<story><title>Frighteningly Unambitious Startup Ideas</title><url>http://ardenthoughts.tumblr.com/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jrkelly</author><text>I wasn&apos;t at the Demo Day, but it&apos;s hard to consider making car repair more efficient to be a problem that really matters.  Not saying it can&apos;t be a decent business, but your essay about ambitious ideas was pushing people to do better.</text></item><item><author>pg</author><text>&quot;If I were Paul Graham, these types of companies simply would not satisfy me (despite what look to be very lucrative payoffs).&quot;&lt;p&gt;That&apos;s hilarious, because I&apos;m the one who wrote all the summaries
of the startups that she&apos;s judging them by.  I deliberately express
startup ideas as x for y whenever possible because that&apos;s the most
efficient way to describe a startup in a few words.  Airbnb, for
example, was in its day &quot;eBay for space.&quot;&lt;p&gt;On Demo Day we accompany each startup&apos;s name with a brief summary
of what they&apos;re doing.  The goal of these summaries is not to convey
the full breadth of a startup&apos;s eventual ambitions, or even what
they&apos;re currently doing, but just to help investors watching 65
presentations remember which company is doing what.   TechCrunch
reused these descriptions, as reporters often do.  And now this
woman has read the summaries printed in TechCrunch and is treating
them as if that were all there was to know about the startup.  It&apos;s
like a game of Telephone (&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_whispers&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_whispers&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;p&gt;My standard advice to startups presenting to investors is that it&apos;s
better to start with an overly narrow description of what you do,
so that investors at least know what you&apos;re talking about, and then
expand from there.&lt;p&gt;See &lt;a href=&quot;http://paulgraham.com/investors.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://paulgraham.com/investors.html&lt;/a&gt;, particularly items 1 and
14.&lt;p&gt;It&apos;s surprising to me that someone who wasn&apos;t even at Demo Day would
feel confident enough to judge the startups&apos; originality based on
the 3-5 word summaries we use on the schedule to help investors
keep them straight in their heads.&lt;p&gt;I was about to say that it&apos;s also surprising that people would
upvote such a post.  But on reflection it&apos;s not that surprising.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>tptacek</author><text>I am just baffled by the idea that people here think there isn&apos;t a huge dent to be made in the universe in auto repair. There are 723,400 auto mechanics in the US alone, making a median of $35k in an incredibly inefficient marketplace that fleeces and inflicts misery on millions of working class families (who get to work and their kids to school in cars, not fixies) &lt;i&gt;every year&lt;/i&gt;.</text></comment>
<story><title>Frighteningly Unambitious Startup Ideas</title><url>http://ardenthoughts.tumblr.com/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jrkelly</author><text>I wasn&apos;t at the Demo Day, but it&apos;s hard to consider making car repair more efficient to be a problem that really matters.  Not saying it can&apos;t be a decent business, but your essay about ambitious ideas was pushing people to do better.</text></item><item><author>pg</author><text>&quot;If I were Paul Graham, these types of companies simply would not satisfy me (despite what look to be very lucrative payoffs).&quot;&lt;p&gt;That&apos;s hilarious, because I&apos;m the one who wrote all the summaries
of the startups that she&apos;s judging them by.  I deliberately express
startup ideas as x for y whenever possible because that&apos;s the most
efficient way to describe a startup in a few words.  Airbnb, for
example, was in its day &quot;eBay for space.&quot;&lt;p&gt;On Demo Day we accompany each startup&apos;s name with a brief summary
of what they&apos;re doing.  The goal of these summaries is not to convey
the full breadth of a startup&apos;s eventual ambitions, or even what
they&apos;re currently doing, but just to help investors watching 65
presentations remember which company is doing what.   TechCrunch
reused these descriptions, as reporters often do.  And now this
woman has read the summaries printed in TechCrunch and is treating
them as if that were all there was to know about the startup.  It&apos;s
like a game of Telephone (&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_whispers&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_whispers&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;p&gt;My standard advice to startups presenting to investors is that it&apos;s
better to start with an overly narrow description of what you do,
so that investors at least know what you&apos;re talking about, and then
expand from there.&lt;p&gt;See &lt;a href=&quot;http://paulgraham.com/investors.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://paulgraham.com/investors.html&lt;/a&gt;, particularly items 1 and
14.&lt;p&gt;It&apos;s surprising to me that someone who wasn&apos;t even at Demo Day would
feel confident enough to judge the startups&apos; originality based on
the 3-5 word summaries we use on the schedule to help investors
keep them straight in their heads.&lt;p&gt;I was about to say that it&apos;s also surprising that people would
upvote such a post.  But on reflection it&apos;s not that surprising.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>yabbadabbadoo</author><text>He also says this in that same essay -&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;If you want to take on a problem as big as the ones I&apos;ve discussed, don&apos;t make a direct frontal attack on it. Don&apos;t say, for example, that you&apos;re going to replace email. If you do that you raise too many expectations. Empirically, the way to do really big things seems to be to start with deceptively small things. Want to dominate microcomputer software? Start by writing a Basic interpreter for a machine with a few thousand users.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;So for all we know, there are a bunch of YC companies aiming to take over the world, but we just don&apos;t know about them since they start off by tackling a very specific, narrow niche. Take greplin for example. I could envision the founders aiming to eat Google&apos;s lunch one day, but they certainly didn&apos;t launch by announcing that to the public.</text></comment>