Phil Libin says your startup idea should have been impossible a few years ago and only now become hard. If it was already possible, or if it's gotten easy, you're too late. The problem has to matter enough to spend your life on.
Wait until the world changes so that an important problem goes from being impossible to just being really hard, and then execute. And I think this is actually kind of important. It doesn't mean that you literally have to— have an idea and then wait for maybe 80 years for this to be true. But it does mean that whatever idea you think you have, you should run against this test. You should say, why is right now the best timing? What is it about my idea that was impossible before? And what is it about the world that's changed that's making my idea just barely possible now? And of course, the other important part here is the word important. It should be a sufficiently important idea. If your idea is not sufficiently important, then you're wasting your life. You shouldn't work on it. If your idea was not impossible before, it was possible before, then you've got to ask yourself the very honest question, why is it still an opportunity? Why haven't other people done it? And if the idea is actually no longer impossible, no longer really, really hard, it's just kind of easy, then it's probably too late.
