It seems to me they're not evaluating the pair {problem, solution}, they're evaluating the pair {problem, founder} - the solution may be changed and tweaked and not be special but the founder has to be special, and carefully designed charts with pretty numbers don't explain a founder, emotional speeches do.
> It seems to me they're not evaluating the pair {problem, solution}, they're evaluating the pair {problem, founder}
I think that's a good insight. "Plans never survive contact with the enemy", and so solutions are constantly changing as a startup explores the problem space. Perhaps what VCs are actually looking for is:
1. The founder identified a problem that actually exists.
2. The problem actually has a solution that can be monetized, in theory.
3. They have confidence that the founder can hone in on a viable solution that can be monetized.
The pitch doesn't have to be the solution, it only has to show that a financially viable path to a solution plausibly exists, and that the founder seems competent enough to find the way towards a financially viable outcome. If even one of the above requirements isn't satisfied, investing money doesn't seem sensible.
How are you inferring that from this blog post? Everything about it seems to be saying "I've heard this solution a million times, and seen a million failures, do you have anything new?"
The answer is to have a solution that has not seen a million failures.
I have really come to appreciate the need for regular retros on a team. That a team needs a very safe space to explore failures and difficulties. It helps to have someone who can facilitate, but cam be successful without. It should be long enough to feel slighty awkward, so that people have time to articulate thoughts, and there should be no manager for at least half an hour, so that grievances about them can be aired.
I’ve seen teams really come together and vastly improve with regular safe meetings. I’ve also seen teams start to fall apart when the retro format changed to make it harder to delve into some of the emotional parts.
Yes, sorry I replied to a different interpretation of your question I guess.
I was trying to say that YC may be looking past the solution to the real underlying issue.
To me this would make sense. We often start out with a problem that bugs us, and then come up with a half baked solution.
Even if the proposed solution isn't valid the founder may have identified a valid problem. In our crowded marketplace, a unique and unmet need is much harder to find than a technical solution.
pg has in the past been quite blunt that he sees the quality of the founders as the most important thing, regardless of the solution.
As has repeated time and time again to the point of almost becoming mythology in my opinion, pg has posted about how he originally hated the AirBnB idea but loved the founders.
Seems like the sort of thing that wants to be a game. If you asked me to name a successful "urban exploration" startup, I'd probably name Pokemon Go and maybe Groupon.
The former isn't a "startup" companywise, and the latter isn't one now, but both were certainly novel, and strongly adjacent to the space under discussion. They both got people out of their homes and offices and into unfamiliar parts of town. My guess is the ultimate winner will find a way to hit both the Pokemon Go and Groupon psychological buttons at once.
