra: "Just learn."
Chapters
The way to get startup ideas is not to try to think of startup ideas. I've written a whole essay on this, and I'm not going to repeat the whole thing here, but the short version is that if you make a conscious effort to try and think of startup ideas, you will think of ideas that are not only bad, but bad and plausible sounding, meaning you and everybody else will be fooled by them and you'll waste a lot of time before realizing they're no good. The way to come up with good startup ideas is to take a step back. Instead of trying to make a conscious effort to think of startup ideas, turn your brain into the type that has startup ideas unconsciously. In fact, so unconsciously that you don't even realize at first that they're startup ideas. This is not only possible. Yahoo, Google, Facebook, and Apple all got started this way. None of these companies were even supposed to be companies at first. They were all just side projects. The very best ideas almost have to start as side projects because they're always such outliers that your conscious mind would reject them as ideas for companies. Okay, so how do you turn your mind into the kind that has startup ideas unconsciously? 1. Learn a lot about things that matter. 2. Work on problems that interest you. 3, with people you like and respect. That third part, incidentally, is how you get co founders at the same time as the idea. My life is full of case after case where I worked on things just because I was interested and they turned out to be useful later in some worldly way. Y combinator itself is something I only did because it seemed interesting. If you're interested in genuinely interesting problems, gratifying your interest energetically is the best way to prepare yourself for a startup, and for that matter, probably the best way to live. But although I can't explain in the general case what counts as an interesting problem, I can tell you about a large subset of them. If you think of technology as something that's spreading like a sort of fractal stain, every point on the edge that's moving represents an interesting problem. So one guaranteed way to turn your mind into the type that startup ideas form in unconsciously is to get yourself to the leading edge of some technology to, as Paul Buchheit put it, live in the future. And when you get there, ideas that seem uncannily prescient to other people will seem obvious to you. You may not realize they're startup ideas, but you'll know they're something that ought to exist. So, strangely enough, the optimal thing to do in college if you want to be a successful startup founder is not some sort of new vocational version of college focused on entrepreneurship. It's the classic version of college as education for its own sake. If you want to start a startup, what you should do in college is learn powerful things and if you have genuine intellectual curiosity, that's what you'll naturally tend to do if you just follow your own inclinations. The component of entrepreneurship I can never quite say that word with a straight face that really matters is domain expertise. Larry Page is Larry Page because he was an expert on and the way he became an expert on search was because he was genuinely interested in it, not because of some ulterior motive. At its best, starting a startup is merely an ulterior motive for curiosity and you'll do it best if you introduce the ulterior motive at the end of the process. So here is the ultimate advice for young would be startup founders reduced to two words Just learn.
