Saved by Ajinkya Wadhwa
What Microsoft Is this the Altair Basic of?
This is not just a good way to run a startup. It’s what a startup is. Venture capitalists know about this and have a phrase for it: barriers to entry. If you go to a VC with a new idea and ask him to invest in it, one of the first things he’ll ask is, how hard would this be for someone else to develop?
Paul Graham • Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age
Why do so many founders build things no one wants? Because they begin by trying to think of startup ideas. That m.o. is doubly dangerous: it doesn't merely yield few good ideas; it yields bad ideas that sound plausible enough to fool you into working on them.
paulgraham.com • How to Get Startup Ideas
So one way to build great software is to start your own startup. There are two problems with this, though. One is that in a startup you have to do so much besides write software.
Paul Graham • Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age
The very best startup ideas tend to have three things in common: they're something the founders themselves want, that they themselves can build, and that few others realize are worth doing. Microsoft, Apple, Yahoo, Google, and Facebook all began this way.
Paul Graham • How to Get Startup Ideas
I should mention one sort of initial tactic that usually doesn't work: the Big Launch. I occasionally meet founders who seem to believe startups are projectiles rather than powered aircraft, and that they'll make it big if and only if they're launched with sufficient initial velocity. They want to launch simultaneously in 8 different publications, ... See more
Paul Graham • Do things that don't scale : YC Startup Library | Y Combinator
I don't know why. Let me tell you one other thing about the Internet: there are thousands of such ideas under our noses even as we speak. Why things happen, I just don't know. Maybe somebody has a need and, in our case, we had a need. That's what triggered the idea. Sometimes ideas are born out of necessity: you solve a problem for yourself, and yo
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