Sam Altman says wait for a genuinely good idea instead of forcing one. Notice problems in your own life, and spot emerging technological waves early, like the internet in the 90s or mobile after 2007. Student founders often see these shifts first.
Chapters
Wait to have a good idea before you start a startup. If you start a startup without a good idea and you just kind of cast around for one, you'll be under pressure to make something up. It won't work that well. The very best startups are all started because someone believes so passionately in an idea and they believe that a startup is the best way to make that happen. One of the things that is really hard about good ideas is that original thought is really hard. Most people just copy somebody else's thoughts. Most people do what somebody else is doing. And this is disastrous because if you have one idea that starts to work and you have 10,000 clones that follow it, none of you are going to be successful. And the person that started first that you all copied is very likely to win. You know, in the year after Facebook started, there were well over a thousand social networks that started. In the year after Instagram started, there were well over 1000 photo sharing apps that started. But you want to do something that is new and different. You want to think of an idea that's not the same idea everybody else is working on. The year that I joined the board of Helion, which is a nuclear fusion company, according to somebody's count, there were 10,000 photo startups of some sort or other started that year. And one nuclear fusion startup started, which seemed a little bit off to me, but I think most people just do what everybody else is doing right then. Noticing problems in your own life is certainly a good way to do this. It's not true that all successful startups are started to solve a problem that the founders have themselves, but is a very high percentage. If you really go back and think about the transformational companies, most of them start with someone solving their own problem. And then there's this idea of a great wave, which is that another thing you notice if you go back and look at all the really successful companies is there was this massive wave of technology coming. You could see it in the distance and you knew it was gonna just like crash over the shore and through the city. And you got out there early on your surfboard. So I think it's really hard to create a technology wave as a startup that takes too many resources. You can't do that. But what you can do is notice that a wave is coming. And university students are particularly good at this. You can notice that a technological wave is coming, and while other people still think it's a toy or not going to matter, you can really get conviction behind it and surf somebody else's wave. And this, by the way, I think, is the reason that great company there tends to be these clusters in time when a lot of great companies started. So, you know, when the Internet wave happened in the mid to late 90s, you had a huge cluster of companies that are now very large, Amazon, Google, Yahoo, I guess, others. And then when the mobile wave happened after the iPhone came out, 2007, 2008, you had this other big wave of Uber, Airbnb, Snapchat, Instagram, WhatsApp in this short period of time, right after this new wave started. And a really good question to ask is, what is the wave that's starting right now? And where is the cluster of companies? Because we're about due for another one. Where's that going to be?
