Startup


Startups and entrepreneurship have always interested me because they are a mechanism for solving problems. At a societal level, really, the only agents of change are people who are comfortable with risk and seek a reward. Obviously, that is very well known. But it's important to look at things from a fundamental basis. So, Startups are one way to solve problems. This point comes up a lot in the Startup literature. You always hear or read that the best Startups were originally the founders trying to solve a problem they knew on a personal level. These companies didn't get founded because they wanted to be rich and famous; they started because the founders experienced a problem and wanted a solution.

Raising Canes, Airbnb, Facebook, Apple, Activision, Patagonia, and OpenAI all of these companies began with a problem. Now, the problems of not being able to find good chicken fingers and wanting to ensure the safe development of human-loving artificial intelligence are very different from eachother. However, both of these problems are similar in the fact that other people thought they were problems, too, and they would pay for a solution. Even though I've never started my own company before, it seems like there is a trap that many founders fall into. They don't pick good problems. Picking a good problem to solve is one of the most important steps because your product is limited by your problem. Your product will only be as useful to people as the problem is painful.

Painful problem: I am hungry and want chicken fingers. Not a painful problem: I need a mattress shipped to my door.

Perhaps if you pick a bad problem, you can pivot and iterate into a better one. But there is a lot to be said for starting with the right problem. And by right problem, I mean the most fundamental problem. If you think you've found a problem, you should be asking why, why, why, why is this a problem? The better ideas, products, and markets lie in the fundamental issues. If you want to solve the problems and improve the lives of the most people, you have to get down to the root of the problem. Or someone else will undercut you. They'll go deeper into the problem and make a far better product. Blockbuster-->Netflix, Blackberry-->iPhone, Google Search-->Perplexity. Of course, it seems most of the time that an advance in technology is needed to get deeper into the problem and attack it. But that advance can't happen if someone isn't thinking deeper. History shows that innovation favors the prepared and open mind. In the book Men, Machines, and Modern Times by Elting E. Morrison, the man who introduced continuous aim firing into the British navy didn't necessarily invent anything new; he just organized better what was at his disposal. So, if you want to be predisposed to identifying, capturing, and advancing new innovations, you should be curious and open-minded. For now this is all I have to say because I am still thinking about Startups.



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