[efitz]

If you’re passionate about something doesn’t the problem come naturally?

It seems to me this ideation thing seems unique to people who are stuck in the ideology of “I just want to be a growth entrepreneur in startups”.

The world does not NEED startups, or entrepreneurs, or exponential growth software startups.

People need solutions to their problems, and there are very many worthy problems that will never generate exponential growth or billion dollar valuations - but the current startup culture ignores these.

[fidotron]

I don't think this is quite fair. One of the few things I think YC is right to go on about is "schlep blindness". This is essentially the observation that most people would have thought Stripe was a stupid idea, given a. we have Paypal and b. payments would be super annoying to work in.

The biggest problems we collectively have are blindingly obvious once pointed out in hindsight, but seeing them for what they are is curiously difficult.

[efitz]

Maybe I didn’t express myself well. To Jack Dorsey, making it easy for street vendors to take payments was a worthy problem. He didn’t go scouring all over doing “ideation”; he saw a problem, was passionate about it, and founded Square to solve it.

I’m not saying that I or anyone else but Jack should have a say in whether the problem was “worthy”.

[caminmccluskey]

Agreed the primary objective is solutions to problems. I tend to think the best solutions will very often come from entrepreneurs and startups but that need not always be the case.

However, on the margin, you should choose to solve the biggest problems for the most number of people. If you succeed in doing that you may be able to build a venture scale company (and arguably you should). Furthermore, it's hard to build a company either way, so you might as well try to solve the most ambitious problems you can.

On the Square point - I don't know Jack Dorsey but I would find it hard to believe that he chose the "street vendor" problem as it was the first thing worthy problem he saw after Twitter. Furthermore just the problem statement is not enough, making X easier is not an idea. *Ideation is was happens after you've noticed that initial problem.* A nuance that seems to be lost when people talk about startup ideas.

[efitz]

Here is the oral history: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Square_(financial_services)#...

[caminmccluskey]

Appreciated but what we need is the oral history of Jack Dorsey in this time period to understand if this was the only problem he was considering working on. As I say, even if that were true, the problem != the idea. The problem is a starting point for potentially many ideas.

[creer]

I'll go with "the world DOES need startups et al". I feel that one fundamental problem for humanity as a whole is the number of steady giant businesses that really don't need to do much. They have a good old process, that they can slowly - and only as necessary - iterate on. This is NOT how progress happens. So yeah, actually the world needs the few people who will notice that this or that giant slice of business is stuck and needs shaking up. THAT is how we move forward in the last few decades.

So, for one example, taxi services were complacent. And Uber and Lyft shook that up. Are Uber and Lyft perfect? No. But that's not the point. The point is that now even taxi services work better.

[majani]

The problem with passion is that most people are passionate about 3 things: food, fashion and entertainment. This makes these areas extremely saturated and further still the distribution curve of success in these fields is brutal

[Cthulhu_]

Or in the case of HN: technology, which leads to a lot of products for and by developers, or a solution looking for a problem to solve.

[efitz]

PS I have come to view “startups” as a toxic nuisance that drains away capital in hopes of winning the unicorn lottery. Very analogous to how I think of personal injury law and how litigants often are just hoping to hit a jackpot verdict.

Yes there are worthy instances of both but they seem to be a ever decreasing portion of the whole.