[tptacek]

X for Y, where X = "Airbnb" and Y = "Large existing market poorly served by technology", is in fact a good shorthand for "frighteningly ambitious".

Literally. Airbnb is a frighteningly ambitious company. It is explosively generating value and we don't know how it's going to play out long term. It could end up with us living in caves with dogs watching out for the Terminators.

It is hard for me to take the rest of the article seriously after it suggests that "Airbnbing" auto mechanics is unambitious. It's possible that most Americans have routine car service done at dealerships where they're being routinely fleeced, and that the current crappy system of servicing vehicles is driving talent either out of the businesses or to those giant dealership shops. Have you ever tried to find a reliable mechanic? I drive an old Audi. It's painful.

[daredevildave]

I'm not sure, maybe you have a different definition of 'frighteningly ambitious' to me. What is the largest possible outcome from making it slightly easier or cheaper to repair your car? It saves a few million Americans a few hundred dollars?

My definition would be more like: sending ordinary people into space; making a mass-production electric vehicle; cheap solar power; curing flu/the common cold; inventing a new type of computing device; replacing huge incumbent companies (telcos, oil); reducing home electricity usage by >50%; inventing a new human-computer interface. Etc.

[tesseractive]

Let's say I wanted to solve a really big problem. Not something comparatively simple like "new kind of computing device", but really big. Global. Like the fact that we tear through so many natural resources because people go out and buy new equipment so often instead of getting old equipment repaired. That is a major ecological problem of the 21st Century right?

So I look into it and I discover that one of the main reasons that people replace a broken device is because it's really easy to go buy a new piece of gear (everyone wants to sell you one!), and much more trouble to track down someone who will repair an old one (properly!) and go deal with whatever's involved in getting it done.

OK, that's an interesting problem to solve, right? But if people are throwing away devices, how do you get everyone to change their behavior? That's really hard, especially for a startup with limited resources.

So what's a minimum viable product to get started with? Well, what if you started with a way to let people get their cars repaired more easily? People already get their cars repaired, and the user experience is terrible. Solve the part of the problem that people know they need solved first (car repair), then move on to convincing them they want other things repaired too. That they don't need a new gadget every two years, they just need an easy way for someone to help them keep their old one in good repair.

And if it works, that's tons (as a measurement of weight) of working devices that don't go into landfills, and tons of natural resources that aren't used up making devices to replace them. Is that ambitious enough for you?

(Note: I have no idea if this is what the founders are actually thinking or not. I just know that you can't judge the ambition of a startup from their first product.)

[tptacek]

If reconfiguring a huge chunk of the automotive industry seems unambitious to you, and the only thing that will truly impress you is orbital death rays and zero point energy, there's not a whole lot for us to discuss.

This is a silly argument. It will always be possible to name something more ambitious for a startup to do. What, you're only taking tourists into suborbital space? A truly ambitious startup would build MOON BASES.

[netcan]

Impactful changes will often significant because of their nth order, not just their direct effects.

For example, Google Adwords has completely changed how customers are acquired for a lot of industries. This changes how companies are structured, which companies succeed and how they are built. That's a big change.

Lets stretch the mechanic example. If people got better, cheaper, easier mechanics this could make them hold on to cars for longer. This could in turn change the way cars are built and change the structure of this giant industry.

[philwelch]

No startup could tackle those tasks, not on YC's scale. Any one of those is so capital intensive or research intensive you'd have to either get rich at a boring pay-people-over-the-Internet startup or be a huge corporation with research labs like Bell Labs or Xerox PARC.

A few hundred dollars for a few million Americans is a billion dollars of economic impact per year.