Honestly, with all skills there are people who naturally "get it" and those that naturally don't. Doesn't matter if it's programming, sports or entrepreneurship.

The reason I left a discouraging comment is that, unlike the other examples, people in certain communities (including here!) have a weird tendency where they feel they must become a successful entrepreneur or they've failed in life.

This is especially bad because businesses started because the founder wants to be an entrepreneur (as opposed to those businesses where the founder has organically come across a real problem to solve/gap in the market) tend to fail in the most awkward ways possible.

We glorify this failure as "real world education", but every time I've seen someone go through this before and it genuinely breaks them.

>Explaining this would be a good place to start. We shouldn't conflate our ineffectiveness at teaching as other people's inability to learn.

Cheeky comment aside, what I meant by this is that most good ideas aren't generated by a logical process but instead by (often viscerally) observing something that makes you go "WTF".

Thoughts like "Why does existing product x suck so much?" or "Why is it so hard/expensive to do simple thing x?" or "Why do customer base x pay so much for this dead basic product?" are good launch points for a profitable business, whereas "what would a product look like that makes life easier for niche segment x"[1] generally isn't.

The former are more reactions that "jump out" as you as you do other things, whereas the latter is a sit-down task that you work through.

[1] Of course, questions like these have their place, but not when you're creating the initial idea.

Yes, this is true. Also, one hell of a lot of luck is needed. I know this goes against most peoples' grain, but it is true. For example, Bill Gates agreed with it. He said that his high-end schools had computers or computer time available for him. He was able to get together with other computer buffs. This would not have happened if he was in a school where this didn't exist, or he went to a school in South side of Chicago in the baddest part of town.

His father was a name partner in a law firm, so Gates got all his legal advice for free, probably including leasing his software rather than selling it, which had huge ramifications.

His mother was on the board of directors of United Way with IBM's CEO, and she hooked up Bill Gates with the CEO and Bill Gate's software was on IBM's PC.

IBM tried to get a PC operating system and went to Gary Kildall to get his version of DR-DOS, but there were disagreements and IBM said no. So they went to Microsoft, who went out and purchased an operating system for $25,000 as I remember ($93,502.72 in today's dollars) from another company and named it MS-DOS and they were able to strike a deal with IBM.

Gates probably had this 3 or 4 year window that he hit perfectly for having his software be able to become the top company. A few years later and it would be too late.

There is a lot of luck involved.

I wonder if your argument could be made for Facebook vs Metaverse. One made it easier to connect with others, the other is a desperate move to save the business.

I think there is some truth in it though. I think he's driving at the fact that good ideas tend to be _found_ as opposed to _generated_.

Sitting down to brainstorm ideas is a lot less likely to lead to a good idea than listening over a longer period of time.

Agreed. I've occasionally tried using frameworks to generate ideas - none of which passed my sniff test. The really good ones come in the shower, so to speak.