1/ Advice on finding “the right idea” is often a variant of the tired painkillers vs. vitamins cliche -- focus on a problem you’ve experienced or others are experiencing yada yada
Yet, many impactful ideas were more akin to aesthetics, how founders felt the world should be.
Yet, many impactful ideas were more akin to aesthetics, how founders felt the world should be.
2/ Take compute virtualization. For decades, VMs were an elegant oddity. The VMware team viewed them as the right way to abstract compute but weren't quite sure the killer use case(s). And yet that led to multiple deca-billion dollar markets.
3/ Many platforms and OSes have followed similar paths. They didn’t address a particular burning need now, but if adopted they would change how we did work and thought about work.
4/ Solving tangible, near-term problems is fine. But it’s not the only way to build a company. And for dreamers, can be tremendously limiting.
5/ Ideas as aesthetics are particularly powerful because the founders with the ideas can draw upon their intuition and impress it on the world rather than manically react to the customers tactical and often blinkered views of "the problem”.
6/ So the next time someone asks if you have a painkiller or a vitamin, tell them neither, you’re too busy creating the red pill.
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