flâneur

Taryn Livingstone

10 followers · 9 following · 1190 views

on the atlas — 28

highlights — 15

  • And often these gaps won't seem to be ideas for companies, just things that would be interesting to build. Which is why it's good to have the time and the inclination to build things just because they're interesting.
    How to Get Startup Ideas
  • What would you pay for right now?
    How to Get Startup Ideas
  • But don't feel like you have to build things that will become startups. That's premature optimization. Just build things. Preferably with other students. It's not just the classes that make a university such a good place to crank oneself into the future. You're also surrounded by other people trying to do the same thing. If you work together with them on projects, you'll end up producing not just organic ideas, but organic ideas with organic founding teams — and that, empirically, is the best combination.
    How to Get Startup Ideas
  • you'll probably see problems that software could solve
    How to Get Startup Ideas
  • working on things that could be dismissed as "toys" often produces good ones.
    How to Get Startup Ideas
  • A good way to trick yourself into noticing ideas is to work on projects that seem like they'd be cool. If you do that, you'll naturally tend to build things that are missing. It wouldn't seem as interesting to build something that already existed.
    How to Get Startup Ideas
  • look for things that seem to be missing
    How to Get Startup Ideas
  • If you're not at the leading edge of some rapidly changing field, you can get to one. For example, anyone reasonably smart can probably get to an edge of programming (e.g. building mobile apps) in a year. Since a successful startup will consume at least 3-5 years of your life, a year's preparation would be a reasonable investment. Especially if you're also looking for a cofounder.
    How to Get Startup Ideas
  • The reason those stimuli caused those founders to start companies was that their experiences had prepared them to notice the opportunities they represented.
    How to Get Startup Ideas
  • Live in the future, then build what's missing.
    How to Get Startup Ideas
  • because little if any of the software you write in school even has users.
    Hiring is Obsolete
  • The big change that "experience" causes in your brain is learning that you need to solve people's problems.
    Hiring is Obsolete
  • All through college, and probably long before that, most undergrads have been thinking about what employers want. But what really matters is what customers want, because they're the ones who give employers the money to pay you.
    Hiring is Obsolete
  • Something similar happened with blogs. People could have been publishing online in 1995, and yet blogging has only really taken off in the last couple years. In 1995 we thought only professional writers were entitled to publish their ideas, and that anyone else who did was a crank. Now publishing online is becoming so popular that everyone wants to do it, even print journalists. But blogging has not taken off recently because of any technical innovation; it just took eight years for everyone to realize the cage was open.
    Hiring is Obsolete
  • Working on something good will pull you along a path where good things keep happening to you. (In fact, this effect is so strong that there’s a danger of getting sucked into too many interesting things and getting distracted from what you really want to do.)
    Advice for ambitious 19 year olds - Sam Altman