sfpirate

Compare Evernote with Google Keep. The latter, which came out later, converted me to use the former. You have nothing to worry about. A big company sucks at copying ideas. An innovative big company gives incentives to defensive maneuvers like this, but never sees them through to an offensive maneuver unless there's billions at immediate risk. If anything, Google is doing you a favor by shining the spotlight on a mediocre solution. All you need now is the product to tap into that dissatisfied channel. They just validated the significance of your market for you. Good luck!

It's along the lines of how to come up with good ideas, but I'm not sure that it's actionable. Almost every problem I think about could be reasonably solved by the next guy. There's the other caveat that if you don't have other people working on similar things you're probably working on a pain point nobody has. I like PG's more actionable approach about picking problems you yourself experience, regardless of who else might be working on it.

That's the first thing that popped into my head. I've spent 5 years in that building. Never realized the man continued to be so successful. It's interesting how people who really change the world can be so low-ego.

Outside the Bay Area, few people know about YC. An article in 2006 by pg made me plan for 3 years to finally move to SF in 2009 (I had googled "how to start a company"). There are a lot of ambitious people out there that don't even realize people here compete for not having a job. Articles like this can change lives if they can raise that awareness through the right channels. Thanks for taking the time to publish it.