Pattern Breakers: How to find a great startup idea | Mike Maples Jr (Founding Partner at Floodgate, ex-Product at Silicon Graphics) #startup #founder #entrepreneur #ycombinator #yc best startup podcast, best startup ideas, how to have startup ideas, business ideas, startup founder tips

You found that there's basically three elements of most breakthrough startup ideas. The three are inflections, insights, and then founder-future-fit. Business is never a fair fight. What inflections let the founder do is wage asymmetric warfare on the president. You referenced this term that you use occasionally, this earned secret. The way inventions happen is people get their hands dirty, being awake to the possibility that secrets are there. If you're living in the future and you notice what's missing, your intuition about what to build is far more likely to be right. This connects with that stat that you shared that 80% of your biggest returning investments came from a pivot. So a startup never beats a big company by executing better. The way startups win is because it proposes a radically different future, disorients the incumbent, and chaotically moves people to that different future. The rock is the inflection, the slingshot is the insight, that David shoots at Goliath. We're looking to create the conditions where we're going to get to play an unfair game by unfair rules that favor us.