Your ideas are useless
the take
The question.
- There's this air that the entrepreneurial spirit of people or the world has changed drastically because of AI.
- There's this belief that any person, irrespective of how good or bad their idea is, can go out and create a company or create something meaningful. And I think that's bullshit.
- This isn't necessarily proof of that, but it's an exploration of that.
On Polsia the product.
- When I saw the Polsia demo, I thought their video was really cool. And when I logged into their platform, it quickly became very not cool.
- I think the reason I dislike the product is because it promotes shitty ideas. There's no skin in the game, there's no risks, there's no effort really tangibly associated with the idea that you try to produce. So a lot of it is extremely surface level.
Caveat on the data.
- Keep in mind, there's some drawbacks here in that not all these ideas are entered by people. Some of them are generated by the machine itself, because it gives you two paths when you sign up for the first time — you can either use one idea that creates for you, or you can enter your own.
- But the idea still stands. These are not unique.
What the clusters show.
- When you cluster them and you look at their semantic similarity, you see these massive clouds of ideas.
- And I think that should kind of give you an understanding of what startups are and what the difficulty is with startups in the first sense. It's not really coming up with an idea. It's the fact that you have to mechanically execute and have sustainable odds on some specific sector of the world that you may or may not have more context over, or experience, or likelihood of success in.
Founder advice (roughly misquoted).
- Whenever you go on those YC stories or you go read articles from founders over the last decade, you'll get a whole bunch of substrate advice that's roughly following the ideas of: choose something you have a good proxy to, choose ideas and share them rigorously, don't be afraid of shying away from them — first time founders are always hiding their ideas.
- The sense that should give you (these are roughly misquoted, there's more to it) is that it's not really about the idea.
The thesis.
- I actually think that, ironically, AI is not helping people by bringing their ideas to the limelight and making it meritocratic, or I guess idea-cratic. It's the opposite.
- It's that ideas don't matter anymore. Raw compute resources and execution are the only things that matter.
- And I think that's exactly what you see when you look at all these generated startup pitches. Some of them are AI, some of them aren't, but you see that there's massive clusters of essentially delusion.
- You have people who just choose common good-sounding ideas, but have zero chance of feasibly succeeding on them. And it's not because the ideas are bad. It's not because there's not enough motivation or incentive. It's because the ideas don't mean anything anymore.
Opening the floodgates floods.
- I feel like the irony in this approach, which is supposed to give people access to opportunity, is that opening the floodgates floods, right?
- I see a lot of apps that are made for job hunters where they auto-apply for you, or they take your resume and they fine-tune every job posting you look at, working autonomously for you.
- I see apps where people will compile job boards for students, where they'll scrape a whole bunch of jobs and give everyone access to the same listings.
- In one sense, if you have just a handful of people with access to that information, it boosts their odds. When you extrapolate it and you give it to everybody, it's no longer as effective — and actually works against candidates because there are too many applicants for certain jobs. People don't get the right attention for their screens.
- A bit needs to be tightened there, but that's what I'm trying to say: it's not actually helping people.
The multiplier analogy.
- Execution does. Always been the case. But I don't like the narrative or the theme that AI is some sort of equalizer, or some sort of promotion of people's entrepreneurial spirits, because it alone does not do that.
- It's kind of like the analogy when they talk about engineers — AI is a multiplier. If you're not above the scalar factor of one or something like that, a bad engineer with AI is still a worse engineer. But a really good engineer with AI is much, much better.
the launch doubled the bot's rate
the map
Each dot is one idea, positioned by semantic similarity. Type to filter — the scatter and the theme list update live.
themes inside the filter
how often is each opening reused
The two most common openers (built X × most Y ×
methodology
