[Detrus]

Paul Graham said don't attack the problem head on. Make a beachhead. Supposedly these seemingly dull ideas are beachheads.

That was covered in a previous HN discussion about a similar article questioning YC startup ideas in practice.

But something like Dropbox seems to have a hard time scaling out, exploring other ideas, and that's with a founder who wants to build a big company like Apple.

Even if you start with a beachhead, it should be one that can grow. Apple started with a PC, to grow they made more and better PCs. Microsoft/Gates started with BASIC then pivoted drastically to an idea that could grow, an OS for PCs. What will Dropbox grow or pivot to in order to be an Apple size company? Hard to imagine backups for teams or iCloud but OS independent will be the ticket.

[Suan]

Supposedly these seemingly dull ideas are beachheads.

Are they really, though? It seems to me that many successful startups are simply bought over by another big company and their "beachhead" is eventually lost in the acquiring behemoth.

[mikk0j]

This beachhead thinking is key. The trouble is that it is harder to represent in the “we’re X for Y” way, which is usually the thing that sticks with the audience (which is also the reason why it works so well).

[Detrus]

But an X for Y beachhead doesn't make the current idea scalable. Perhaps it's a beachhead for the founder to get a reputation so maybe one day he can try a scalable idea, either in the current company or some future one. But it doesn't mean the pivot will be related to the current X for Y.

It worked out for Microsoft. But somewhat contradictory to this scenario Paul Graham also said to start chipping at the ambitious idea because starting companies is hard anyway.

So looking at seemingly dull ideas of YC, is there some way for them to scale without pivoting as far as Microsoft did?

[anthonyb]

dailyllama, looks like you've been hellbanned. None of your comments are out of order or trolling, so I thought I'd let you know. You might be able to contact someone at ycombinator and get yourself re-instated.

If ever someone wants to know why hellbanning is stupid, you can point them here...