Dalton Caldwell: evaluation

Transcript context

…I was watching your chat with Michael Seibel talking about pivots and either you or he used this phrase of you want to move towards the mountains in the desert to find the gold of a new startup idea versus the middle of the city. You're unlikely to find gold in the middle of San Francisco. Is there anything along those lines that you can share? Yeah, I think maybe this pertains into what we see from applications and interviews, which is from where I sit seeing everything people apply to YC with and what they interview with and whatnot. People all have the same idea. Basically imagine this, imagine your information consumption where you're listening to the same podcast, wink, wink, you're reading the same people on Twitter, you're reading the same blog post. Basically you have the same information diet of all these other founders and you're friends with all the same people. Does it seem surprising then that you would all end up with similar startup ideas or similar philosophies on what makes a good startup idea? Of course you are. So this is the metaphor on cities is that if you just are following the same principles and have the same information flow into your brain, you're going to come up with the same ideas with everybody else. And so the prompt here is to try to go more off the beaten path either from your personal experience, like in the case of Brex and Retool or Whatnot. There was no one else trying to build marketplaces for Funko Pops. Go deeper in your own personal interests or experience to find something that just your exact peer wouldn't come up with in exactly the same way. And again, the Zip example, I don't think other people were trying to build wonky procurement software. That was not an idea that we saw much of. And so again, the prompt to people is try to mix up what your information diet is or what areas of expertise you have and mine that well, versus just having all the same thoughts as everybody else. And so again, let me give you one more example. A few years ago, startups around trucking were super new and fresh because no one was doing them and they worked really well and then it became completely conventional wisdom to do trucking related startups. I'm not trying to diss anyone, but you'll see things that become fashionable really quickly because someone found success in this unfashionable space and then it becomes fashionable. This is a good segue to something I definitely want to spend time on, which is you have this concept of tarpit ideas, which are essentially ideas people all gravitate towards and get stuck in and either pivot into and then can't pivot out of or try to pivot out of. And essentially it's just consistently bad startup ideas that people continue to try to start. Can you just talk about this and then what is examples of just bad startup ideas that people should stop trying to start?…

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