Billion-Dollar Unpopular Startup Ideas

If you only want to work on things that are hot, you're going to find yourself working on derivative ideas that end up being obvious, that end up having five, ten, 100 competitors. It's great for that number one, number two, but guess what? Like, number three through number 98 of all the people in that market, their startups are going to die. Nine out of ten people might tell you you're stupid or crazy, but then one out of ten people might be exactly the person who believes what you believe. Run out and try to find things that humans really desperately want and need, and then you'll figure out the rest. (instrumental music) Welcome back to another episode of The Light Cone. As Peter Thiel says, "Competition is for losers." And as we look at all the AI startups we're working with, increasingly, AI competition is back. So, how do you actually deal with it? You know, well, I think if we go back to Zero1 again, uh, what we would say is, we're looking for how do you think from first principles, how do you actually deal with that competition by being contrarian, and right? Harj, how do you think about it?

Yeah, something I've been thinking about recently is, um, probably just over a year ago, we talked about how we were finding it, um, easier than ever to fund companies that were looking for a startup idea and that they could pivot and find an idea. And it felt like the two causes of that were, one, there was just so much greenfield. Like, AI was new, um, there were so many verticals to go after that hadn't been picked over yet, and the models themselves were changing. Like, there was such a, there was a step function increase in new models every few months that just caused the idea space to expand. So you could both... There was greenfield and you could always count on a cha- big change coming that would shake things up, um, and create more ideas and I think clearly we've seen the benefit of that. Like, there are so many vertical AI agent companies that are doing tremendously well. But I kind of feel like the vibe is shifting a little bit now, where when I'm talking to founders, doing office hours, trying to help them find ideas, it's not as easy as, "Hey," like, "go figure out, like, uh, a vertical where there's, like, a workflow to automate, like insurance or banking," because there's multiple startups in each of these verticals now. Um, and there actually hasn't been, like, a model that's shaken things up, um, for a while now. And so, I think it's becoming more important to think about what's your actual, like, unique insight that is going to enable you to find a good idea and what's, like, the contrarian bet you're going to make, um, so that you can actually stand out from all of the competition?