Sam Altman explains how to come up with a great startup idea

“Wait to have a good idea before you start a startup. If you start a startup without a good idea… you’ll be under pressure to make something up and it won’t work that well. The very best startups are all started because someone believes so passionately in an idea and they believe that a startup is the best way to make that happen.”

As Sam explains in the clip below, the hard thing about good ideas is they require original thought. Most people just copy other people’s thoughts, but it’s usually disastrous if you try to copy someone else’s idea. For example, thousands of social media and photo sharing apps were started after Facebook and Instagram, but very few went anywhere. You want to do something that’s new and different.

A good way to come up with startup ideas is noticing problems in your own life:

“It’s not true that all successful startups are started to solve a problem that the founders have themselves, but it’s a very high percentage. If you go back and think about the transformational companies, most of them start with someone solving their own problem.”

Another thing you notice if you go back and look at all the really successful companies is that many of them were early to a massive technology wave.

Sam believes these “Great Waves” are why great companies tend to cluster in time (e.g. Amazon and Google with the Internet wave; Uber, Airbnb, Snapchat, Instagram, WhatsApp with the mobile wave; etc.).

“A really good question ask is: What is the wave that’s starting right now?”

Sam also wrote an essay on this: Idea Generation.

Full video: Waterloo Engineering “Sam Altman Startup School Video | Waterloo Engineering“ (Jul 2017)