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|  **Want to start a startup?** Get funded by Y Combinator.  
  
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March 2012  
  
One of the more surprising things I've noticed while working on Y Combinator
is how frightening the most ambitious startup ideas are. In this essay I'm
going to demonstrate this phenomenon by describing some. Any one of them could
make you a billionaire. That might sound like an attractive prospect, and yet
when I describe these ideas you may notice you find yourself shrinking away
from them.  
  
Don't worry, it's not a sign of weakness. Arguably it's a sign of sanity. The
biggest startup ideas are terrifying. And not just because they'd be a lot of
work. The biggest ideas seem to threaten your identity: you wonder if you'd
have enough ambition to carry them through.  
  
There's a scene in _Being John Malkovich_ where the nerdy hero encounters a
very attractive, sophisticated woman. She says to him:

> Here's the thing: If you ever got me, you wouldn't have a clue what to do
> with me.

That's what these ideas say to us.  
  
This phenomenon is one of the most important things you can understand about
startups.  You'd expect big startup ideas to be attractive, but actually
they tend to repel you. And that has a bunch of consequences. It means these
ideas are invisible to most people who try to think of startup ideas, because
their subconscious filters them out. Even the most ambitious people are
probably best off approaching them obliquely.  
  
**1\. A New Search Engine**  
  
The best ideas are just on the right side of impossible. I don't know if this
one is possible, but there are signs it might be. Making a new search engine
means competing with Google, and recently I've noticed some cracks in their
fortress.  
  
The point when it became clear to me that Microsoft had lost their way was
when they decided to get into the search business. That was not a natural move
for Microsoft. They did it because they were afraid of Google, and Google was
in the search business. But this meant (a) Google was now setting Microsoft's
agenda, and (b) Microsoft's agenda consisted of stuff they weren't good at.  
  
Microsoft : Google :: Google : Facebook.  
  
That does not by itself mean there's room for a new search engine, but lately
when using Google search I've found myself nostalgic for the old days, when
Google was true to its own slightly aspy self. Google used to give me a page
of the right answers, fast, with no clutter. Now the results seem inspired by
the Scientologist principle that what's true is what's true for you. And the
pages don't have the clean, sparse feel they used to. Google search results
used to look like the output of a Unix utility. Now if I accidentally put the
cursor in the wrong place, anything might happen.  
  
The way to win here is to build the search engine all the hackers use. A
search engine whose users consisted of the top 10,000 hackers and no one else
would be in a very powerful position despite its small size, just as Google
was when it was that search engine. And for the first time in over a decade
the idea of switching seems thinkable to me.  
  
Since anyone capable of starting this company is one of those 10,000 hackers,
the route is at least straightforward: make the search engine you yourself
want. Feel free to make it excessively hackerish. Make it really good for code
search, for example. Would you like search queries to be Turing complete?
Anything that gets you those 10,000 users is ipso facto good.  
  
Don't worry if something you want to do will constrain you in the long term,
because if you don't get that initial core of users, there won't be a long
term. If you can just build something that you and your friends genuinely
prefer to Google, you're already about 10% of the way to an IPO, just as
Facebook was (though they probably didn't realize it) when they got all the
Harvard undergrads.  
  
**2\. Replace Email**  
  
Email was not designed to be used the way we use it now. Email is not a
messaging protocol. It's a todo list. Or rather, my inbox is a todo list, and
email is the way things get onto it. But it is a disastrously bad todo list.  
  
I'm open to different types of solutions to this problem, but I suspect that
tweaking the inbox is not enough, and that email has to be replaced with a new
protocol. This new protocol should be a todo list protocol, not a messaging
protocol, although there is a degenerate case where what someone wants you to
do is: read the following text.  
  
As a todo list protocol, the new protocol should give more power to the
recipient than email does. I want there to be more restrictions on what
someone can put on my todo list. And when someone can put something on my todo
list, I want them to tell me more about what they want from me. Do they want
me to do something beyond just reading some text? How important is it? (There
obviously has to be some mechanism to prevent people from saying everything is
important.) When does it have to be done?  
  
This is one of those ideas that's like an irresistible force meeting an
immovable object. On one hand, entrenched protocols are impossible to replace.
On the other, it seems unlikely that people in 100 years will still be living
in the same email hell we do now. And if email is going to get replaced
eventually, why not now?  
  
If you do it right, you may be able to avoid the usual chicken and egg problem
new protocols face, because some of the most powerful people in the world will
be among the first to switch to it. They're all at the mercy of email too.  
  
Whatever you build, make it fast. GMail has become painfully slow.  If you
made something no better than GMail, but fast, that alone would let you start
to pull users away from GMail.  
  
GMail is slow because Google can't afford to spend a lot on it. But people
will pay for this. I'd have no problem paying $50 a month. Considering how
much time I spend in email, it's kind of scary to think how much I'd be
justified in paying. At least $1000 a month. If I spend several hours a day
reading and writing email, that would be a cheap way to make my life better.  
  
**3\. Replace Universities**  
  
People are all over this idea lately, and I think they're onto something. I'm
reluctant to suggest that an institution that's been around for a millennium
is finished just because of some mistakes they made in the last few decades,
but certainly in the last few decades US universities seem to have been headed
down the wrong path. One could do a lot better for a lot less money.  
  
I don't think universities will disappear. They won't be replaced wholesale.
They'll just lose the de facto monopoly on certain types of learning that they
once had. There will be many different ways to learn different things, and
some may look quite different from universities. Y Combinator itself is
arguably one of them.  
  
Learning is such a big problem that changing the way people do it will have a
wave of secondary effects. For example, the name of the university one went to
is treated by a lot of people (correctly or not) as a credential in its own
right. If learning breaks up into many little pieces, credentialling may
separate from it. There may even need to be replacements for campus social
life (and oddly enough, YC even has aspects of that).  
  
You could replace high schools too, but there you face bureaucratic obstacles
that would slow down a startup. Universities seem the place to start.  
  
**4\. Internet Drama**  
  
Hollywood has been slow to embrace the Internet. That was a mistake, because I
think we can now call a winner in the race between delivery mechanisms, and it
is the Internet, not cable.  
  
A lot of the reason is the horribleness of cable clients, also known as TVs.
Our family didn't wait for Apple TV. We hated our last TV so much that a few
months ago we replaced it with an iMac bolted to the wall. It's a little
inconvenient to control it with a wireless mouse, but the overall experience
is much better than the nightmare UI we had to deal with before.  
  
Some of the attention people currently devote to watching movies and TV can be
stolen by things that seem completely unrelated, like social networking apps.
More can be stolen by things that are a little more closely related, like
games. But there will probably always remain some residual demand for
conventional drama, where you sit passively and watch as a plot happens. So
how do you deliver drama via the Internet? Whatever you make will have to be
on a larger scale than Youtube clips. When people sit down to watch a show,
they want to know what they're going to get: either part of a series with
familiar characters, or a single longer "movie" whose basic premise they know
in advance.  
  
There are two ways delivery and payment could play out. Either some company
like Netflix or Apple will be the app store for entertainment, and you'll
reach audiences through them. Or the would-be app stores will be too
overreaching, or too technically inflexible, and companies will arise to
supply payment and streaming a la carte to the producers of drama. If that's
the way things play out, there will also be a need for such infrastructure
companies.  
  
**5\. The Next Steve Jobs**  
  
I was talking recently to someone who knew Apple well, and I asked him if the
people now running the company would be able to keep creating new things the
way Apple had under Steve Jobs. His answer was simply "no." I already feared
that would be the answer. I asked more to see how he'd qualify it. But he
didn't qualify it at all. No, there will be no more great new stuff beyond
whatever's currently in the pipeline. Apple's revenues may continue to rise
for a long time, but as Microsoft shows, revenue is a lagging indicator in the
technology business.  
  
So if Apple's not going to make the next iPad, who is? None of the existing
players. None of them are run by product visionaries, and empirically you
can't seem to get those by hiring them. Empirically the way you get a product
visionary as CEO is for him to found the company and not get fired. So the
company that creates the next wave of hardware is probably going to have to be
a startup.  
  
I realize it sounds preposterously ambitious for a startup to try to become as
big as Apple. But no more ambitious than it was for Apple to become as big as
Apple, and they did it. Plus a startup taking on this problem now has an
advantage the original Apple didn't: the example of Apple. Steve Jobs has
shown us what's possible. That helps would-be successors both directly, as
Roger Bannister did, by showing how much better you can do than people did
before, and indirectly, as Augustus did, by lodging the idea in users' minds
that a single person could unroll the future for them.   
  
Now Steve is gone there's a vacuum we can all feel. If a new company led
boldly into the future of hardware, users would follow. The CEO of that
company, the "next Steve Jobs," might not measure up to Steve Jobs. But he
wouldn't have to. He'd just have to do a better job than Samsung and HP and
Nokia, and that seems pretty doable.  
  
**6\. Bring Back Moore's Law**  
  
The last 10 years have reminded us what Moore's Law actually says. Till about
2002 you could safely misinterpret it as promising that clock speeds would
double every 18 months. Actually what it says is that circuit densities will
double every 18 months. It used to seem pedantic to point that out. Not any
more. Intel can no longer give us faster CPUs, just more of them.  
  
This Moore's Law is not as good as the old one. Moore's Law used to mean that
if your software was slow, all you had to do was wait, and the inexorable
progress of hardware would solve your problems. Now if your software is slow
you have to rewrite it to do more things in parallel, which is a lot more work
than waiting.  
  
It would be great if a startup could give us something of the old Moore's Law
back, by writing software that could make a large number of CPUs look to the
developer like one very fast CPU. There are several ways to approach this
problem. The most ambitious is to try to do it automatically: to write a
compiler that will parallelize our code for us. There's a name for this
compiler, _the sufficiently smart compiler,_ and it is a byword for
impossibility. But is it really impossible? Is there no configuration of the
bits in memory of a present day computer that is this compiler? If you really
think so, you should try to prove it, because that would be an interesting
result. And if it's not impossible but simply very hard, it might be worth
trying to write it. The expected value would be high even if the chance of
succeeding was low.  
  
The reason the expected value is so high is web services. If you could write
software that gave programmers the convenience of the way things were in the
old days, you could offer it to them as a web service. And that would in turn
mean that you got practically all the users.  
  
Imagine there was another processor manufacturer that could still translate
increased circuit densities into increased clock speeds. They'd take most of
Intel's business. And since web services mean that no one sees their
processors anymore, by writing the sufficiently smart compiler you could
create a situation indistinguishable from you being that manufacturer, at
least for the server market.  
  
The least ambitious way of approaching the problem is to start from the other
end, and offer programmers more parallelizable Lego blocks to build programs
out of, like Hadoop and MapReduce. Then the programmer still does much of the
work of optimization.  
  
There's an intriguing middle ground where you build a semi-automatic
weapon—where there's a human in the loop. You make something that looks to the
user like the sufficiently smart compiler, but inside has people, using highly
developed optimization tools to find and eliminate bottlenecks in users'
programs. These people might be your employees, or you might create a
marketplace for optimization.  
  
An optimization marketplace would be a way to generate the sufficiently smart
compiler piecemeal, because participants would immediately start writing bots.
It would be a curious state of affairs if you could get to the point where
everything could be done by bots, because then you'd have made the
sufficiently smart compiler, but no one person would have a complete copy of
it.  
  
I realize how crazy all this sounds. In fact, what I like about this idea is
all the different ways in which it's wrong. The whole idea of focusing on
optimization is counter to the general trend in software development for the
last several decades. Trying to write the sufficiently smart compiler is by
definition a mistake. And even if it weren't, compilers are the sort of
software that's supposed to be created by open source projects, not companies.
Plus if this works it will deprive all the programmers who take pleasure in
making multithreaded apps of so much amusing complexity. The forum troll I
have by now internalized doesn't even know where to begin in raising
objections to this project. Now that's what I call a startup idea.  
  
**7\. Ongoing Diagnosis**  
  
But wait, here's another that could face even greater resistance: ongoing,
automatic medical diagnosis.  
  
One of my tricks for generating startup ideas is to imagine the ways in which
we'll seem backward to future generations. And I'm pretty sure that to people
50 or 100 years in the future, it will seem barbaric that people in our era
waited till they had symptoms to be diagnosed with conditions like heart
disease and cancer.  
  
For example, in 2004 Bill Clinton found he was feeling short of breath.
Doctors discovered that several of his arteries were over 90% blocked and 3
days later he had a quadruple bypass. It seems reasonable to assume Bill
Clinton has the best medical care available. And yet even he had to wait till
his arteries were over 90% blocked to learn that the number was over 90%.
Surely at some point in the future we'll know these numbers the way we now
know something like our weight. Ditto for cancer. It will seem preposterous to
future generations that we wait till patients have physical symptoms to be
diagnosed with cancer. Cancer will show up on some sort of radar screen
immediately.  
  
(Of course, what shows up on the radar screen may be different from what we
think of now as cancer. I wouldn't be surprised if at any given time we have
ten or even hundreds of microcancers going at once, none of which normally
amount to anything.)  
  
A lot of the obstacles to ongoing diagnosis will come from the fact that it's
going against the grain of the medical profession. The way medicine has always
worked is that patients come to doctors with problems, and the doctors figure
out what's wrong. A lot of doctors don't like the idea of going on the medical
equivalent of what lawyers call a "fishing expedition," where you go looking
for problems without knowing what you're looking for. They call the things
that get discovered this way "incidentalomas," and they are something of a
nuisance.  
  
For example, a friend of mine once had her brain scanned as part of a study.
She was horrified when the doctors running the study discovered what appeared
to be a large tumor. After further testing, it turned out to be a harmless
cyst. But it cost her a few days of terror. A lot of doctors worry that if you
start scanning people with no symptoms, you'll get this on a giant scale: a
huge number of false alarms that make patients panic and require expensive and
perhaps even dangerous tests to resolve. But I think that's just an artifact
of current limitations. If people were scanned all the time and we got better
at deciding what was a real problem, my friend would have known about this
cyst her whole life and known it was harmless, just as we do a birthmark.  
  
There is room for a lot of startups here. In addition to the technical
obstacles all startups face, and the bureaucratic obstacles all medical
startups face, they'll be going against thousands of years of medical
tradition. But it will happen, and it will be a great thing—so great that
people in the future will feel as sorry for us as we do for the generations
that lived before anaesthesia and antibiotics.  
  
**Tactics**  
  
Let me conclude with some tactical advice. If you want to take on a problem as
big as the ones I've discussed, don't make a direct frontal attack on it.
Don't say, for example, that you're going to replace email. If you do that you
raise too many expectations. Your employees and investors will constantly be
asking "are we there yet?" and you'll have an army of haters waiting to see
you fail. Just say you're building todo-list software. That sounds harmless.
People can notice you've replaced email when it's a _fait accompli_.   
  
Empirically, the way to do really big things seems to be to start with
deceptively small things. Want to dominate microcomputer software? Start by
writing a Basic interpreter for a machine with a few thousand users. Want to
make the universal web site? Start by building a site for Harvard undergrads
to stalk one another.  
  
Empirically, it's not just for other people that you need to start small. You
need to for your own sake. Neither Bill Gates nor Mark Zuckerberg knew at
first how big their companies were going to get. All they knew was that they
were onto something. Maybe it's a bad idea to have really big ambitions
initially, because the bigger your ambition, the longer it's going to take,
and the further you project into the future, the more likely you'll get it
wrong.  
  
I think the way to use these big ideas is not to try to identify a precise
point in the future and then ask yourself how to get from here to there, like
the popular image of a visionary. You'll be better off if you operate like
Columbus and just head in a general westerly direction. Don't try to construct
the future like a building, because your current blueprint is almost certainly
mistaken. Start with something you know works, and when you expand, expand
westward.  
  
The popular image of the visionary is someone with a clear view of the future,
but empirically it may be better to have a blurry one.  
  
  
  
  
  
**