Idea Generation
blog.samaltman.com/idea-generation
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You want to be able to project yourself 20 years into the future, and then think backwards from there. Trust yourself—20 years is a long time; it’s ok if your ideas about it seem pretty radical.
In such a tectonic shift, the world changes so fast that the big incumbents usually get beaten by fast-moving and focused startups.
Any time you can think of something that is possible this year and wasn’t possible last year, you should pay attention.
This is especially true if next year will be too late.
When you can say “I am sure this is going to happen, I’m just not sure if we’ll be the ones to do it”, that’s a good sign.
A good question to ask yourself early in the process of thinking about an idea is “could this be huge if it worked?”
Think early about why an idea might have that property. It’s obvious for Facebook or Airbnb, but it often exists in more subtle ways.
I’ve come to believe that founder/company fit is as important as product/market fit.
Finally, a good test for an idea is if you can articulate why most people think it’s a bad idea, but you understand what makes it good.
(By the way, it’s useful to get good at differentiating between real trends and fake trends. A key differentiator is if the new platform is used a lot by a small number of people, or used a little by a lot of people.)
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