Thread by @avichal

1/ Right after graduating I worked at @Google and Larry Page said something in passing that has stuck with me for a decade: "Most important problems aren't that hard to solve, it's just that no one has really tried." With some experience, I have come to believe this is 100% true.

2/ Humans are terrible at intuiting exponential growth and long tail distributions. As a result, most entrepreneurs dramatically mis-estimate risk. Winning markets that look easy is much harder than you'd think, and markets that look hard are often way easier than you'd expect.

3/ Starting a SAAS company (or ecommerce, social, consumer app company, etc.) is far more risky than expected -- it's a crowded market, hiring is hard, and scaling is hard because bigger companies with distribution are going to run directly at you as soon as you have traction.

4/ Counter-intuitively, starting a supersonic airplane company (@boomaero) is far less risky than most expect. You have almost no competition, engineers would kill to work on something meaningful, and if it flies you are worth $20 billion!

5/ The onus is on the entrepreneur to show why everyone has misunderstood the risks. You have to be a special entrepreneur to run at a problem that looks very hard (@Cruise , @SpaceX, @boomaero). But there are many meaningful problems that could be solved if enough people tried.