"Startup Ideas We'd Like to Fund" and the ensuing pandemonium

[samataro]

PG,

When does an entrepreneur stop being and entrepreneur and become an employee? A passive, unassuming employee willfully blinded by the facade of calling oneself an entrepreneur.

After reading your post "Startup Ideas We'd Like to Fund" along with 200-some comments, everything just seems watered down. It seems all too "Model T". Its as if people are willing to build these products just to build products. Wheres the passion?

Myself and fellow CS buddies have been seriously evaluating the option of applying to ycombinator with something we've have been working on. But something just doesn't feel right.

I would also argue that with ~$25,000, its not the ideas your funding Paul, its really the people.

Does anyone else feel the way i do, or is it just me ...

TC.

[pg]

I can't tell what you're asking. Are you saying that anyone who works on some type of idea an investor says they're interested in is now just an employee? Because practically all investors have ideas they wish people would propose to them, and a lot have written about them.

[eugenejen]

It is very hard to grasp what did you mean. But if you are questioning passions for ideas and entrepreneurship, then my feeling is different from yours.

When I first read the post on YC by PG, I understand PG tried to tell people this is not an inclusive list. All ideas put down by PG have a common pattern. It is PG's motto: "making something that people want". And PG also alerted the would-be applicants that not every problem is solvable only by purely engineering or computer science. Some problems require much clever hacks to acquire user bases and break out stereotypes in jaded users' mind. Of courses, some ideas that PG pointed out are traditionally viewed by startups as "suicidal" to get into territory of MS/Google.

I guess you feel frustrated because as a CS student, you probably think about the best things to save the world is to do something CS cool. But in reality, what a CS graduate can do to make people live better is probably to create an application that frustrate end user less than what users are using now. This seems so uncool. It takes more passion to care about my users to make them happy than to make myself happy. I can be happy for creating some cool hacks. But to make my users happier takes me more patience to know what they really want, more thought and effort to figure how can I create a better product. Though Model T is not a Ferrari, but I know my users are happily driving around to make their life better.

[noodle]

i don't disagree with what you're saying, but its interesting that this article about what they want to fund totally shifted what you saw.

to put money down on what is essentially nothing more than an idea, you have to be investing in the people as just as much as you're investing in the idea. a good idea backed by a team of monkeys on keyboards will surely eventually produce and launch the startup, as per the infinite monkey theorem. what you're investing in is the people backing the idea, trusting that they're quality enough to do a good job to create a good company and product.

[jeffreyjflim]

nah, it's not just you. "CS" would be? Counter-Strike?

I havent read those comments, btw. Knew something like that would happen.

[noodle]

computer science?