# Garry's Channel: Billion dollar startup ideas

**Author:** Garry Tan
**Type:** Video
**URL:** https://www.ycombinator.com/library/Ji-garry-s-channel-billion-dollar-startup-ideas
**YouTube ID:** 3YKNr-LiblI

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What makes you new, different, and unique in the world will often be the exact thing that makes you succeed. Embrace
your differences, and you’ll find something amazing in there. Learn how founders like Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Ryan
Petersen of Flexport, and Jack Conte of Patreon did exactly that: learn things from unique personal experiences that put
them on the right path.

And if you can do that, you avoid infinite competition. You can make something truly awesome.

## Transcript

- Startup ideas. Oh my God. Why is it so hard to come
up with a good startup idea? That's what we're going
to talk about today. Let's get started. (intense music) Everyone's making the same photo-sharing, podcasting, travel
plans, local event apps. Probably because desire is mimetic. We want what other people want. - Zuck: If you guys were
the inventors of Facebook

you'd have invented Facebook. It's the same ideas over and over again. Especially the ones that have already been successful. Because that's what's present to hand That's what's obvious to people to try to follow when they want to start a startup. But you shouldn't do that. And this is really tricky
because the most famous startups were not famous at the moment
when they were started. As Chris Dixon says, the
great disruptive startup ideas are hard to spot because
when they start they're toys.

The personal computer was a crazy idea. Why would anyone want a
computer on every desk and in every home? That didn't make sense to most people. And then suddenly it made a lot of sense. So was Bitcoin. "Your magical internet beans
are a joke", they said. So was social networking. How could Facebook ever make money? Those are real things that people asked when Facebook was new. These days we wonder if anyone else will be able to make money. And the danger now is there
are not just hundreds, not just thousands, but
probably hundreds of thousands

of people who are all trying
to do the same things. And as Peter Thiel says, infinite
competition is for losers. How do you break free? How do you avoid the crowd? How do you avoid mimesis? Just doing what everyone else is doing. Here's what Steve jobs has
to say about exactly this. - [Steve] Have you ever thought about what it is to be intelligent? Probably some of you have. A lot of it's memory, but
a lot of it's the ability to sort of zoom out like you're in a city and you could look at the whole thing from about the 80th
floor down at the city.

And while other people
are trying to figure out how to get from point A to point B, reading these stupid little maps you can just see it all
out in front of you. You can see the whole thing
and you can make connections that just seem obvious. But the key thing is that if
you're going to make connections which are innovative, to connect
two experiences together, that you have to not have
the same bag of experiences as everyone else does or else you're going to
make the same connections and then you won't be innovative. What you got to do is
get different experiences than the normal course of events.

- You got to zoom out, you
got to make connections and you have to have
different experiences. You can't have the same
experiences as everyone else. It's okay to be weird. What makes you new, different
and unique in the world will be the exact thing
that makes you succeed. You've got to embrace differences and that's why diversity matters a lot. If you do that and you find
a problem that needs solving you'll do something amazing here. Let's look at a few examples.

I was an early investor in Flexport and meeting Ryan Petersen
was an amazing moment because when you met him you knew he had stumbled onto a huge market. My favorite pitch meetings are
with founders who teach you something about the world
you didn't know before. Global logistics was one of those things and he knew it intimately. Here's Ryan in a recent interview. - You were selling through Amazon 10 years ago, 15 years ago? - Yeah, 10, 15 years ago, Amazon introduced the third party seller. I remember I was one of the
first people to sign up for it. And I thought it was amazing
that for 40 bucks a month

I could become an Amazon merchant and add products to their catalog. But I would just make up my
own brand name and create it. I thought it was amazing. Like, oh wow, I'm on Amazon. This is live. This is legit. So our business was importing
motorbikes from China. It was a tough business. I lived in China for a couple of years. Actually, it was a good business. It went along for a while. We never considered it a startup. We were never trying to
like change the world. It was like a couple of guys
trying to earn a living. I moved to China, live there for two years running supply chain for that business. - So he was one of the first people to be an Amazon merchant. He imported motor bikes
and electric scooters.

And he learned a lot
about the supply chain from his own personal experience. We invested in Flexport. I worked with Ryan both at Y Combinator and with my fund Initialized and Flexport is now worth
more than $3.2 billion. I met Jack Conte and Sam Yam pretty early, so early that they were
just getting started with the idea of Patreon. - I Started Pomplamoose with my wife. We created our own YouTube channel and we bought pomplamoose.com
and we started posting videos and music under the name Pomplamoose.

And we did that, let's see, that was 2008. So we did that for a few years. We were in the very early
first wave of people that were using YouTube to
reach other musicians and fans. And eight years ago, the,
the monetization methods for creators were just totally broken. And I remember looking
up from this feeling like there's got to be a better
way for creative people who are reaching millions of people online to make a living from that. - Jack started a band with his wife and started posting YouTube videos

And because they saw
that problem very early they created something
amazing that has funded a new generation of creator. It's like an online Renaissance. Patreon is now worth
more than $1.2 billion. I don't have all the answers here. These are just breadcrumbs. History doesn't repeat, but it rhymes. We went through some great
examples of billion dollar startups that started the right way, but don't do what they did. You have to go into your experience and find things that are unique to you.

And here are a few other pitfalls that I want to be careful of. First, you don't have to be novel. The above examples certainly
were relatively novel but they're certainly not the
first time they were tried. Remember though, if there's competition, you have to be better, faster, cheaper in order to stand a chance. Competition is not your friend. It's fierce and it will
make your startup fail. Second, it's also okay
if the first version of your startup is not quite perfect. In 2010, Chris Dixon pointed out that a lot of disruptive
technology is dismissed as toys

because the tech itself
is still developing. They undershoot user needs. He writes, "The first telephone could only carry voices a mile or two. The leading telco of
the time, Western Union, passed on acquiring the phone because they didn't see how
it could possibly be useful to businesses and railroads,
their primary customers. What they failed to
anticipate was how rapidly telephone technology and
infrastructure would improve. And this was true of how
mainframe computers viewed the PC and the microcomputer and
how modern telecom companies viewed things like Skype."

So where do we go from here? Well, I think you should
read Paul Graham's 2012 essay about startup ideas. There's a breadcrumb
there that he left for us that I want to highlight here. How do you find good startup ideas? Here's what he said, "Work on
hard problems, driven mainly by curiosity, but have
a second self watching over your shoulder, taking
notes of gaps and anomalies. Give yourself some time. You have a lot of control over the rate at which you turn yours
into a prepared mind

but you have less control over the stimuli that spark ideas when they hit it. If Bill Gates and Paul Allen
had constrained themselves to come up with a startup
idea in one month, what if they'd chosen a month before the Altair even appeared?" - Bill Gates: Major milestone
for us was when we were walking through Harvard Square one time and saw this popular electronics magazine. We wrote this company immediately and offered to do a BASIC for them.

- Altair BASIC became a huge hit and the company they made
ended up becoming Microsoft. The essay is linked in the description and you should go check it out. Before you go over there though please click Like and Subscribe
and hit the bell icon. The world needs more
startups, good startups. The world doesn't need more
photo-sharing-travel-plans local events startups, save yourself. Please be mindful. Find something new, follow your interests. Take note of the gaps, anomalies and the things you genuinely
believe the world needs.

Keep working on your creator
skills, on your builder skills. Being a great engineer, being
a great product manager, becoming a better leader,
becoming more consistent, more conscientious, and
a better communicator. You will create something amazing. Thanks for watching.
