Paul Graham's advice for coming up with startup ideas

December 05, 2023

Paul wrote an excellent essay on this topic: How to Get Startup Ideas.

As he explains in the clip below, the core idea is:

“If you make a conscious effort to try and think of startup ideas, you will think of ideas that are not only bad but bad and plausible-sounding—meaning you and everybody else will be fooled by them and you’ll waste a lot of time before realizing they’re no good.”

He continues:

“The way to come up with good startup ideas is to take a step back. Instead of trying to make a conscious effort to think of startup ideas, turn your brain into the type that has startup ideas unconsciously.”

Yahoo, Google, Facebook, and Apple all got started this way. None of them were supposed to be companies at first—they were all just side projects.

As Paul explains:

“The very best ideas almost have to start as side projects because they’re always such outliers that your conscious mind would reject them as ideas for companies.”

And you get your brain to have startup ideas unconsciously by:

  1. Learning a lot about things that matter

  2. Working on problems that interest you

  3. With people you like and respect (this is incidentally how you get co-founders at the same time as the idea)

In other words, learn powerful things, follow your intellectual curiosity, and work on things that stretch you. What really matters for coming up with good startup ideas is domain expertise.