> How many successful entrepreneurs have you heard of without ideas, just totally empty heads and whole bunch of hustle?

We'll find out after this next YC round. Besides, I think the point is that pg is looking for people that are the antithesis of empty heads. Startup ideas mutate, and if you can find driven people with fertile minds and place them in a setting where product ideas can be brainstormed and hashed out with the guidance of the YC team, then they stand a much better chance of success then the typical entrepreneur who might try this on their own.

Don't get me wrong - I love the 'no idea' concept and hope it works out, and I love the fact that YC is ballsy enough to experiment and innovate. They key here, though, is that ideas still matter. YC will simply help generate and execute those ideas.

I agree. Ideas do matter. Being accepted into YC with no idea will place the startups in a creative pressure cooker. Just for fun, I think I'll try an experiment tomorrow => I'll go for a walk and not let myself come home until I come up with 5 product ideas. (Luckily I don't mind long walks.)

Coming up with a decent product idea is hard for most people. But I have to wonder, is it hard because they expect the ideas to come easily and have never spent the time to really focus in on it?

Coming up with product ideas is easy. Coming up with a real business model around that idea, as well as understanding the market, not so much. Granted, half the industry thinks the product is all that matters. Acquisition is not a business model. It's gambling.

Maybe, but that really for pg & co. to decide. I'm not going to presume anything.

>"How many successful entrepreneurs have you heard of without ideas, just totally empty heads and whole bunch of hustle?"

Other than the empty heads part, it's pretty common. That's why we will probably see millions of smartphone apps within a few years.

IMO, YC focuses on a particular type of entrepreneur. One of their features is that they don't place a high value on bootstrapping and place more value on working within a collaborative ecosystem. Those traits indicate flexibility.

Most of the ideas that YC companies pursue are not visionary in a way that correlates to the type of passion underlying an Apple or Oracle. They're usually more practical, limited and don't require a Jobs or Ellison.

> Oh really? How many successful entrepreneurs have you heard of without ideas, just totally empty heads and whole bunch of hustle?

This is because we are going about it backwards. A successful entrepreneur obviously became successful by executing on some idea. That says little about what came first: the desire to strike out on their own or the flash of an idea. My guess is that there is a fair percentage of both these cases plus the third case where someone was forced into being an entrepreneur (I put Google in that category).

So yes, ideas matter but when used as a criteria to decide whether to startup or not, they are an artificial barrier.

I guess it depends on what we mean by success, idea and entrepreneurs. Do they have to be successful on their first product? If their first product morphs into something completely different from their original idea does that mean the idea was pointless? If they're not successful until their 2nd, 3rd, 4th or 60th product what's the difference between starting with no idea and starting with an idea that gets abandoned?

Some examples:

Id, shipped 3 games before Wolfenstein Flickr started as an MMO company Rovio shipped 60+ games before Angry Birds Twitter's first project was a podcast directory

I'm sure there's hundreds of other examples.

Hey.. Commander Keen was awesome. Don't knock early iD. :)

Y combinator seems to have focused on people that have hustle and a decent idea. I don't think they're lowering the requirement, a 22 year old with hustle and no experience and no idea isn't a great investment. Instead I suspect they're changing the requirement to get a different batch of people in the door, as evidenced by the "as shown by what they've done in the past". Someone with more experience or a more proven record could certainly have "no idea" and be the type of person where if you stick them in a room with other skilled/experienced people, things will happen.

I know more than a few people where we could sit in a room and brainstorm some decent business ideas. Maybe not even ones we want to work on, but a building full of these people, with ideas coming out of one room, being refined in another, maybe being executed in yet another? I think that could lead to something.

Microsoft. They've never had an overarching product idea that defines their business, they just created software trying to see what would stick.

Overarching product idea? So it's not an idea unless it's overarching? They've had plenty of ideas. Not all the ideas panned out. It's not like they stumbled, fell on a keyboard, and out popped Windows 95.

It's still a counterexample to all the startups that had one big unifying vision from the outset. Obviously you need some idea before you start making a product, that much is a tautology, but it's equally clear that Microsoft more or less winged it from there.

I didn't see the GP ask about a big, unifying vision. He was asking about ideas.

> Obviously you need some idea before you start making a product

That's not the discussion though.

>> The idea for a company is an artificial barrier to becoming an entrepreneur > Oh really? How many successful entrepreneurs have you heard of without ideas, just totally empty heads and whole bunch of hustle?

Can you be an entrepreneur without an idea? Obviously not.

And even Microsoft had an idea for a product (starting with the BASIC interpreter for the Altair). That was, after all, where it all started.

At that point it's not really a question, just a tautology. My apologies for trying to interpret the question more generously.