[edanm]

This is a great essay. But since it's long, I suspect some people won't get to the last few paragraphs, which are IMO the most important:

"The need to do something unscalably laborious to get started is so nearly universal that it might be a good idea to stop thinking of startup ideas as scalars. Instead we should try thinking of them as pairs of what you're going to build, plus the unscalable thing(s) you're going to do initially to get the company going."

As someone in the "Startup Scene" for many years, and especially as a Software Consultant, I've talked with hundreds of people about their startups. And this is probably the number one insight I wish more people had - startups are not just "having an idea" (what people used to think), they're also not just "idea * execution" (which is a great concept but incomplete). Rather, the fundamental building blocks of a startup is "what are you doing" and "how are you getting users". Almost everything else can be missing in the high level discussion, but not those two. It's taken me many years to understand this, and PG just put it in a very succint form.