Paul Graham on how to get startup ideas

December 10, 2024

“The way to get startup ideas is not to try to think of startup ideas… 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.

PG gives three tips for having startup ideas unconsciously:

  1. Learn a lot about things that matter

  2. Work on problems that interest you

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

PG explains:

“My life is full of case after case where I worked on things just because I was interested and they turned out to be useful later in some worldly way. Y Combinator itself is something I only did because it seemed interesting… If you’re interested in genuinely interesting problems, gratifying your interest energetically is the best way to prepare yourself for a startup. And, for that matter, probably the best way to live.”

To find interesting problems, PG recommends getting yourself to the leading edge of some technology and learning “powerful things.”

“The component of entrepreneurship that really matters is domain expertise. Larry Page is Larry Page because he was an expert on search. And the way he became an expert on search was because he was genuinely interested in it, not because of some ulterior motive. At its best, starting a startup is merely an ulterior motive for curiosity, and you’ll do it best if you introduce the ulterior motive at the end of the process.”

He concludes:

“So here is the ultimate advice for young, would-be startup founders reduced to two words: just learn.”

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