All right, this is Dalton plus Michael and today we're gonna talk about how to get unique AI startup ideas. Here are a bunch of old people telling you how to get unique ideas. Where should we start?

I mean, look, the problem right now is the tools are so good, you can crank out anything. And so the bottleneck is less building the thing. It's actually having an idea. And the problem is, most ideas are extremely non-unique.

Yes. And I would even go so far as to say, many founders out there are not even being encouraged to come up with unique ideas. Like they're almost being encouraged to like what just raised, what just raised the seed round, what sounds good to investors, just tell me how I can get funded, Dalton. Just tell me what idea gets me funded.

It's almost like whatever the current thing is on Twitter, oh, I guess I'll make a clone of that. Like, oh, you know, when we're recording this right now, it's like, oh, open claw, let's just clone that. There you go, that's my startup.

Pretty low effort. Pretty low effort. I think the other thing that's weird is when people who are trying to start companies think that they can de-risk their idea by doing something that they see recently got funded or they see is like raised a series B. Either one of those is really funny. It's like, I've seen so many examples, someone's like, well, that thing has raised money at a billion dollar valuation. Therefore, dot, dot, dot, dot, dot.

Well, what's so funny is we inadvertently were part of that problem. And so what would always happen when I was doing interviews for YC is someone I was interviewing would flag, oh, YC funded a company two batches ago doing XYZ. So that validates the market. And I'd be sitting there being like, I funded that company. I did not fund it for the idea. I actually funded a different idea, and they pivoted during the batch. And so as the person who funded that, this is not validation. Like I can't stress enough, as the source of this validation thing you're talking about, there's no signal here.

You involuntarily validate.

Yeah, so I can't stress enough that crying to read the tea leaves of what kind of stuff is launching in the YC batch, it's not that it's like exactly wrong, but it's certainly not a marketplace of picking ideas that have been de-risk.

I think it's exactly wrong. I think they're like, I'm sorry. You're gonna decide on what you're gonna work on for maybe the next 10 to 20 years of your life by looking at a list of what other people are working on. Like, come on. There are certain things that you're picking that you should think about that way. Like maybe we go to college. Or maybe you major, maybe. But what you spend the next 20 years of your life on, let's have a little bit more conviction than that. So one of the ideas that you brought up that I really like is this idea of looking the discard bin. So let's talk about that. If you shouldn't look at what's cool, How do you look in the discouragement?

Yeah, the way to think about it is everyone has a filter for startup ideas. And because we have very similar filters, if your ideation process is to find an idea that is both good and no one's ever thought of it before, you're gonna have a bad time. You're trying to discover something that no one has ever thought of before. And there's a lot of people in the world. I don't know if you heard, Michael. There's billions of them. And so, most likely what you actually need to do is to find an idea that has already been discarded by others and it's been discarded for some reason. Do you get what I'm trying to say? Like, instead of trying to find something no one's ever thought of, find something that everyone's thought of and thinks is bad.

Yes. Classic examples of that. Instagram would be maybe a very classic example. One of the things that I see a lot of people do when they're in this kind of ideation stage is talk to their friends and look for things that all of their friends thinks are good ideas. And I might advise the exact opposite in this situation. Like what happens if you talk to your friends and like you got maybe not universal bad.

What if they told you. Yeah, what if they're like, look, I'm worried about you. If you explain your idea. Is that what happened with the founders of Airbnb, Michael? Is that the story? Like their parents were worried about them?

I would say this. Many successful YC companies, every one of their friends and family members thought the idea was bad. We keep on saying, the way you get a unique idea is you have to move away from consensus, right? So we got to move away from the consensus of startup founders, away from the consensus of investors, away from the consensus of your friends. And it's really interesting because like another way that I like to think about how do you move away from consensus is doing things are just hard. Saying that you want to do something that takes 10 years, especially when you're a young person, that just seems really intimidating. So it's like easy to tell yourself, oh yeah, I know the numbers say it's going to take 10 years, but like I'll figure it out in two. And then you cut down all of the things that might take longer than two years to work. And I feel like, If you want to cheat, just imagine ideas that might take longer than two years to work. And the likelihood of success can be way higher.

Yeah. And when you think about examples, like currently, the consensus is that being a founder of open AI in Anthropic is a good thing. Again, maybe that'll change.

Well, it happened and took 18 months, right?

And when you think about those companies, A, they were deeply weird. Like Can you imagine a weirder start than how OpenAI got started by being a non-profit research lab...

during the time of SAS descendants?

And You know, a lot of things didn't go well and they didn't really have a product for a long time. Anthropic was like super weird. And a lot of their early money came from FTX. Like the whole story is like bizarre. And now they seem consensus very good, but wow. They are the definition of non-consensus things. Right? And so I'm not even arguing those are instructive stories that if you do what they do, you're going to succeed. I'm actually arguing the opposite, which is trying to just copy what worked in the past for other people isn't necessarily going to give you a truly unique idea.

One of the things that actually makes this harder is how much content VCs are putting out there. If you were a young founder in the early 2000s, how much VC content did you have access to?

It didn't exist, right? So the way it works is before TechCrunch, the only people that wrote about technology were like the Wall Street Journal, Walt Mossberg, and he would mostly cover Apple. He'd be talking about the new Mac or whatever. And so if you were a startup, there was nowhere.

CES.

Yeah, right? And so then TechRange came out and it was the first place to like cover startups. And then now we have this like, you know, we have a lot of content out there. And again, you know, we are certainly part of it. And I realized that our voices have been part of this thing. My justification is that we've never tried to explicitly tell founders what to think. more kind of just giving, telling stories, giving advice, kind of like we're doing office hours but with a wider group of people. But if you're making all of your life decisions based on podcasts, that is a definition of coming up with ideas that are not unique. Like literally that's the definition of a non-unique idea is something that you heard in a podcast, right?

There's a trope on startup ideas that have run around the entire time that we've been doing startups that I might argue wasn't followed during the B2B SaaS era. This idea of solving your own problem or being your own user. It's interesting now because it almost seems like this has completely gone out of style. This idea that like, oh, if I'm working on something for myself, there's no way it can get big or like, there's no way the market's big enough or like, I don't trust my own ability to like choose things. How do you think about this?

I think one of the big talking points on, you know, VCE podcast or VCE content is, Hey, $100 billion outcomes, trillion-dollar outcomes, they're the only things that matter. And if it doesn't seem really big, it's not even, it's like a joke. You'd like, you'd like, mock someone. And so, what that's causing is a lot of ideas that are like, truly unique, wouldn't ever fit within that framework. And so of course the example, you know, your startup, Justin putting the camera on his head to start Twitch.

Doesn't work.

Is that a $100 billion opportunity in life? Like, you would filter that out. Right? Something like WhatNot, which is one of my better investments at YC. It's like, okay, so it's a marketplace for authenticated Funko Pops. What's the tam on that? You would discard that. And so I think trying to take these late stage investor advice things and apply them to startup ideas, only a small number of things would meet that bar. And so you're gonna end up with extremely derivative, repetitive ideas that would meet that bar.

I completely agree. And I think this leads me to my last thought on this subject, which is I have found that sometimes weird people have an easier time coming up with weird, aka unique ideas. We do have this challenge that now that tech seems like such a moneymaker and there's so much money invested in early stage startups. There are a lot of people who are not very weird, who are very attracted to this space. It's funny that I'm saying weird is like a positive because I think in the normal context in America weird isn't seeing as positive but like a lot of these ideas that worked seemed really weird and a lot of the people when you know them Yeah are a little weird. So like how do you think about? You know, I sometimes wonder, is the tech setup world as welcoming to weird people as it once was? Well, how do you think about this?

Yeah. I think it's a great point. And again, maybe this is just, you know, we're getting old or something. That's an option. But people that are non-conformist or otherwise quirky in ways that you would describe as Quirky is the nice way to say it. They tend to do their own weird stuff and they don't usually need to ask permission. They constantly are generating strange ideas on their own. And if anything, society tells them, hey, you know. Like shut up. Like we don't want to hear all your dumb ideas on how to make things work better. Right?

That's like, like the system grinds that out of you. Those people tune to do well with startups because they don't actually have any problems coming up with unique ideas. Probably their bigger problem is filtering out deciding which unique idea is worth their time because they're always coming up with ideas. Versus a lot of systems are consensus machines. And people that are really good at calibrating and triangulating consensus, those tend to be people that have the hardest time coming up with unique ideas, because it's sort of been beaten out of them, and it's just not their natural thing.

Again, an example of Y Combinator itself, Most investors that start funds have investment experience and have a career where they're like, oh, I have a Harvard MBA or a Stanford MBA, and then I worked here as an associate. And Paul Graham was like, I built a Lisp website, and I got rich. And I decided to do this really weird thing that I made up from first principles of letting young people apply to a summer program. And as it turns out, that's the guy that all of these normie VCs look up to. And he's just like a weird guy. Who had no training. And did something that would never have been produced by like a normal investor, right?

Well, I'll take a step further. Made something that he wish existed when he was a founder. Like made something that he would have appealed to him. So it's tricky because I think that like, you know, there are a lot of people who are watching this video who are probably thinking is the startup worldwide for me. I find it awkward to say that like, even though this is an exciting time for tech, not everyone is cut out for this. Not everyone is cut out to be the person coming up with the idea. I don't know, what should you do if you're having too hard of a problem?

If it's your dream, you should totally try to start a company. And I would never, I would feel really bad if I ever said something that made people question themselves or feel bad in these videos we're making, because we're making them because we're trying to help people. But if you really, really, really struggle to come up with unique ideas, it's totally okay to go work somewhere. And you still get to be part of things. Not everyone has to, be like a weird shaman that comes up with strange ideas, that gets okay. And when you think about it, society wouldn't work if everyone thought that way.

Well, I love that point, because also maybe you should work with someone who's weird. And they should come up with the idea. I mean, that's what I did.

That's true, you just kind of wear alarm for the rioting on the ideation part. You're like, I guess that's what you guys want to do.

Yeah. I would have not helped in the ideation process of putting a camera on Justin's head. I would have not contributed at all. So you can work somewhere, you can join with someone. This is maybe an interesting point. Like everyone interested in startups doesn't have to be the person who comes up with the idea.

I think they're like, in closing for me, It is hard to feel like you're working on something where a lot of people think it's a bad idea. That's hard. And I like talking about this because you should brace yourself for that. Like that is 100% the experience of everyone who's succeeded. So like, I know it's hard, right? But like, you should feel like you're there, and you should feel maybe like you're gonna be there for a couple years. And like, if you're working on something that you're so excited by, you're willing to be there for a couple years, as someone who's a fun startup founder, I'm excited by that, right?

When I meet someone who I get the vibe, if this doesn't work in a couple months, they're moving along, I'm always like, oh, yeah, I want, you know, I always had this phrase, it's like, You're 10% in, but you want me to be 100% in? That's like a weird lie. So I don't know, for the people watching, it's totally cool to be weird and to work on something people think is weird if you're gonna use it.

Including us. Like basically, if your filter is, do the people on these videos seem like they'd approve of our ideas? We're saying no. Like don't be approval seeking from authority figures if you wanna actually have unique ideas.

Well, and I'll extend that further. We have regularly funded ideas that we thought were bad. We have regularly worked with founders of pidiment ideas that we thought were bad. And like to be completely honest, like sometimes the thing in my job is like, I'm a doctor. I'm treating the patient walking in the door. I don't get to choose. Like, I want to help these folks succeed. And who am I to know whether this is going to work? I'm not going to, you know, let's not put ourselves in that position.