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

Paul Graham · published Aug 2008 · hedged

Great startup ideas tend to seem wrong, because an idea that is both good and novel probably has to look bad to most people.

If a good idea didn't seem bad to most people, someone would already be doing it and it wouldn't be novel.

source A Fundraising Survival Guide

Paul Graham · published Oct 2010 · hedged

The kind of intelligence that matters most for founders is imagination — generating surprising new ideas — rather than solving predefined problems quickly.

In the startup world most good ideas seem bad initially, because if they were obviously good someone would already be doing them.

source What We Look for in Founders

Paul Graham · published Sep 2012

The most successful founders tend to work on ideas that few besides them realize are good, because obviously good ideas would already have been done.

If a good idea were obviously good, someone else would already have done it.

source Black Swan Farming

Paul Graham · published Sep 2012

The sweet spot for startups is the intersection of ideas that seem bad and ideas that are good — while the vast majority of ideas that seem bad are simply bad.

Thiel's Venn diagram makes both the existence of the intersection and its rarity vivid.

source Black Swan Farming

Paul Graham · published Sep 2012

Startups with a high probability of making it really big will appear to have a disproportionately low probability of succeeding at all.

Because the best ideas seem like bad ideas, the two probabilities are inversely related rather than merely uncorrelated.

source Black Swan Farming

Paul Graham · published Dec 2020

In a market economy it is hard to make something people want that they don't already have, so a fundable startup idea must be about something both new and uncertain.

If others knew about the need and could satisfy it they already would; and if the need and one's ability to satisfy it were certain, that would already show up as large, fast-growing revenues.

source Billionaires Build

Paul Graham · published Jun 2026

The way to get the very best startup ideas is not to consciously look for startup ideas, because deliberate searching makes you too conservative and the best ideas sound lame at first.

Conscious idea-hunting lops off the outliers; the best ideas sound so bad initially that a searcher would reject them, which is why they remain undiscovered.

source How to Earn a Billion Dollars

Paul Graham · published Dec 2014 · hedged

New ideas come not from trying explicitly to have them but from solving problems and taking one's weird hunches seriously; for a sufficiently expert person, any strange idea that occurs is worth exploring.

The winds of change originate in the unconscious minds of domain experts.

Scope: requires sufficient expertise in the field

source How to Be an Expert in a Changing World

Paul Graham · published Dec 2020

The ideal founders are those living at the leading edge of some change who build something they themselves want, and most super-successful startups are of this type.

Building what they and their peers wanted, while being at the leading edge of change, meant more people would want these things in the future.

source Billionaires Build

Mike Maples · published 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 20VC: How To Do a 10x Seed Fund in 2025 | Three Frameworks to Evaluate Startups an Founders | Lessons from Losing Billions Missing Airbnb and Pinterest & Investing Lessons from Charlie Munger with Mike Maples @ Floodgate

Paul Graham · published Jun 2026

To grow fast you must discover a need nobody else knows about yet, because in a market economy known satisfiable needs are immediately served — and the way to find such a need is to feel it yourself.

As soon as a new, satisfiable need is discovered, people rush to satisfy it.

Scope: market economies

source How to Earn a Billion Dollars

Paul Graham · published Jun 2026

The best startups come from friends building projects that were never meant to be companies, and anything that genuinely seems cool to build has a high probability of leading to a good idea however preposterous it sounds.

Founders unconsciously predict future demand, so random-seeming cool projects are far from random; Apple, Google, Facebook and Justin.TV/Twitch all started this way.

source How to Earn a Billion Dollars

Micha Kaufman · published 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 20VC: Fiverr CEO: 'If You're Not Adapting to AI, F* You. You're Done | Why "Time to Copy" is the Most Important Metric in Startups Today | Why 99% of AI Companies Today Will Die | Why Governments Will Take Control of AI with Micha Kauffman

Paul Graham · published Jun 2026

The key to a successful startup is understanding some group of users deeply enough to make exactly what they want; building for yourself is just a special case of this rule.

Only deep understanding of users produces something they love enough to tell their friends, and only that yields the exponential growth a startup needs.

source How to Earn a Billion Dollars

Paul Graham · published Mar 2008

PR people and journalists systematically underestimate, in retrospective accounts, how uncertain successful startups' early days were.

Once a company is big it's hard to imagine it was small and helpless, so the story is told as if greatness was assured — but many equally promising startups fail.

source A New Venture Animal

Paul Graham · published Sep 2012

History gets rewritten by big successes so that their eventual success seems obvious in retrospect; Facebook, Microsoft and Apple all initially fit the description of a bad idea.

Graham's own memory of Facebook sounding lame — a niche market with no money doing something that didn't matter — and the same description fitting Microsoft and Apple.

source Black Swan Farming

Kevin Hartz · published 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

Cristóbal Valenzuela · published 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 · published 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 · published 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

Paul Graham · published Mar 2007

The most valuable truths are the ones most people disbelieve, so controversy is a sign of a good idea and one should push aggressively toward such ideas—in this case, seeking things that would be popular but seem hard to monetize.

Unbelieved truths are like undervalued stocks: if you start with them you have the whole field to yourself.

source Controversial unbelieved ideas are the most valuable so founders should pursue them

Paul Graham · published Sep 2012

Not all big hits follow the bad-idea pattern; Google seemed a bad idea only because the search market looked crowded.

There were already lots of search engines and there didn't seem to be room for another.

source Some hits like google seemed bad only due to a crowded looking market not inherent flaws

Paul Graham · published Jun 2021

The consensus about which problems are most important is often mistaken, so correctly disagreeing with it is a valuable opportunity.

source Consensus view of important problems is often mistaken so correctly disagreeing is a valuable opportunity

Paul Graham · published Oct 2009

Outside the startup world founders get no respect, partly because outsiders don't understand startups and partly because most good startup ideas seem bad.

Pitch an idea to a random person and most of the time they instinctively think it will flop.

source Outsiders give founders no respect partly because good startup ideas instinctively seem bad to them

Paul Graham · published Jul 2023

An idea others ignore, which you can say precisely what they're overlooking, is about the best bet available.

Others' lack of interest plus your specific expertise makes the opportunity unusually favorable.

source An idea others ignore that you can precisely articulate the oversight of is the best bet