Founders pick bad startup ideas. Good startup ideas pick founders. (This is facile, I realize, but there is a lot of truth in it.)
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Many of the most successful startups weren't even meant to be companies at first. Google and Facebook for example. They were just side projects. But these ideas were so obviously promising that they drove their discoverers to turn them into companies.
The opposite is the startup that happens because people think it would be cool to start a startup, and then go looking for an idea. (Though to be fair, Amazon is an instance of this.)
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This happened to us. First start up, thought was amazing idea. Got a patent. World not ready though. This led to a second idea that quickly gained traction. New start up now uses first start-up's technology.
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First start up also got rejected by
@ycombinator 4 times but we carried on. With backing we wouldn't have found idea that led the scaling start up.
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Netflix also.
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Bezos was purposeful in identifying major ideas with business potential. Similar to a grad student deciding on the right research project to pursue for a dissertation. But many wannabe founders don’t approach idea selection with the idea’s future value and consequences in mind.
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I think lots of SaaS companies fit the Amazon exception too. Outcomes much smaller tho
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Which side of the coin does Apple fall under?
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Apple is slightly weird, because it grew out of a side-project, but the side-project was Wozniak's, and the one who felt the pressure of the idea's promise was Jobs.
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Yes, Paul, I also agree more with your first tweet (personal bias). The most determined founders are the ones who solved the problem for themselves first, without thinking about "getting rich". It's about playing our beloved game; the money is icing on the cake.
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1/ I see what you mean PG. In the later case, where startups find founders: I have always felt that the dots connect backwards. Almost the cumulative life experience before lead to that serendipitous point where it all seems to fit.
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2/ My previous startup was my school research project at CMU. I just pursued because it was interesting. And the current one, that I start amidst Covid19, was just a culmination of different relevant experiences - crystallizing to intersect with a desperate market need.
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