Should founders pursue ideas that are non-obvious to the public rather than conventional ones?

Mike Maples · Jan 6, 2025

Great startup ideas don't come from trying to think up a startup; they come from founders living in the future who notice what's missing there and build it

William Gibson's line that the future is already here but unevenly distributed; like Newton saying he saw gravity because he was thinking about it all the time, these founders are obsessed and deep in the rabbit hole

36:21 Founders find ideas by living in the future not by deliberate ideation

Kevin Hartz · Jul 22, 2024

The best seeds are non-obvious ideas, and Airbnb is best understood as distributed storage for people, which is more efficient and cost-effective than centralized hotel capacity

Analogy to distributed versus on-prem enterprise storage; Airbnb built a massive distributed hotel across the planet

16:49 Best seed investments come from non obvious analogical reframings of existing markets

Micha Kaufman · Jun 9, 2025

The most interesting startups will come from founders who take the time to understand real human needs and challenges rather than building incremental versions of what already exists

AI forces us to discover our humanity, and that level of thinking is what differentiates real building from building for the sake of building

21:35 Genuine understanding of human needs not incremental cloning differentiates founders

Cristóbal Valenzuela · Aug 28, 2023

Doubt is actually a good sign — thinking differently from everyone else is the interesting position to be in

If everyone is finding the same patterns and you're thinking about something else, then if it works it will be huge and if it doesn't you'll learn something

30:00 Self doubt and thinking differently from consensus is itself a good sign

Varun Mohan · Jun 2, 2025

Startups should pick ideas that are non-obvious to the public, but must stay humble because most non-conventional ideas are simply bad ideas.

If an idea is obvious to everyone there's no alpha — a big company with more distribution, resources and capital will beat you to market; but unconventionality alone is no guarantee of quality.

4:36 Non obvious ideas are the only source of alpha but most unconventional ideas are simply bad

Marc Lore · Jul 12, 2021

Inventing big ideas requires deliberately set-aside, relaxed thinking time; it can't be done in the gaps of ordinary life.

Big ideas come from connecting dots about where the world is going, which needs dedicated uninterrupted time — which is why he chooses thinking over reading.

37:20 Big ideas require deliberately set aside relaxed thinking time not passive immersion