I think the idea of describing a startup as "like X for Y" is OK for some but in general I agree that it comes across as not being particularly innovative. I think it makes sense to give prospects a frame of reference for an offering but there are other ways of doing it aside from defining your entire company in comparison to another one.
I agree. People want to know very quickly what the idea is and what it's comparable to. I believe that it gets the audience more engaged in the fact they don't need to make the connection while learning about the product throughout the presentation.
There was a TC post encouraging startups to pitch their slogan in a concise format which did not follow the x for y pattern. In a few more words they mostly avoided the problem you are presenting here.
I had the exact same reaction when reading coverage of the demo day. Hopefully the ideas seem underwhelming because of the last part of Paul Graham's essay. In the "tactics" section he says, "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." Maybe these YCombinator startups actually do have ambitious ideas, but they're starting out with something small and seemingly unimportant. Maybe in five years some of these companies will be reinventing education and communication.
I'm not sure what the value of this post is? Would you honestly expect every company or even every demo day to contain a frighteningly ambitious idea? And if they were frighteningly, scarily ambitious, would TC really hype them? The sane response seems to be to write them off instead as far too ambitious.
I guess I just don't get what the skepticism here brings to the table? I'm open to input about that.
I would imagine that the point is to encourage future entrepreneurs to avoid the two trends pointed out in the post. YCombinator and TechCrunch are both trendsetters, so it makes sense to express skepticism if you have a problem with the types of ideas TechCrunch is covering from demo day.
I don't expect the batch to contain all frighteningly ambitious ideas, but it would be fun if at least one was. I'm sure YC would be receptive to such a plan if the founders were smart.
I've sent the list of companies from the latest batch to several non-tech friends and not a single person has been impressed with anything on the list. That's not a good sign.
With things like Dropbox and Reddit not only did my eyes light up, but the eyes of non-tech friends lit up. Same with Hipmunk. Hipmunk I didn't even have to show someone, I could just say "not shitty airline search" and they were intrigued.
I think the point to this submission and others like it are that a lot of people are scratching their heads over this current batch. Nobody expects every company to be "Wow!" but generally there are a few.
Paul Graham said don't attack the problem head on. Make a beachhead. Supposedly these seemingly dull ideas are beachheads.
That was covered in a previous HN discussion about a similar article questioning YC startup ideas in practice.
But something like Dropbox seems to have a hard time scaling out, exploring other ideas, and that's with a founder who wants to build a big company like Apple.
Even if you start with a beachhead, it should be one that can grow. Apple started with a PC, to grow they made more and better PCs. Microsoft/Gates started with BASIC then pivoted drastically to an idea that could grow, an OS for PCs. What will Dropbox grow or pivot to in order to be an Apple size company? Hard to imagine backups for teams or iCloud but OS independent will be the ticket.
Something I've seen clearly is that if you haven't talked quietly with the founders of a startup, you might not know what they're doing.
I'm building a company right now that intends to have three major Acts in it's lifetime, the first of which is unimpressive but designed to get us customers and base knowledge for use while executing Act II, which we then intend to apply to additional verticals as part of Act III.
But Act I will likely look like something that two guys could put together in their garage in a year. And that's exactly what it is.
This beachhead thinking is key. The trouble is that it is harder to represent in the “we’re X for Y” way, which is usually the thing that sticks with the audience (which is also the reason why it works so well).
But an X for Y beachhead doesn't make the current idea scalable. Perhaps it's a beachhead for the founder to get a reputation so maybe one day he can try a scalable idea, either in the current company or some future one. But it doesn't mean the pivot will be related to the current X for Y.
It worked out for Microsoft. But somewhat contradictory to this scenario Paul Graham also said to start chipping at the ambitious idea because starting companies is hard anyway.
So looking at seemingly dull ideas of YC, is there some way for them to scale without pivoting as far as Microsoft did?
Supposedly these seemingly dull ideas are beachheads.
Are they really, though? It seems to me that many successful startups are simply bought over by another big company and their "beachhead" is eventually lost in the acquiring behemoth.
dailyllama, looks like you've been hellbanned. None of your comments are out of order or trolling, so I thought I'd let you know. You might be able to contact someone at ycombinator and get yourself re-instated.
If ever someone wants to know why hellbanning is stupid, you can point them here...
"If I were Paul Graham, these types of companies simply would not satisfy me (despite what look to be very lucrative payoffs)"
There's a difference in investing in companies expecting some kind of a return and throwing money at really ambitious ideas in the hope that one of those gets really successful. I cannot see how investing carefully and getting returns (ie. making money) is not satisfying.
The hard ones don't get press for years. Look at upvertr, sure it could be described as git + electronic software + parts sourcing, but it will take them a while to build this to the point where everyone will see how amazing and useful it is.
Be aware, you've linked directly to the home page of your tumblr instead of linking to the post itself. Your HN submission will become very confusing after you make another tumblr post.
Those who disparage "X for Y" descriptions misunderstand their use. When you have only a few minutes (or seconds) to pitch your idea, being X for Y or the X of Y is an effective way to give people the gist and pique their interest. Only then does it make sense to go into more detail and explain the full scope of your ambitions.
Exactly. Only a minority of companies that use those pitches used the same phrasing in their initial creation process. The goal is to solve a problem someone has, the "X for Y" is a shorthand for "don't take my word for it that people have this kind of problem, look at this very similar situation".
A wise man once said "Nothing is original. There is nothing new under the Sun. It's never what you do but how it's done".
While I agree that saying "My Product X is like Y on steroids" is somewhat unoriginal and maybe even uninspiring, the simple fact is that every idea is pretty much an evolution of a previous idea.
That being said, I'm not to sure what the point of the article was :)
A problem I see with many of these ideas is what I would call the profitability mirage. The general belief is that the flow is: $founder->getStartup()->iterate()->getUsers()->monetize(), with a AcquiredException thrown somewhere in one of those method calls.
The problem is that so many of these startup ideas (that don't happily see an AcquiredException before monetize() is called) will fail at the monetize step because there is steep competition in many of these markets right now, and the burgeoning startup mentality means that someone else is probably doing exactly what you do, slightly better or worse, but they're at a point in their business cycle that they don't need to call monetize() just yet. Thus, you may have a mass exodus of users at precisely the point where you try and bring your ARPU above zero.
If the default behavior of a program is to throw an AcquiredException after a few iterations, I wouldn't call it an Exception in the first place. imho, the real exception here is the monetizeException.
"With the press these companies are getting, I expect they will make investors and founding teams a hefty profit, but they certainly do not speak to me as signs of brilliant, innovative thinking."
This is something I've seen several times, I don't believe anyone has shown that 'press coverage' was a causative agent in a successful exit. I believe 'delivering a useful product' (which happens to generate press coverage as a side effect) is the missing piece here.
You want a brain dead stupid IOs App I would buy that is derivative? Instapaper for Printers. Which is to say I would love an App where I could launch it on my iPad and then 'print' to it across the network from my Mac or Windows machine. I don't care if it dropped the printout into iBooks or created its own 'space' (I could imagine a designer would have fun with the old 20th century printout distribution bins). But basically there are times when I wish I could print something out and then read it on the road later. It was a capability discussed for the old Plastic Logic Reader that never saw the light of day.
And yes, I still do 'listings' when I'm studying old code or dumping a bunch of numbers and charts.
the only problem with this post is that Google was like Yahoo but that search actually worked, Microsoft was like IBM (the software bits) but software for the masses. There are a lot of counterexamples where starting with something existing provides a beachhead for the ambitious.
The problem is press coverage. The press needs to be able to write a story. In order to write that story, they have to understand (quickly) what they are writing about and deliver it to readers in a way they can understand (quickly). So if someone demo's a way for doctors to track medical records and an algorithm that uses all of this data to improve point of care diagnostics, what do you call that in a headline? Google for Doctors?
The reason why I bring the medical example up is because there is a team here that has a frighteningly ambitious start up (not idea yet). Medigram is a stacked team that is going after the medical industry in a way that no one else wants to. Starting with a messaging app that complies with regulators, they are planting the seed of trust with the medical industry. When they move up to records, they get data. When they get data, they use that math heavy team to solve the ambitious idea of making diagnosis more accurate. Then who knows? A tiny pill that you can swallow that transmits blood test data back to a central server and diagnose your issues instantly? I don't know, but they had to start somewhere.
Unambitious startup ideas can be conjured up by a small team and sold to a big company later with hardly any up front dollars. If you want ambitious you should look outside the realm of 100% tech startups. Specifically, you should look in the food/tech realm - but don't look at the worthless calorie counters.
Disclaimer: I work for a struggling startup in the food/tech realm.
I fail to see why companies that make money would fail to satisfy an investor?
Is there something about the YC model that makes companies that go on to turn modest profits not generate returns for the investor?
A business like Wal-Mart wouldn't satisfy you as an investor? I wouldn't have any problems taking 8% of Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart didn't invent anything new, they just did it a little bit better than their competitors. Techcrunch 1969: "Wal-Mart: Sears for people who like to pay less"
Impressive algorithms don't make money, businesses that satisfy customers do. You're not going to 'change the world' unless your customers are happy.
Walmart is a world-class innovator in supply chain management, retail engineering, shipping logistics, inventory tracking... the list just goes on and on.
Walmart is one of those things that is just so effective and so pervasive that we forget how important its original ideas are. It's like learning to like music in 2003 and hearing the Pixies for the first time and not getting it; you don't realize that virtually all of pop/rock music for the last 20 years is built on stuff they popularized.
But unlike the Pixies, Walmart has ruthlessly refined and improved their systems instead of breaking up the band with a faxed message from Black Francis.
Point being: innovation isn't always easy to spot in a simple paragraph on a message board.
Whoa! Wal-Mart revolutionized the supply chain. And Wal-Mart also started with a revolutionary idea: We can make stores in rural areas so people don't have to drive to the big city to shop. Every other chain considered those same rural areas unprofitable. It turned out to be a gold mine.
There are several books out there about how revolutionary Wal-Mart has been. I suggest you read one before assuming that Wal-Mart "didn't invent anything new"!
I don't disagree that wal mart is an innovator and that their innovations allowed them to crush their competitors, but from the perspective of Wal-Mart in 1969 they aren't doing anything new. At that point they're "Sears for people who want to pay less" which illustrates the silliness of OPs POV.
Fundamentally though Wal-Mart's business model is "big truck - small truck" it's just a specialization of Sears business model, similar to how all the businesses on TC are X for Y.
X for Y, where X = "Airbnb" and Y = "Large existing market poorly served by technology", is in fact a good shorthand for "frighteningly ambitious".
Literally. Airbnb is a frighteningly ambitious company. It is explosively generating value and we don't know how it's going to play out long term. It could end up with us living in caves with dogs watching out for the Terminators.
It is hard for me to take the rest of the article seriously after it suggests that "Airbnbing" auto mechanics is unambitious. It's possible that most Americans have routine car service done at dealerships where they're being routinely fleeced, and that the current crappy system of servicing vehicles is driving talent either out of the businesses or to those giant dealership shops. Have you ever tried to find a reliable mechanic? I drive an old Audi. It's painful.
I'm not sure, maybe you have a different definition of 'frighteningly ambitious' to me. What is the largest possible outcome from making it slightly easier or cheaper to repair your car? It saves a few million Americans a few hundred dollars?
My definition would be more like: sending ordinary people into space; making a mass-production electric vehicle; cheap solar power; curing flu/the common cold; inventing a new type of computing device; replacing huge incumbent companies (telcos, oil); reducing home electricity usage by >50%; inventing a new human-computer interface. Etc.
If reconfiguring a huge chunk of the automotive industry seems unambitious to you, and the only thing that will truly impress you is orbital death rays and zero point energy, there's not a whole lot for us to discuss.
This is a silly argument. It will always be possible to name something more ambitious for a startup to do. What, you're only taking tourists into suborbital space? A truly ambitious startup would build MOON BASES.
Let's say I wanted to solve a really big problem. Not something comparatively simple like "new kind of computing device", but really big. Global. Like the fact that we tear through so many natural resources because people go out and buy new equipment so often instead of getting old equipment repaired. That is a major ecological problem of the 21st Century right?
So I look into it and I discover that one of the main reasons that people replace a broken device is because it's really easy to go buy a new piece of gear (everyone wants to sell you one!), and much more trouble to track down someone who will repair an old one (properly!) and go deal with whatever's involved in getting it done.
OK, that's an interesting problem to solve, right? But if people are throwing away devices, how do you get everyone to change their behavior? That's really hard, especially for a startup with limited resources.
So what's a minimum viable product to get started with? Well, what if you started with a way to let people get their cars repaired more easily? People already get their cars repaired, and the user experience is terrible. Solve the part of the problem that people know they need solved first (car repair), then move on to convincing them they want other things repaired too. That they don't need a new gadget every two years, they just need an easy way for someone to help them keep their old one in good repair.
And if it works, that's tons (as a measurement of weight) of working devices that don't go into landfills, and tons of natural resources that aren't used up making devices to replace them. Is that ambitious enough for you?
(Note: I have no idea if this is what the founders are actually thinking or not. I just know that you can't judge the ambition of a startup from their first product.)
Impactful changes will often significant because of their nth order, not just their direct effects.
For example, Google Adwords has completely changed how customers are acquired for a lot of industries. This changes how companies are structured, which companies succeed and how they are built. That's a big change.
Lets stretch the mechanic example. If people got better, cheaper, easier mechanics this could make them hold on to cars for longer. This could in turn change the way cars are built and change the structure of this giant industry.
No startup could tackle those tasks, not on YC's scale. Any one of those is so capital intensive or research intensive you'd have to either get rich at a boring pay-people-over-the-Internet startup or be a huge corporation with research labs like Bell Labs or Xerox PARC.
A few hundred dollars for a few million Americans is a billion dollars of economic impact per year.
Even Twitter wouldn't sound ambitious if you say "we are group SMS for the world".
To better understand how ambitious a startup is, assume that its adoption is 100%. If everyone is using it, does it change lives? If everyone chats on Twitter, does it impact politics? If everyone is on Facebook, do you reconnect with old friends? Etc. Dropbox is in that category too.
With used cars purchases, I can see how everyone would use the site, and still not have any meaningful impact. Cheaper cars. More efficient market. But still, in the end, cheaper cars. Am I missing something?
That's fine when everyone everywhere uses the same OS or all OSs automatically connect to the same back end. But if I want to share files between a Windows box, an iPad, and an Android phone, it's unlikely that anything useful for my purposes will be built into the OS anytime soon.
And even if I insist on buying nothing but Apple (or whatever) products, if I want to share files with my dad or my next door neighbor, now I have to worry about what OS they're running too.
You install Dropbox once per device. After that, it's trivially easy.
OS independent iCloud is a nice feature but hard to see the path to Apple sized scale from it. It's just one of fifty UX headaches of typical computer use. Easier to get at those from OS or browser positions, Dropbox is in a weird spot.
So maybe their next move is to buy Evernote, or build their own. As someone already mentioned, build a suite of document viewers/editors that go hand in hand with managing the files. Go from just allowing you to post a public folder to becoming your personal web presence. Manage cross-social-network personal information so that it always stays in sync.
There are a lot of possibilities if you think past the files.
Sure but it's a distant pivot. It's almost starting over except they have a company with revenue. Adobe also has that and each new product attempt fails or wins independent of Photoshop's success. And Adobe and MS products are more related to each other than file backup and editing.
Dropbox the product is a good revenue stream and could spark another Microsoft/Adobe style multiproduct software company.
Is that Paul Graham meant by start to chip at the big vision with a beachhead though? Because then any product idea has that potential, as long as it starts the first company. Seemed like he was advocating for a more direct path, hacker search to more general search, basecamp to email, etc. Starting companies is hard anyway, start with a clear path to something big.
But to me it doesn't seem a huge leap from "we keep your files for you and get them for you wherever you are" to "we let you do things with your files" or "we keep other stuff for you too." It seems like a very natural proposition to offer users.
What if you could edit all your files in dropbox' html interface? What if it was easy to do, and kept the simplicity they've become known for?
Then your OS would be a commodity, and Dropbox would be what provided the value. Seamless editing of documents across devices, no matter where you are or what sort of device you're working on.
They can become the file system for the internet. If they're successful, many futures apps (mobile or desktop) will sit on top of Dropbox software to sync files and app state for their users. That is an incredibly powerful vision.
> If they're successful, many futures apps (mobile or desktop) will sit on top of Dropbox
This sounds like a great vision for Dropbox to follow, but I just can't shake the feeling that the future is going to ultimately look a lot more like what Google is doing with docs, and eliminate the need for most offline/native apps at all. And if in the best case, Dropbox is still going to be dependent on offline apps, I guess it just feels a bit limiting.
I'll admit as much as the next person that the current wave of web/browser-based things (games, operating systems, phone apps, etc) feel seriously lacking, but given enough time, I just can't imagine how this isn't the direction the future is heading. Dropbox makes it amazingly easy to backup, version, and share files right now, but if all the apps you use would already be doing that for you, what would be the point? Or rather, how would Dropbox pivot to account for this?
I think Dropbox is awesome, and that vision you're describing is great, but I would imagine that there is a very specific window of opportunity for when they would have to take action if they want to see this type of 'endgame' have any real impact.
Ubiquity. Once dropbox becomes essential for a large number of mobile or web-based apps (and their users), it becomes indispensable. With this comes a lot of possibility for monetizing either from the users or the vendors.
Of course one could say that's the same goal for just about any consumer-facing startup these days.
Amazon was only new books in the beginning. Once you get a market started, you can add other products. But for used cars my imagination is only good enough to see another ebay as it's extension.
As an ordinary person outside of the VC world, I literally have no idea what Airbnb is. Never heard of them once. Ever. I think there may be a mismatch between what people who read Techcrunch consider exciting and what actually has traction with the public at large.
Well everybody has an opinion, and a choice to tread on a path that feels "right". For a moment you might think these ideas are unambitious, but when you dig-deep you'll discover a lot of gems underneath. One wouldn't expect a frightening execution, speak or quality within six months of a startup.
That's probably a picture only big daddies like Apple can show to the world. For example on another thread you can already see DuckDuckGo revealing their ambitious face after a perceivable unambitious journey of two years!
Also another thing that probably we all miss is that the next big thing might not necessarily be anything from the ones ever listed - ambitious or unambitious. None of the big names like Facebook or Google or Apple were frighteningly ambitious ideas to the world until they kicked butts of everyone.
On second part: Suggestions on choosing a worthwhile domain name is really nice, but looking at how much has been squatted out there, there doesn't seem much of a choice or harm with the current trend of choosing twin word names.
There are fewer cheap options at disposal of entrepreneurs and so it is for the rest of the world.
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I thought that most of them did quite well even if some ideas were unambitious even when presented in this manner.
Um, maybe not, but Bill Gates definitely pitched Windows as like a Mac, but for IBM compatible PCs. Seems like a bad example.
I guess I just don't get what the skepticism here brings to the table? I'm open to input about that.
With things like Dropbox and Reddit not only did my eyes light up, but the eyes of non-tech friends lit up. Same with Hipmunk. Hipmunk I didn't even have to show someone, I could just say "not shitty airline search" and they were intrigued.
I think the point to this submission and others like it are that a lot of people are scratching their heads over this current batch. Nobody expects every company to be "Wow!" but generally there are a few.
That was covered in a previous HN discussion about a similar article questioning YC startup ideas in practice.
But something like Dropbox seems to have a hard time scaling out, exploring other ideas, and that's with a founder who wants to build a big company like Apple.
Even if you start with a beachhead, it should be one that can grow. Apple started with a PC, to grow they made more and better PCs. Microsoft/Gates started with BASIC then pivoted drastically to an idea that could grow, an OS for PCs. What will Dropbox grow or pivot to in order to be an Apple size company? Hard to imagine backups for teams or iCloud but OS independent will be the ticket.
I'm building a company right now that intends to have three major Acts in it's lifetime, the first of which is unimpressive but designed to get us customers and base knowledge for use while executing Act II, which we then intend to apply to additional verticals as part of Act III.
But Act I will likely look like something that two guys could put together in their garage in a year. And that's exactly what it is.
It worked out for Microsoft. But somewhat contradictory to this scenario Paul Graham also said to start chipping at the ambitious idea because starting companies is hard anyway.
So looking at seemingly dull ideas of YC, is there some way for them to scale without pivoting as far as Microsoft did?
Are they really, though? It seems to me that many successful startups are simply bought over by another big company and their "beachhead" is eventually lost in the acquiring behemoth.
If ever someone wants to know why hellbanning is stupid, you can point them here...
There's a difference in investing in companies expecting some kind of a return and throwing money at really ambitious ideas in the hope that one of those gets really successful. I cannot see how investing carefully and getting returns (ie. making money) is not satisfying.
While I agree that saying "My Product X is like Y on steroids" is somewhat unoriginal and maybe even uninspiring, the simple fact is that every idea is pretty much an evolution of a previous idea.
That being said, I'm not to sure what the point of the article was :)
The problem is that so many of these startup ideas (that don't happily see an AcquiredException before monetize() is called) will fail at the monetize step because there is steep competition in many of these markets right now, and the burgeoning startup mentality means that someone else is probably doing exactly what you do, slightly better or worse, but they're at a point in their business cycle that they don't need to call monetize() just yet. Thus, you may have a mass exodus of users at precisely the point where you try and bring your ARPU above zero.
This is something I've seen several times, I don't believe anyone has shown that 'press coverage' was a causative agent in a successful exit. I believe 'delivering a useful product' (which happens to generate press coverage as a side effect) is the missing piece here.
You want a brain dead stupid IOs App I would buy that is derivative? Instapaper for Printers. Which is to say I would love an App where I could launch it on my iPad and then 'print' to it across the network from my Mac or Windows machine. I don't care if it dropped the printout into iBooks or created its own 'space' (I could imagine a designer would have fun with the old 20th century printout distribution bins). But basically there are times when I wish I could print something out and then read it on the road later. It was a capability discussed for the old Plastic Logic Reader that never saw the light of day.
And yes, I still do 'listings' when I'm studying old code or dumping a bunch of numbers and charts.
The reason why I bring the medical example up is because there is a team here that has a frighteningly ambitious start up (not idea yet). Medigram is a stacked team that is going after the medical industry in a way that no one else wants to. Starting with a messaging app that complies with regulators, they are planting the seed of trust with the medical industry. When they move up to records, they get data. When they get data, they use that math heavy team to solve the ambitious idea of making diagnosis more accurate. Then who knows? A tiny pill that you can swallow that transmits blood test data back to a central server and diagnose your issues instantly? I don't know, but they had to start somewhere.
Disclaimer: I work for a struggling startup in the food/tech realm.
Is there something about the YC model that makes companies that go on to turn modest profits not generate returns for the investor?
A business like Wal-Mart wouldn't satisfy you as an investor? I wouldn't have any problems taking 8% of Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart didn't invent anything new, they just did it a little bit better than their competitors. Techcrunch 1969: "Wal-Mart: Sears for people who like to pay less"
Impressive algorithms don't make money, businesses that satisfy customers do. You're not going to 'change the world' unless your customers are happy.
Walmart is one of those things that is just so effective and so pervasive that we forget how important its original ideas are. It's like learning to like music in 2003 and hearing the Pixies for the first time and not getting it; you don't realize that virtually all of pop/rock music for the last 20 years is built on stuff they popularized.
But unlike the Pixies, Walmart has ruthlessly refined and improved their systems instead of breaking up the band with a faxed message from Black Francis.
Point being: innovation isn't always easy to spot in a simple paragraph on a message board.
Whoa! Wal-Mart revolutionized the supply chain. And Wal-Mart also started with a revolutionary idea: We can make stores in rural areas so people don't have to drive to the big city to shop. Every other chain considered those same rural areas unprofitable. It turned out to be a gold mine.
There are several books out there about how revolutionary Wal-Mart has been. I suggest you read one before assuming that Wal-Mart "didn't invent anything new"!
Fundamentally though Wal-Mart's business model is "big truck - small truck" it's just a specialization of Sears business model, similar to how all the businesses on TC are X for Y.
Literally. Airbnb is a frighteningly ambitious company. It is explosively generating value and we don't know how it's going to play out long term. It could end up with us living in caves with dogs watching out for the Terminators.
It is hard for me to take the rest of the article seriously after it suggests that "Airbnbing" auto mechanics is unambitious. It's possible that most Americans have routine car service done at dealerships where they're being routinely fleeced, and that the current crappy system of servicing vehicles is driving talent either out of the businesses or to those giant dealership shops. Have you ever tried to find a reliable mechanic? I drive an old Audi. It's painful.
My definition would be more like: sending ordinary people into space; making a mass-production electric vehicle; cheap solar power; curing flu/the common cold; inventing a new type of computing device; replacing huge incumbent companies (telcos, oil); reducing home electricity usage by >50%; inventing a new human-computer interface. Etc.
This is a silly argument. It will always be possible to name something more ambitious for a startup to do. What, you're only taking tourists into suborbital space? A truly ambitious startup would build MOON BASES.
So I look into it and I discover that one of the main reasons that people replace a broken device is because it's really easy to go buy a new piece of gear (everyone wants to sell you one!), and much more trouble to track down someone who will repair an old one (properly!) and go deal with whatever's involved in getting it done.
OK, that's an interesting problem to solve, right? But if people are throwing away devices, how do you get everyone to change their behavior? That's really hard, especially for a startup with limited resources.
So what's a minimum viable product to get started with? Well, what if you started with a way to let people get their cars repaired more easily? People already get their cars repaired, and the user experience is terrible. Solve the part of the problem that people know they need solved first (car repair), then move on to convincing them they want other things repaired too. That they don't need a new gadget every two years, they just need an easy way for someone to help them keep their old one in good repair.
And if it works, that's tons (as a measurement of weight) of working devices that don't go into landfills, and tons of natural resources that aren't used up making devices to replace them. Is that ambitious enough for you?
(Note: I have no idea if this is what the founders are actually thinking or not. I just know that you can't judge the ambition of a startup from their first product.)
For example, Google Adwords has completely changed how customers are acquired for a lot of industries. This changes how companies are structured, which companies succeed and how they are built. That's a big change.
Lets stretch the mechanic example. If people got better, cheaper, easier mechanics this could make them hold on to cars for longer. This could in turn change the way cars are built and change the structure of this giant industry.
A few hundred dollars for a few million Americans is a billion dollars of economic impact per year.
To better understand how ambitious a startup is, assume that its adoption is 100%. If everyone is using it, does it change lives? If everyone chats on Twitter, does it impact politics? If everyone is on Facebook, do you reconnect with old friends? Etc. Dropbox is in that category too.
With used cars purchases, I can see how everyone would use the site, and still not have any meaningful impact. Cheaper cars. More efficient market. But still, in the end, cheaper cars. Am I missing something?
Dropbox should be a feature of the OS. Otherwise it can only get one part of the UX right, drag and drop.
And even if I insist on buying nothing but Apple (or whatever) products, if I want to share files with my dad or my next door neighbor, now I have to worry about what OS they're running too.
You install Dropbox once per device. After that, it's trivially easy.
There are a lot of possibilities if you think past the files.
Dropbox the product is a good revenue stream and could spark another Microsoft/Adobe style multiproduct software company.
Is that Paul Graham meant by start to chip at the big vision with a beachhead though? Because then any product idea has that potential, as long as it starts the first company. Seemed like he was advocating for a more direct path, hacker search to more general search, basecamp to email, etc. Starting companies is hard anyway, start with a clear path to something big.
But to me it doesn't seem a huge leap from "we keep your files for you and get them for you wherever you are" to "we let you do things with your files" or "we keep other stuff for you too." It seems like a very natural proposition to offer users.
Then your OS would be a commodity, and Dropbox would be what provided the value. Seamless editing of documents across devices, no matter where you are or what sort of device you're working on.
That's a pretty good endgame for dropbox.
Google Docs already turns your local filesystem into a "commodity." And what if Dropbox becomes Google Docs, that's not google/Apple sized. Then what?
The path to scale for Dropbox seems quite tricky.
This sounds like a great vision for Dropbox to follow, but I just can't shake the feeling that the future is going to ultimately look a lot more like what Google is doing with docs, and eliminate the need for most offline/native apps at all. And if in the best case, Dropbox is still going to be dependent on offline apps, I guess it just feels a bit limiting.
I'll admit as much as the next person that the current wave of web/browser-based things (games, operating systems, phone apps, etc) feel seriously lacking, but given enough time, I just can't imagine how this isn't the direction the future is heading. Dropbox makes it amazingly easy to backup, version, and share files right now, but if all the apps you use would already be doing that for you, what would be the point? Or rather, how would Dropbox pivot to account for this?
I think Dropbox is awesome, and that vision you're describing is great, but I would imagine that there is a very specific window of opportunity for when they would have to take action if they want to see this type of 'endgame' have any real impact.
Of course one could say that's the same goal for just about any consumer-facing startup these days.
What once seemed like a niche, unambitious company now is frighteningly ambitious.
That's probably a picture only big daddies like Apple can show to the world. For example on another thread you can already see DuckDuckGo revealing their ambitious face after a perceivable unambitious journey of two years!
Also another thing that probably we all miss is that the next big thing might not necessarily be anything from the ones ever listed - ambitious or unambitious. None of the big names like Facebook or Google or Apple were frighteningly ambitious ideas to the world until they kicked butts of everyone.
On second part: Suggestions on choosing a worthwhile domain name is really nice, but looking at how much has been squatted out there, there doesn't seem much of a choice or harm with the current trend of choosing twin word names.
There are fewer cheap options at disposal of entrepreneurs and so it is for the rest of the world.