Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

[Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas]

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| Want to start a startup? Get funded by
Y Combinator. |

March 2012

One of the more surprising things I've noticed while working
on Y Combinator is how frightening the most ambitious startup
ideas are. In this essay I'm going to demonstrate
this phenomenon by describing some. Any one of them
could make you a billionaire. That might sound like an attractive
prospect, and yet when I describe these ideas you may
notice you find yourself shrinking away from them.

Don't worry, it's not a sign of weakness. Arguably it's a sign of
sanity. The biggest startup ideas are terrifying. And not just
because they'd be a lot of work. The biggest ideas seem to threaten
your identity: you wonder if you'd have enough ambition to carry
them through.

There's a scene in Being John Malkovich where the nerdy hero
encounters a very attractive, sophisticated woman. She says to
him:

Here's the thing: If you ever got me, you wouldn't have a clue
what to do with me.

That's what these ideas say to us.

This phenomenon is one of the most important things you can understand
about startups.
[1]
You'd expect big startup ideas to be
attractive, but actually they tend to repel you. And that has a
bunch of consequences. It means these ideas are invisible to most
people who try to think of startup ideas, because their subconscious
filters them out. Even the most ambitious people are probably best
off approaching them obliquely.

1. A New Search Engine

The best ideas are just on the right side of impossible. I don't
know if this one is possible, but there are signs it might be.
Making a new search engine means competing with Google, and recently
I've noticed some cracks in their fortress.

The point when it became clear to me that Microsoft had lost their
way was when they decided to get into the search business. That
was not a natural move for Microsoft. They did it because they
were afraid of Google, and Google was in the search business. But
this meant (a) Google was now setting Microsoft's agenda, and (b)
Microsoft's agenda consisted of stuff they weren't good at.

Microsoft : Google :: Google : Facebook.

That does not by itself mean
there's room for a new search engine, but lately when using Google
search I've found myself nostalgic for the old days, when
Google was true to its own slightly aspy self. Google used to give
me a page of the right answers, fast, with no clutter. Now the
results seem inspired by the Scientologist principle that what's
true is what's true for you. And the pages don't have the
clean, sparse feel they used to. Google search results used to
look like the output of a Unix utility. Now if I accidentally put
the cursor in the wrong place, anything might happen.

The way to win here is to build the search engine all the hackers
use. A search engine whose users consisted of the top 10,000 hackers
and no one else would be in a very powerful position despite its
small size, just as Google was when it was that search engine. And
for the first time in over a decade the idea of switching seems
thinkable to me.

Since anyone capable of starting this company is one of those 10,000
hackers, the route is at least straightforward: make the search
engine you yourself want. Feel free to make it excessively hackerish.
Make it really good for code search, for example. Would you like
search queries to be Turing complete? Anything that gets you those
10,000 users is ipso facto good.

Don't worry if something you want to do will constrain you in the
long term, because if you don't get that initial core of users,
there won't be a long term. If you can just build something that
you and your friends genuinely prefer to Google, you're already
about 10% of the way to an IPO, just as Facebook was (though they
probably didn't realize it) when they got all the Harvard undergrads.

2. Replace Email

Email was not designed to be used the way we use it now. Email is
not a messaging protocol. It's a todo list. Or rather, my inbox
is a todo list, and email is the way things get onto it. But it
is a disastrously bad todo list.

I'm open to different types of solutions to this problem, but I
suspect that tweaking the inbox is not enough, and that email has
to be replaced with a new protocol.
This new protocol should be a todo list protocol, not
a messaging protocol, although there is a degenerate case where
what someone wants you to do is: read the following text.

As a todo list protocol, the new protocol should give more power
to the recipient than email does. I want there to be more restrictions
on what someone can put on my todo list. And when someone can put
something on my todo list, I want them to tell me more about what
they want from me. Do they want me to do something beyond just
reading some text? How important is it? (There obviously has to
be some mechanism to prevent people from saying everything is
important.) When does it have to be done?

This is one of those ideas that's like an irresistible force meeting
an immovable object. On one hand, entrenched protocols are impossible
to replace. On the other, it seems unlikely that people in
100 years will still be living in the same email hell we do now.
And if email is going to get replaced eventually, why not now?

If you do it right, you may be able to avoid the usual chicken
and egg problem new protocols face, because some of the most powerful
people in the world will be among the first to switch to it.
They're all at the mercy of email too.

Whatever you build, make it fast. GMail has become painfully slow.
[2]
If you made something no better than GMail, but fast, that
alone would let you start to pull users away from GMail.

GMail is slow because Google can't afford to spend a lot on it.
But people will pay for this. I'd have no problem paying $50 a month.
Considering how much time I spend in email, it's kind of scary to
think how much I'd be justified in paying. At least $1000 a month.
If I spend several hours a day reading and writing email, that would
be a cheap way to make my life better.

3. Replace Universities

People are all over this idea lately, and I think they're onto
something. I'm reluctant to suggest that an institution that's
been around for a millennium is finished just because of some mistakes
they made in the last few decades, but certainly in the last few
decades US universities seem to have been headed down the wrong
path. One could do a lot better for a lot less money.

I don't think universities will disappear. They won't be replaced
wholesale. They'll just lose the de facto monopoly on certain types
of learning that they once had. There will be many different ways
to learn different things, and some may look quite different from
universities. Y Combinator itself is arguably one of them.

Learning is such a big problem that changing the way people do it
will have a wave of secondary effects. For example, the name of
the university one went to is treated by a lot of people (correctly
or not) as a credential in its own right. If learning breaks up
into many little pieces, credentialling may separate from it. There
may even need to be replacements for campus social life (and oddly
enough, YC even has aspects of that).

You could replace high schools too, but there you face bureaucratic
obstacles that would slow down a startup. Universities seem the
place to start.

4. Internet Drama

Hollywood has been slow to embrace the Internet. That was a
mistake, because I think we can now call a winner in the race between
delivery mechanisms, and it is the Internet, not cable.

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