How to get an idea for a startup

http://www.seldo.com/weblog/2008/08/04/how_to_get_an_idea_for_a_startup_move_to_the_bay

by richtaur • 18 years ago

9 11 18 years ago

swombat2• 18 years ago

The bay is necessary to get your idea in the first place. It's not because the people who live in the bay are unusually creative, it's because there are unusually large numbers of creative people in the bay.

What a load of crap. There are unusually large numbers of creative people all over the world, if you know how to recognise them.

In fact, creativity more often occurs from a meeting of unrelated ideas - and you're more likely to get that talking to someone who isn't doing the exact same job within the exact same mind-space within the same giant echo-chamber.

IsaacSchlueter• 18 years ago

But completely unrelated ideas don't spawn the kind of creativity that is really useful. The point is that you want a lot of conversation on a particular topic, and some "accidents" to occur within those conversations. If the topic is "doing stuff with computers," then you'll have more computer-related creativity coming out of a place that has a lot of computer ideas bumping into one another.

This article falls into the "why are hubs hubs?" category.

Not to nitpick, but how could there be "unusually large numbers" of anything "all over the world"? What's so unusual about that large number, if it's everywhere?

swombat2• 18 years ago

But completely unrelated ideas don't spawn the kind of creativity that is really useful.

Pretty much every idea out there can be tied back into computers. The more outlandish the idea, the more likely that the resulting union is radically new and interesting.

Not to nitpick, but how could there be "unusually large numbers" of anything "all over the world"? What's so unusual about that large number, if it's everywhere?

My point exactly.

greatreorx• 18 years ago

But completely unrelated ideas don't spawn the kind of creativity that is really useful.

I completely disagree. Intelligent people from differing fields getting together will yield creativity on par or better than when everyone from the same industry gets together. Unless your idea of useful creativity is 500 Bay area companies doing web feed readers from back a few years ago or everyone working on Facebook apps now. Alot of really great tech ideas don't come from the Bay area. You may not hear about them, but they are out there. So maybe your premise should actually be stated as:

"if you want to come up with an idea that everyone in the Bay area will like, than you should move to the Bay area."

aneesh2• 18 years ago

This doesn't make much sense. I have yet to meet an entrepreneur who struggles to come up with a great idea; in fact, most people have lots of good ideas. The idea is the easy part, executing is harder.

cperciva• 18 years ago

I have yet to meet an entrepreneur who struggles to come up with a great idea; in fact, most people have lots of good ideas.

I'm not sure about that. Most people have lots of ideas... but in my experience the overwhelming majority of these are very bad ideas.

I think it's worth considering the possibility that living in the bay area benefits startups by letting founders see lots of what does and doesn't work, and thereby helping them avoid spending time on some of their very bad ideas.

(Of course, this cuts both ways: I doubt you'd see an Amazon.com come out of someone who had spent years in the bay area -- more likely you'd get a response along the lines of "You want to sell books online? Like... dead trees? Which you have to store in warehouses and ship across the country? You should write a facebook app instead, that would be so much cooler.")

aneesh2• 18 years ago

I agree that it helps to be surrounded by smart, creative people. I also think there are decreasing marginal returns to this benefit - are 1,000 smart people really that much more useful than 100 people for bouncing ideas off of? Is Seattle, Chicago or New York really so bad? More than the Bay area, it's how resourceful you are.

Now I'm not saying the Bay Area is a bad place to be, just that you don't need to be there to come up with and work on an awesome idea. Better reasons to be in the Bay Area: Investors, investors, investors.

bigbang• 18 years ago

People move to bay area to find similar hackers and share/get-motivated from their experiences. Ofcourse the investors too. But moving to bay area to get ideas seems wierd.

curiousgeorge• 18 years ago

Reads like self-affirmation more than anything else.

Frankly, in my field the ideas that are getting funded in the Bay are mostly derivative and hardly innovative - almost everyone is trying to monetize through online advertising instead of actually selling things.

jedc• 18 years ago

My problem with this is that everybody getting their ideas in the same place quickly turns to group-think. And that breeds derivative products and services with negligable added benefit.

lbrandy• 18 years ago

A large group of like-minded people constantly conversing is also a recipe for groupthink. Yes, the Bay area is the home of most the tech startups. And curiously they all look and feel the same, imitating each other in an innumerable number of ways.

How to get an idea for a startup

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