The Story Founders Leave Out

James Currier has started five companies, was an early investor in DoorDash, Lyft, and Patreon, and is a founding partner of NFX, a firm that invests in startups. Many of the founders NFX works with have already built one successful company and want to build another but do not yet have an idea. The line, from his essay “The Hidden Patterns of Great Startup Ideas” (NFX, August 2019), describes what he watches them go through: finding the idea “is not as easy as it often sounds in the telling after the fact.”

Two lines of startup advice on this site contradict that.

The first is from John Doerr, the investor who bet $11.8 million on a young Google in 1999 and joined its board: ideas are easy, execution is everything. Execution means the work after the idea: building it, selling it, running the company. Currier’s essay takes on a version of this that most people have heard, the saying that success is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration, which in startup terms means 1% idea and 99% execution. “We disagree.” The saying may be true at later stages, he allows, and later stages are where Doerr formed his view, watching startups “struggle with growth and scale.” At the start, Currier says, the idea multiplies everything after it, and a mediocre company takes 100% of your time just as a transformative one does. The biggest waste he sees is “great people working on mediocre ideas.”

The second is from Paul Graham, who co-founded the startup program Y Combinator: look for problems, preferably problems you have yourself. Graham calls ideas that grow out of a founder’s own life “organic,” says the most successful startups almost all begin that way, and calls any deliberate hunt for ideas “plan B.” If so, there is no search to leave out. Currier’s essay offers three counterexamples. If you had been making the slides to raise money for Facebook, Supercell, or Slack, he writes, you could not easily have named a “problem” they solved; the pitch that fit was “This would be awesome.” Ali Tamaseb, a venture capitalist who built a dataset of billion-dollar startups for his book Super Founders (PublicAffairs, 2021), quotes Currier’s line and reports what the data showed. Some ideas were eureka moments, but many came out of “months or even years of careful, deliberate ideation,” often from founders who saw an opening rather than a problem of their own. “It’s a myth that all billion-dollar companies are created by mission-driven founders solving their own personal problems. You can win as a missionary, and you can win as a mercenary.”

Those last two words have a history, and it runs through Doerr again. In a 2000 talk, Doerr sorted founders into two kinds: missionaries, who are “driven by passion,” and mercenaries, who “think opportunistically.” He wanted the first kind; the line of his that Marty Cagan quotes on this site is “We need teams of missionaries, not teams of mercenaries.” Tamaseb’s sentence, two decades later, says both kinds have won.

The disagreement is itself worth something. Doerr sat on Google’s board, Graham co-founded Y Combinator, Currier works with repeat founders, and Tamaseb counted. If there were one way the biggest companies got started, people this close to them would have settled on it by now. They have not. More than one way has worked. The reason we seldom hear about the painstaking search for problems is that founders tend to leave it out, probably because it doesn’t make for a good story.