# Dalton & Michael: Should you follow your passion?

**Author:** Dalton Caldwell, Michael Seibel
**Type:** Video
**URL:** https://www.ycombinator.com/library/DW-dalton-michael-should-you-follow-your-passion
**YouTube ID:** KWNNmPCF-Xs

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Dalton Caldwell and Michael Seibel talk about solutions in search of a problem, whether or not to follow your passion,
how to figure out what to work on, and how to motivate yourself.   
  
We asked YC founders: Is there a simple fact you wish you knew when you started your company or a rookie mistake you
wish you could take back?

## Transcript

guess what gives you passion you want to hear the secret guess what keeps you attached to an idea that damn thing working success users revenue numbers that makes a lot of these folks that have no particular ideas suddenly care a lot more when they actually are running a business that appears to be working hey this is michael seibel with dalton caldwell and welcome to rookie mistakes we ask yc founders for their rookie mistakes so we can share them with you and help you avoid them yc founder wrote

in said we chose to create a company around a hot technology we were really excited about the tech we eventually raised funds because there were enough investors who were excited about it too but now looking back i think we had it backwards we were the classic silicon valley startup in search of a problem michael let's start with the definition of solution in search of a problem what do we mean by that solution of search for a problem is where you build a thing and you're like we have this thing

we just need to find someone who wants it we need to find a use for it we have we have the solution and let's go out and find a problem for it and you know as long as technology has existed um this has been an issue remember um reading about the patent system you know there's millions of patents for products like better mouse traps or whatever that there's actually no market for whatsoever and so this is you know as long as humans have been banging rocks together there have been rocks that were not that were uh solutions but they weren't uh useful for anybody and so look this

happens a lot with technologists that happens a lot with silicon valley where they start with the technology they think is cool and they try to find a market for it second now the core thing that i want to talk about here that you sort of zeroed on is founders with no particular opinions about what the market should be and no um ideas on who the customers are or or anything they're just sort of floating in space the best explanation that i come up with is that there's a bit of a school metaphor here i think that people are trained in school for so long that they try to see

startups like school and in school you're not really rewarded for having opinions on things you're rewarded for accomplishing specific tasks and so you're also rewarded when you're doing things that your smart friends are also doing and so i think when they apply that model to their startups they think okay someone invested in me that's an obvious that's like getting an a on a paper right um i'm doing an idea that my friends

think is really cool that's like getting into a college my friends think is really cool right it's just kind of this rinse and repeat of the strategy that's worked for them in the past well and you see the superficial similarity between what you're doing and things that appear to be working and you try to hide from the fact that you have no idea what you're doing or you don't believe it you have no particular opinion of what it is and so you so it's what's brutal about this is you have to really look in the mirror and understand the difference between

superficial similarity of what you're doing and kind of going through the motions versus the damn thing actually working you know we talked about the surface issues let's go deeper how are you actually supposed to figure out what to work on like that's the real thing okay so let's say you find yourself attracted to this stuff and you're like all right i believe you i believe you dalton i'm not going to do a blank startup because it's the coolest technology right now how do i forget what to work on you know i think a lot of people get

told to follow your passion you know i'm looking for a project a project again that's a good tell if you call it a project um that's a bad sign we're looking for a project we are very passionate about and so you sort of go through this like spirit journey of what all the problems are that face humanity or something and so you're like okay michael we figured out our passion is the environment yep

that's our startup and so so again like i think when people give the advice of like follow your passion they're trying to be hopeful what do you think what do you think that actually means in a way that is that is actionable when someone is saying that what does it mean to follow your passion when you're fighting i want to break this down part one there are people out there that have real problems that encounter real problems on a daily basis um

they are passionate about solving those real problems and they can actually see even in their mvps the problems being solved i think for those people i want to push them to solve the real problems in their lives i think there's a whole set of other people who don't have very many problems in their life and i think those people kind of reach for like the un problems or the global prop right the problems that like they are told they should care about but they

don't really encounter in a day to day and they can't really tell whether they're improving them or not and so i think you know you and i always kind of get get into a debate on this because you know for that person who grew up i mean we have funded people who like in their country when you try to swipe a bank card the transaction doesn't go through like two out of uh out of five times and it's you know and we've funded them and they've actually fixed that and that

wasn't a theoretical problem but that turned into actually improving banking in their country right then we funded other people who absolutely didn't didn't have that so to me i'm happy to talk about the other things that you can trigger on if you don't have that real problem in your life but what do you think about the people who do have the real problem in their lives and they're going after it i think in terms of this passion thing like let's go let's dig way back into history yes um what was the genesis of the companies

microsoft and apple i mean microsoft you know flashback to the 70s my recollection of the story is it was some folks that really liked computers when they were a new thing and someone needed to port basic which was a programming language onto some weird hardware sold out of a strip mall in albuquerque you know and so these were just folks that were really into this weird niche thing but no one told them to go work on micro computers

they weren't following you know their their professors weren't telling them that it was a great market i don't think anyone would have but there wasn't any of that stuff they probably wouldn't be working on that stuff even if there was no money in it right yeah they were that was that's how i define passion is would you do would you be doing this stuff even if you didn't make any money doing it yes you know yes and i think with apple same deal like you know they were working on stuff they thought was cool like homebrew computer club and welding excuse me um soldering stuff in your garage and trying to make software

run on it that was i think how they were passionate about the ideas and so going back to having an opinion or being passionate i think it's finding stuff that like you care about even if there was no money in it and that you're doing it even if there's no approval from it from authority figures it's a bit of an anti-authoritarian deal that you're like yeah i know this is stupid but i think it's cool and i know everyone thinks it's stupid i think the no money of it in it is like the easy one i think the no approval

from authority fig like you can't imagine yourself becoming elon musk solving this problem you can't imagine the press loving you you can't imagine because like i would argue that when elon musk was starting he couldn't imagine that that would you know how much of a cinderella story he's become right and so i i do feel like there's this like i'm gonna be fulfilled if i solve this problem even if no one else gives a so

that is an area of okay i'm passionate about a problem i would argue that in a lot of the teams that we fund two three four founders they're not all equally passionate about the problem right that's hard right like oh we're all in love with this so one of the things that i've thought about a lot is what are the other things you can be passionate about in the context of startups that can motivate you to grind it out for years because like that's the bar right like

what are you gonna work on when everyone thinks it's a great point four years so so again like let's to to dispute what we ourselves are saying right to have a debate with ourselves look the problem with being like 19 or 20 is a lot of people aren't passionate about many things and they all tend to have the same startup ideas and so let me give you a great example i want to find a way to plan to do activities in the real world with my friends it's too

hard to coordinate and plan activities with them and so i'm really passionate about this michael this is my one of my biggest problems in life this is my we thought about it solving this finding a way to coordinate going out with my friends is like the biggest problem we know about we care about we're experts so you know we're gonna do it what these people don't know is this is literally the most common college kid idea that's been tried for at least 20 years right nope well they would know if they did any google searching

but they're experts so they don't have to do any google searching well you know michael the no one just implemented correctly see we have a better ui dynamic yeah so all the thousands of companies that tried this they were all wrong and we're right i'm passionate by voice that was the problem so where i'm going with this is to the extent that the stuff that you care about the most is the same as everyone else or you don't actually have unique passions you might

want to zoom out a little bit and not have passion be your primary mode of making a decision because guess what's really fun guess what gives you passion you want to hear the secret guess what's keeps you attached to an idea that damn thing working success users revenue numbers that makes a lot of these folks that have no particular ideas suddenly care a lot more when they actually are running a business that appears to be working do you know how fun that is i don't think people get this

running a startup that is not working is not fun if every day you wake up and it feels bad and you feel like you're like free falling or something and you're like you know the music is going to stop you know you're dead okay running something that's working where you're getting customers and every day you see your like stripe account inching up where you're making thousands or tens of thousands of dollars is awesome and you might actually develop passion for the thing you're working on and come to understand your customers problems um

because the gravity of the damn thing working brings you in deeper and deeper this shocks a lot of young teams have you seen this michael where teams with no ideas that somehow find like a business that works or that there's market demand for suddenly fall in love with the thing they're working on talk to me about some of that that was twitch that that's exactly twitch so you know in my mind um the thing that gave kept us motivated with justin.tv and twitch

was that users wanted to stream live video online and i can't say that we were that passionate about streaming live video online but certainly when we put something out there we started people seeing people use it they were and even though the company wasn't doing well for years we always had a lot of traffic you know like the company wasn't doing well and we had like 30 million monthly visitors like we were streaming like years of video to them and so

it was shocking how like we didn't lose employees as fast as you would think like once you had something going keeping it going was was motivation in and of itself and the other thing i was thinking about when you were talking was like i always like sports analogies on this right like is the person who becomes the best in some sport the person who was nerding out on it the earliest or is the person who's a great athlete

and when they play the sport they do well and they're like oh like i'm pretty fast like like oh like i can i can do this oh like i can jump higher than my friends when i'm playing against my friends i'm disproportionately doing better and then that creates the positive feedback losing yeah like i want to do better i want to do better now i'm going to become a student of the sport now i'm going to specialize now i'm going to but it started by like oh this is fun because i'm doing well

and so i think feels good exactly winning feels it's it's that simple and so when i talk to founders about this i say hey look you got a team of two three four people um maybe you're gonna have one or two who are passionate about the problem because they've experienced it or because it's a life work or so and so forth but the other things that you can be passionate if you're on the team on is one your co-founders right working with friends is so much fun compared to a job at google working with

your friends feels like winning not having a boss feels like winning like being able to choose what you get to do every day feels like winning i think there's a certain set of somewhat broken people and i would put you know us in that group where like having consequences feels like winning like if i'm playing in a sandbox and everything is controlled and i can't do anything wrong it doesn't feel like winning if if i can lose like like games have losers and

winners right like if i can lose and i i i it's much more like affiliate winning i think um those are the things that you can kind of tie yourself to at least for a little while before you've got clear evidence that your customers um you're solving a real problem for your customers so and it's a riff on this man i actually think what you're talking about and what i always suggest founders do is intentionally set up motivators

um like psychological motivators around you to intentionally game yourself like very intentionally the same way you would be you know training a pet or something you train yourself right and when you set yourself up with a startup idea with no opinions with no customers with no revenue searching for amorphous goals that are ill-defined working with strangers working with strangers you could not create

a shittier environment to ever do anything good because there's there's no rule you just wake up every day and you do things and maybe something happens maybe it doesn't but like you're you're hoping that you'll be discovered something i don't even know what you're hoping for so you're hoping magical things will happen to you okay versus when you set it up so that you're like okay our job is to get revenue but so many founders are like well i don't want revenue i think that'll slow our you know they have theoretical reasons but what's good about having revenue is it's a number and you can look at the number

every day and if the number goes up your your brain will feel good your brain will release chemicals when you make money that is fine and you'll work hard another day it's weird and so again you're like yeah yeah i know i know no but really this is one of those hacks to hack your motivation if you're not motivated to work on your idea or work on your startup is you just decide to make money make that a metric you care about

and then feed the beast as the money comes in as you search for the money you'll feel better and better and it becomes addictive and that that's how you create the passion that's how you bootstrap it if you're floating in space with no opinions so if we wrap this up i think what we're trying to say is that the failure case the startup in search of a problem doing hot tech raising money and their friends think is cool this is a this is the type of person who's thinking that there should be extrinsic motivators

that startups are based on these extrinsic motivators the folks who are willing to work on something that's not cool who are working with friends or people they enjoy spending time with who are willing to work on something even if it doesn't work even if they won't get famous even if they won't get rich those people are searching for intrinsic motivators those people are trying to figure out what can i do every day to make myself feel better at the end of the day at the beginning of the day and like counter-intuitively

because this thing is so hard startups the intrinsic motivator folks win in the long run even though the extrinsic motivator folks tend to look like they're winning earlier and so that's like the mental trick you've got to do right it's like 95 of your friends doing startups are extrinsically motivated and their startups gonna die in the next two or three years but some of them are this and a lot of those gonna raise money and hire people and get offices and so on and so forth but almost all of them are

gonna die and the the person who everyone thinks is like a little too weird like not working on the normal thing like not growing as fast as they might think is normal not caring about the press and yada yada those disproportionately end up surviving that two to three years and building something people want and so man avoid the trap right avoid the extrinsic motivation trap

it's great for getting to a good high school or a good college not so good for the whole startup game
