I'm not offended nor mad about this, but I don't know if this is going to work out well. There are good ideas, bad ideas and terrible ideas. Terrible ideas can't be successful no matter what (startup)dream team is behind it, and bad ideas are the kind that only a black swan event can change into a successful business.
Also consider that while some "ideas" are the classic "twitter for dogs" or some other improvised nonsense others are actually very elaborated and go far beyond the idea and into the "concept" stage. That a concept gets thrown into the garbage bin together with all the dull "twitter for X" ideas is very demeaning to all the teams that spent a long time working on that.
And speaking of teams, is very VERY difficult to build one let alone keep it together without an actual goal (idea->concept->objective). Is next to impossible to keep things going when every session can be summed up as "any ideas?", the sound of crickets and no actual work. I don't know where you guys are but here if you walk into engineering and say "who wants to be in a startup?" followed by "there's no idea yet" you are not going to get the 10X engineers there, not even the 1Xs. The only ones paying attention will be the CS101 guys, and not the ones that learned Ruby by themselves but the ones that don't even know what PHP is yet.
Ideas keep the group together, give the team an actual goal rather than a vague outcome (eg: "we're going to be rich!"). Many like to talk about failed startups, but they rarely mention that the startups that fail the most are those founded by wantrepreneurs with no idea, no concept, very little knowledge and only one clear objective: make lots of money. What's the problem? you're not making any money by just wishing, you need an actual product that gains traction, and then a coherent business plan that actually works (or will work but in that case you better have lots of investors friends).
I don't mind YC is doing it but I think they should change their strategy: 3 months is a very short time to come up with a decent non-half-baked idea considering you also have to <execute it> which is a nice way of summing up all the actual work you'll have to do to get your product out there.
Also consider that while some "ideas" are the classic "twitter for dogs" or some other improvised nonsense others are actually very elaborated and go far beyond the idea and into the "concept" stage. That a concept gets thrown into the garbage bin together with all the dull "twitter for X" ideas is very demeaning to all the teams that spent a long time working on that.
And speaking of teams, is very VERY difficult to build one let alone keep it together without an actual goal (idea->concept->objective). Is next to impossible to keep things going when every session can be summed up as "any ideas?", the sound of crickets and no actual work. I don't know where you guys are but here if you walk into engineering and say "who wants to be in a startup?" followed by "there's no idea yet" you are not going to get the 10X engineers there, not even the 1Xs. The only ones paying attention will be the CS101 guys, and not the ones that learned Ruby by themselves but the ones that don't even know what PHP is yet.
Ideas keep the group together, give the team an actual goal rather than a vague outcome (eg: "we're going to be rich!"). Many like to talk about failed startups, but they rarely mention that the startups that fail the most are those founded by wantrepreneurs with no idea, no concept, very little knowledge and only one clear objective: make lots of money. What's the problem? you're not making any money by just wishing, you need an actual product that gains traction, and then a coherent business plan that actually works (or will work but in that case you better have lots of investors friends).
I don't mind YC is doing it but I think they should change their strategy: 3 months is a very short time to come up with a decent non-half-baked idea considering you also have to <execute it> which is a nice way of summing up all the actual work you'll have to do to get your product out there.