Ask PG: What Is The Most Frighteningly Ambitious Idea You Have Been Pitched On?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4509934

by npguy • 14 years ago

407 189 14 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

cperciva• 14 years ago

Posting an "Ask PG" at 3 AM Pacific time seems frighteningly ambitious to me.

npguy4• 14 years ago

:-) 3 AM is not that bad, or is it?

svs• 14 years ago

Isn't PG on the Maker Schedule?

nsmartt• 14 years ago

Being on the Maker schedule doesn't imply being awake at 3 AM.

arctangent• 14 years ago

There is a useful tool to suggest the best times to post a new thread: http://hnpickup.appspot.com

Is anyone aware of something similar which breaks this down by type of thread?

npguy4• 14 years ago

I must have used that for my show HN post.

I was wondering why it was almost a dead response, While I have seen good response for similar show HN posts.

anyways the post is here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4495098

alpb• 14 years ago

Am I the only one getting some text on gray background without any graphics or charts on this page?

smiler• 14 years ago

Not really - PG will see it eventually

loceng• 14 years ago

Even if he did see it, I don't imagine it's something he'd respond to - or perhaps even could respond to.

kmfrk• 14 years ago

pg doesn't sleep; he waits.

TeMPOraL4• 14 years ago

And yet it worked!

tribeofone2• 14 years ago

Not an idea, but I have to say I was blown away by the first meeting I was in with a company that said they were trying to exit for $1B.

This pretty much summed up my reaction: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z1CEbl9cK3o&t=3m7s

markmm3• 14 years ago

Did they ever make it?

tribeofone2• 14 years ago

Still working on it. They were serious though. Probably end up short of that, but not by much.

bhousel• 14 years ago

Wow, what industry? Healthcare? Telecom? Can't think of too many that could credibly claim a $1B exit.

hollerith3• 14 years ago

Huh? I have been assuming that a large fraction of VC-funded startups try for exits of at least $1 billion. (The more rational ones know they will probably fail, but that does not prevent their sincerely aiming for that target.)

I am almost certain their investors want them to aim at least that high.

Are you sure you're not confusing billion and trillion?

ADDED. I'm not trying to appear bad-ass or hardcore (and in fact, I've never been a founder because I judge that I cannot afford that level of risk of being left with a severely suboptimal monetary reward for my efforts). I am honestly trying to understand VC-funded startups.

mcartyem• 14 years ago

Also, what is an idea you have been pitched on that seemed bad to you that you can't tell yet if it's a good idea.

jtheory• 14 years ago

"Most of them" seems to be the likely answer to this one. Including most of the real winners.

Wilya• 14 years ago

I don't see any way for him to give an answer to this that wouldn't cause hundreds of people to apply to the next YC with the exact same idea (or with the same idea with tiny meaningless variations).

Not sure if that would benefit anyone.

NameNickHN• 14 years ago

I'm pretty sure that hundreds of people already are applying with the exact same idea. PG's answer wouldn't make much difference.

darylteo• 14 years ago

Something Something Something Social Network.

chmike• 14 years ago

How would one make the difference between frighteningly ambitious, crazy or stupid ?

MPSimmons2• 14 years ago

They all kind of look the same in the beginning, don't they?

MattGrommes• 14 years ago

That reminds me of Peter Thiel's Venn diagram of 'Sounds like a bad idea' and 'Is a good idea'. It's a pretty slim area in the middle and the 'Sounds like' part means it's hard to know until you do it.

Alex39172• 14 years ago

How would you even know? Sometimes the most ambitious ideas don't require more than a few hundred lines of code. It's often how you want the rest of the world to use your product that makes it ambitious, not the product itself.

numeromancer• 14 years ago

DFFT FTW!

bfe2• 14 years ago

"We want to make our own rockets and spaceships from scratch. But that's just the beginning, to pave the way to settling Mars and making it affordable for middle-class customers to relocate to Mars." I imagine if Elon Musk had pitched SpaceX for YC, it would be a strong candidate for this.

api• 14 years ago

You can't compare comic book superheroes to normal people. :)

Eliezer7• 14 years ago

You kinda can. Life isn't a comic book, and if you saw Elon Musk when he was 15, he wouldn't have any special aura of destiny glowing around him. I'm not saying that everyone can grow up to be Elon Musk, but he didn't have any sort of special license which allowed him to do it, either. In the end, superheroes are composed of people who try to become superheroes even though the rest of the world spends the first decade thinking they're committing lese majeste because they don't have a superhero license.

mej106• 14 years ago

Yeah, pretty much any of his recent ideas/companies are "frighteningly ambitious".

I do wonder how YC would handle someone that is as ambitious and skilled as Musk, but without his financial success. (Un?)Fortunately for them I think that is a pretty rare combination, so they probably don't have to worry too much.

stickfigure• 14 years ago

It is a mantra here that there is an enormous amount of timing and luck involved in creating a successful startup.

I would expect the majority of people with Musk's skill and ambition to lack his level of financial success. Certainly the percentages will be better than the general population, but it's not guaranteed or even likely.

EGreg• 14 years ago

I think it's pretty clear that the amounts YC invests wouldn't be enough to really "build an MVP" for Elon Musk's ideas. It's not something you do unless you already have a lot of money.

Elon Musk talks about this, in one of his interviews, how Tesla and SpaceX are something that requires a lot of money to begin with. Because they are big risks.

patmcguire• 14 years ago

Might not have ever pitched pg, since they're hardware and probably needed a bigger initial investment than YC does to make sense, but Blue River Technologies is probably the most ambitious thing I've heard of.

http://techcrunch.com/2012/09/10/blue-river-technology-raise...

The original product was a robot that zapped weeds with lasers, they switched to a superheated oil because it's cheap enough to be practical.

kristofer• 14 years ago

a guy who claimed that high speed Internet service could be delivered ove the magnetic field of AC power lines and into homes. wanted USGovt to mandate it because it was so amazing and cheap.

ig13• 14 years ago

Presumably PG can't answer because of confidentiality, but the the most ambitious one I've heard is a pitch for a company claiming they could build a trillion dollar company.

(They were working on a cement/concrete replacement that was cleaner and cheaper)

MPSimmons2• 14 years ago

Was that the company that said they could make concrete that extracted carbon from air?

ig13• 14 years ago

Don't remember the details, Khosla was an investor though.

mpwh• 14 years ago

Why does this post have so many points?

teffen• 14 years ago

What kind of question is that? The submission's points are awarded by the users who find the content interesting.

mbrubeck• 14 years ago

That's pretty common when an "Ask PG" post gets an answer from pg. A lot of HN members are highly interested in pg's thoughts.

Eliezer7• 14 years ago

We never pitched him on the Singularity Institute (http://singularity.org/research/), but I doubt he's ever been seriously pitched on anything more ambitious than "build a recursively self-improving Artificial Intelligence with a stable, specifiable goal system so that it can improve into a superintelligence and do world optimization." If he's been pitched on anything more frightening than that, I'd really like to know what.

ajuc• 14 years ago

I think "build a recursively self-improving Artificial Intelligence WITHOUT a stable, specifiable goal system so that it can improve into a superintelligence and do world optimization" is more frightening, even if less ambitious :)

seiji2• 14 years ago

Honest question: Does SI actually do anything other than hold conferences and take donations so smart people don't have to get real jobs?

mikedmiked• 14 years ago

If thats an honest question: http://singularity.org/what-we-do/

There exists an axis which all institutions lie upon where (i) those that do direct business and support short-term incremental innovations exist on the left hand side, and (ii) abstract research institutes supporting long-term paradigm shifts of innovation exist on the right had side.

Both serve the same ultimate purpose.

sorry for grammar i'm tired.

brackin• 14 years ago

Totally agree. Ambitious is not the same as pompous, people forget that.

For example: We are building a social platform that will change the way the upper class communicates with a chat-site exclusively for the rich as We are building technology that gets removes the need for cars and allows people to get around faster and safer.

decode• 14 years ago

A cynic would say that the main activity of SI's Research Fellows is to type up their Science Fiction and Philosophy musings and upload them as PDFs to their website. Someone less cynical would say that these musings are fundamental research in the area of self-replicating AIs that will enable other people to build said AIs in the future.

I tend to lean toward the cynical interpretation.

Eliezer7• 14 years ago

My hope is that if the spun-off Center for Applied Rationality takes off, we can all get out of the business of "Trying to explain to people why this an urgent problem that needs funding" and get back to "Actually researching the problem." It does take more than 2 people to actually research the problem (we know, we tried it with two people) and up until just recently there wasn't a very obvious path to how to find and fund 3 or more. Of course we've also produced various think-tank-ish analytic papers along that trajectory, whose value is not zero, but actual serious end-of-the-world basic-math research has always required more funding and more attention than we had.

All I can say is - it's starting to look like it did work (the "spend years convincing people to fund it" path) and it's not at all obvious even in retrospect what else we could've done.

reinhardt• 14 years ago

After PG's response, chance are you'd be filed under "unconvincingly pitched frighteningly ambitious ideas".

pg• 14 years ago

I'm sorry if this is an unsatisfying answer, but if you mean convincingly pitched, I couldn't answer a question like that without disclosing the long-term plans of startups that would prefer to keep them secret.

If you mean unconvincingly pitched, it would probably be the applications we get from people who've discovered new power sources that violate the laws of physics.

npguy4• 14 years ago

Thanks PG! More or less knew this would be the response :-) Can you at least share the domain e.g. Mobile apps or personal finance etc?

Eliezer7• 14 years ago

Can you say where the scariest and most ambitious convincing pitch was on the following scale?

1) We're going to build the next Facebook!

2) We're going to found the next Apple!

3) Our product will create sweeping political change! This will produce a major economic revolution in at least one country! (Seasteading would be change on this level if it worked; creating a new country successfully is around the same level of change as this.)

4) Our product is the next nuclear weapon. You wouldn't want that in the wrong hands, would you?

5) This is going to be the equivalent of the invention of electricity if it works out.

6) We're going to make an IQ-enhancing drug and produce basic change in the human condition.

7) We're going to build serious Drexler-class molecular nanotechnology.

8) We're going to upload a human brain into a computer.

9) We're going to build a recursively self-improving Artificial Intelligence.

10) We think we've figured out how to hack into the computer our universe is running on.

xiaoma• 14 years ago

What a way to reframe the entire conversation like a boss. Prior to reading your comment, I thought my scale went from 1 to 10, but it only went from 1 to 2.

ph0rque8• 14 years ago

Eliezer, I believe you just created the Yudkowsky Ambition scale.

My startup, http://automicrofarm.com/, rates between a 3 and a 5, depending on how successful it becomes, in my opinion.

mej106• 14 years ago

So anything > 3 requires a bunch of "hard science". That does a great job of highlighting the fact that almost all of the readers of HN will be incapable of producing any of these.

Time for a career change.

lionheart• 14 years ago

And now I have to rescale all my ambitions

tel2• 14 years ago

I don't think this scale applies so well in the healthcare vertical. Any major healthcare breakthrough is going to hit the latter half of 6 at least a bit, but I'm not sure that those all induce changes that scale above 5.

T_S_2• 14 years ago

I think I am at 0.25 on this scale.

sskates• 14 years ago

I know within my own batch (W12) the highest a startup pitched itself at demo day was about a 2.5- creating a company substantially bigger than Apple. I wouldn't be surprised if you could find a 4 or 5 somewhere in in all of YC with something along the lines of creating the next version of the internet (especially from the startups doing hardware). The tradeoff there is the variance is even higher; doing a software startup is safe, relatively speaking!

croddin• 14 years ago

Where does Planetary Resources rank on this scale?

Futurebot• 14 years ago

After reading the original essay from PG, I was hoping that this comment would finally appear. I think number 3 would start at "frightening." Anything below that would simply be "quite" or "very."

4) Amazingly 5) Terrifyingly 6) Shockingly! 7) Mind-bendingly 8) Unbelievably 9) Universe-changing 10) Alpha-Omegaly!

davidgerard• 14 years ago

Where would the World Wide Web be on this scale? It would look below 4, but one instance of it, Wikileaks, arguably sparked several revolutions and is a 3 by itself.

sanj• 14 years ago

Where does the internet fit into this hierarchy?

How about the web?

3-6

wamatt• 14 years ago

11) Become the universe

Used to joke with my friends about this, as the most ambitious goal of any rational entity in maximizing the existence utility function.

"Happiness" etc are human factors, while obviously relevant to us now, and may not exist down the line.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_theory

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matrioshka_brain

Co-operative existence models of super massive intelligent entities (like Matrioshka brains), could equally end up being dominant vs 'last man standing' scenarios. But at least in LMS (which of course we are not fans of), there is no doubt as to the eventual outcome.

writetoalok2• 14 years ago

> We think we've figured out how to hack into the computer our universe is running on

Not sure someone with that kind of access will need seed funding with YCombinator or anywhere else. Unless their hack is unproven and unreliable, and up for immediate rejection.

chronophilic• 14 years ago

Does anyone know of a sort of hacker news for 3 and up?

I think it would be good for my blood pressure to find a place where people don't equate "changing the world!" with "finding a new way to sell socks on the internet!"

leolalabs• 14 years ago

...Its interesting....before Google all the investors were saying that you could not compete against yahoo....and before you could not compete against IBM....and you could not compete aganits microsoft....All this was BS then and it is all BS today...

TikiTDO• 14 years ago

Oh finally, now I can just say I'm 10 on the Yudkowsky Ambition scale. You've saved me much explaining.

mammalfriend• 14 years ago

This is neat. Just keep in mind that there's a difference between transformative innovation and a successful business.

minm• 14 years ago

Few years back, this guy (Ramar Pillai) fooled the whole country and if i remember correctly even got the audience from Indian PM and State Chief Minister. Probably the best pitch ever :).

He claimed he can turn water into fuel using some herbs :).

http://8ate.blogspot.com/2009/09/pramar-pillai-herbal-fuel-m...

brudgers• 14 years ago

"violate the laws of physics"

I suspect the convincing ones violate conventional wisdom, best practices, and to a certain degree, common sense.

hammock• 14 years ago

Appreciate the honesty in revealing that the biggest idea you've been pitched you can't actually talk about. But how about not taking the easy way out and instead answering what is the most frighteningly ambitious idea you have been convincingly pitched that you can talk about?

seiji2• 14 years ago

Just wake up your inner pg: airbnb, dropbox, that new skateboard thinggy.

run4yourlives• 14 years ago

I swear to you - cold fusion is real. I have a reactor in my basement.

hluska• 14 years ago

Several years ago, a good friend came to me and excitedly pitched his latest invention - perpetual motion. He grew more and more animated as he explained how his device used magnets...

Being young, I drew a diagram showing why it would fail. With each line, I could sense him deflating, but I kept drawing. Finally, by the time I brought up Newton, I realized that I'd gone too far.

Our friendship didn't really work out too well after that and I still feel somewhat guilty...

podperson• 14 years ago

Once upon a time a good friend tried to convert me to Scientology. That didn't work out so well for our friendship either. All I did was ask to see him levitate...

hkmurakami• 14 years ago

This reminds me of Jeff Bezos' anecdote about telling his grandmother how much her smoking had shortened her life.

http://www.princeton.edu/main/news/archive/S27/52/51O99/inde...

its_so_on• 14 years ago

Thank you very much for taking this step. (Not disclosing long-term plans just because they're frighteningly ambitious). Hopefully this goes double for ideas you chose not to take 7% of for a couple of grand :)

(As that adds real injury to mere insult.)

I genuinely appreciate it.

jameslevy• 14 years ago

The irony is that over the next few decades, maybe it will turn out that the single biggest YC black swan could be a new power source that appears to violate the laws of physics.

systems• 14 years ago

i dont like ideas that need to be kept a secret, i think its just psychological or emotional to feel or think you need to keep your idea a secret to increase its chance of success

if its so easy to execute and replicate ... its not much of an idea ...

Tycho• 14 years ago

Huh?! But ideas are worthless anyway, everyone knows that.

runjake• 14 years ago

Was pg ever pitched on Instagram? Because a "picture service that gets sold for $1B" sounds frighteningly ambitious.

mikeleeorg• 14 years ago

I don't think Instagram set out to be acquired for $1B. That was just a pleasant after-effect. And here's pg's answer on what he would have done had he been pitched on Instagram:

"Instagram is the one we'd most likely have missed. It all depends when we'd talked to them. They were a kind of overnight success in traffic. If we'd talked to them even a day after they launched we would certainly have said yes. But before that it might have seemed too speculative."

Source: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4497517

001sky• 14 years ago

These guys did invest in instagram. But...

When we invested in Instagram, it wasn’t actually Instagram. It was a company called Burbn, and the idea was roughly to build a mobile micro blogging service. Technologically, it was also different: an HTML 5 application rather than a native app...

Of course you never know what then happens. Instagram pivots to photos, and exits at ~$1B. But...

As Kevin iterated on Burbn, we made another investment in an excellent entrepreneur, Dalton Caldwell. Dalton’s company, Mixed Media Labs, initially built a product called PicPlz. PicPlz aime d to be a mobile photo sharing service...

Of course, now Dalton (as app.net) is doing what instagram (then as Burbn) set out to do - a micro-blogging service.

So, there ya go...the ol' switcheroo ;D

neurotech1• 14 years ago

I'm going to speculate for a bit, and say that some of the "Frighteningly Ambitious" ideas probably involve hardware or hardware/software combinations. Kickstarter is full of updates on how getting designs into production is harder than expected.

johnrgrace• 14 years ago

Now I think I'm going to have to troll some Angel investors I know, shoot for about 4/5

femto• 14 years ago

I'd like to write a program, which uses Quantum Electrodynamics to simulate an electron in the presence of a point charge (ie. an hydrogen atom).

Next, I'd like to run two instances, put them in the same space and see if the simulation spontaneously forms an hydrogen molecule.

I'd then like to add a second electron, and see if the result was an Helium atom.

Keep adding electrons until the simulation can do 6 and 8 electrons (carbon and hydrogen).

Now, I'd like to put all three types of simulated atoms (H,C,O) in the same space and see if the result is organic chemistry. At this point, additional optimisations might be necessary, maybe along the lines of starting the simulation by computing simplified models and using those where full accuracy is not required.

I'd then like to continue building the system up, adding optimisations as necessary. Keep adding atoms, and seeing if ever more complex molecules result. Extend to atoms with additional electrons as required (eg. need to add Nitrogen for DNA bases).

At some point, custom hardware would be required. First GPUs/FPGAs, then custom silicon, and whatever else is state-of-the-art at the time.

See how far the optimise/extend cycle can be pushed. Amino acids, DNA, proteins, cells, organs, organisms?

Who knows how far it would get? It might remain an interesting toy, at the 0 level. The closer it is to simulating a human, the closer it is to an 9 or 10 on the "Yudkowsky Ambition Scale". --- update: spelling

constantin• 14 years ago

we can see the websites? Where started your startup?

Ask PG: What Is The Most Frighteningly Ambitious Idea You Have Been Pitched On?

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