[elmuchoprez]

"A college kid would never have come up with what I'm building, because they wouldn't realize the problem I'm trying to solve actually exists."

This is such a key point. Sometimes it takes years, if not decades, of experience to even know that the problem exists. Put another way, if the problem can be solved by a 22-year-old with no experience in the field, there's a good chance they've misunderstood the problem.

[snorkel]

... And years of work experience to understand organizational dynamics to setup a healthy business helps too. It's more than the idea that matters, but can you build and run the team that will make that idea a reality. I know that when I was fresh out of college I didn't understand organizational dynamics at all. I've read many examples of young startups failing because of rookie management mistakes.

[6ren]

Yes, coming up with the problem is often the hard bit.

But it happens the other way too, in that many young inventors tackle problems because "they didn't realize they were 'impossible'". More knowledgeable folk can do this too, but it requires a certain... disrespect for authority. Like Einstein's flexibility with time and space (though he was young then; he didn't make breakthroughs in later life, possibly because he himself became an authority).

Fortune favours the delusional.

[beat]

It's not a matter of "didn't realize it's impossible". The problem young startup entrepreneurs have is they don't realize that valuable problems exist. Valuable problems tend to be industry-specific and narrowly defined, so you need to be at least aware of the problems of an industry, and the existing solutions/workarounds. Without industry experience at anything but being a college student and reading HN, how are you going to find problems to solve? That's why you see so many me-too social apps. You solve what you know, and if your most extensive experience with computers is Facebook and Twitter, that's your space for problems.

There are a couple of other factors to consider. First, there are problems that can be solved with new tech that couldn't be solved with old tech. The web opened up a huge front of new solutions over the past 10-20 years. Mobile is opening up another wave of solutions.

And finally, consider the "aspirin or vitamin" question. Vitamins are tempting, but aspirin sells better. Me, I'm working in more or less the monitoring space for configuration management. My key competition isn't other monitoring tools, it's the DevOps movement and automation tools like Chef and Puppet. When people have enterprise configuration management suck, those are the recommended solutions. But they're vitamins being sold as aspirin. Simply getting to where there's organizational buy-in to go to DevOps or to automate what was once manual is a whole fresh sort of pain. My competitive advantage is a near-painless dose of aspirin - immediate relief without having to change the whole model.

Ain't no college kid coming up with that.

[thisrod]

There's an obvious reason for Einstein to have gotten stuck: the subject of his later research, a quantum theory of gravity, really was too hard. The problem remains open today.

[chasing]

cough(Soylent)cough

[wahsd]

Soylent lulz as if that hasn't been done and done again. It's just snake oil under different name.

[aianus]

Please point me to an existing product I can buy today.

I've never looked forward to a product launch as much as this.

[DanBC]

Ensure (http://ensure.com/)

Fortisip (https://www.nutricia.co.uk/fortisip//)

[aianus]

Which Ensure is formulated to replace food entirely? As far as I can tell, if I drank enough ensure to get 2400 calories, the other nutrients would be out of wack. As in, a given portion does not have the same DV% of each nutrient.

I'd never heard of Fortisip but from what I can tell it and ensure are both considerably more expensive than regular food, and actually more expensive than eating out.

[DanBC]

I'm not a doctor and I'm not going to give you potentially dangerous advice for you to fuck about with while experimenting on your nutritional intake.

Recommended daily calories are 2000 for adults.

One week of soylent is $65. 48 bottles of Ensure Plus is about $80. 6 bottles of Ensure Plus would be 2100 calories.

[MDS100]

They are not marketed this way, because the producers are not insane and/or incompetent. Soylent is more expensive than eating food.

[gotrecruit]

EAS Myoplex? There are a myriad of other Meal Replacement Powders on the market that has been around for decades, some of them designed to completely replace meals with specific ratios such as 40/40/20 (protein, carbs, fat) or more commonly, low-carb versions. Seriously, go to bodybuilding.com and look under the meal replacement category and you'll find a bunch of products that has figured this shit out decades before soylent.

[rusabd]

fatty fish or fatty meat