Week 1: Listen to the Waves
From my house in the heart of Silicon Valley, I can be on the Northern California coast in about half an hour. I go several times a week, dog in tow, for a long walk on the beach. The coastline is often foggy and windswept, the kind of place that demands reflection. As I throw a tennis ball into the surf and watch the waves crash rhythmically onto the shore, I often find myself thinking about startups.
Where do great startup ideas actually come from? Do they arrive fully formed, like lightning bolts of brilliance, during a walk on the beach?
We’ll come back to that. But first, let’s get clear on what we even mean by entrepreneurship.
Harvard Business School professor Howard Stevenson once defined it as:
“The pursuit of opportunity without regard to resources currently controlled.”
What I love about this definition is that it captures the essence of the entrepreneurial mindset. A great founder doesn’t worry about whether they have money, a team, customers, or even technology in hand. They see an opportunity worth chasing, and they trust they can assemble whatever resources are required. That’s what entrepreneurs do.
Maybe that’s why you enrolled in this course. You see an opportunity, and you’re ready to figure out how to pursue it. My job is to help you on that path. And the first step is clearing away some dangerous myths about startups.
Myth #1: It All Starts With a Brilliant Idea
The popular story is that startup success begins with a genius idea, delivered in a flash of inspiration. You wake up with a vision, build an app, and by Tuesday you’re a billionaire.
The truth? If you study startup history, it’s hard to find examples where success hinged on the original idea. In fact, most original ideas fail.
- Twitter began as a podcasting app called Odeo.
- Instagram started as a check-in app called Burbn.
- YouTube’s founders thought their main use case would be video dating.
- Slack was originally a gaming company.
The ideas didn’t work. The teams did. They adapted, pivoted, and executed relentlessly until they found something that did work.
Mark Zuckerberg didn’t invent social networking. Steve Jobs didn’t invent the personal computer or the smartphone. Elon Musk didn’t invent electric cars. What made them successful was execution, not ideas.
As I tell my students: ideas are cheap; execution is everything.
Myth #2: Your Idea Is Worth Millions
If startup ideas were inherently valuable, there would be marketplaces full of people buying and selling them. There aren’t—because nobody pays for ideas. They’re not scarce. They’re not protected. They’re not worth anything until someone does the hard work of execution.
So don’t cling to the illusion that your idea itself has value. What matters is what you build around it.
Where Startups Really Begin: Noticing Problems
If success isn’t about ideas, where do great startups come from?
Paul Graham, co-founder of Y Combinator, puts it well:
“The verb you want to be using with respect to startup ideas is not ‘think up’ but ‘notice.’ The way to get startup ideas is not to try to think of startup ideas. It’s to look for problems.”
Most enduring startups began when a founder noticed a real problem—and became obsessed with solving it.
- Uber’s founders saw how inefficient private drivers were with their downtime.
- Airbnb’s founders needed help paying rent and realized they could rent out a spare room.
- Cisco’s founders were frustrated by slow campus networking at Stanford.
In each case, the founders didn’t just notice the problem. They fell in love with solving it.
Max Levchin, co-founder of PayPal and now CEO of Affirm, told me how his company began. He was already fascinated by financial services, but when he dug into the credit card industry, he became enraged at predatory practices like hidden fees and retroactive interest hikes.
“So I guess that’s how I founded Affirm,” he said. “It was love plus rage.”
That combination—deep passion plus frustration with the status quo—drove him to build a company now worth billions.
Myth #3: You Need a Completely Unique Idea
Students often pitch me on ideas that boil down to: “There’s nothing like this on the market!”
But uniqueness alone is not value. If there are no frog-flavored cookies on the market, maybe it’s because nobody actually wants frog-flavored cookies.
Successful startups usually improve or reimagine things people already want. It’s easier to sell a better chocolate-chip cookie than to convince the world it needs frog-flavored ones.
One way to spot opportunities is by looking at gray markets—places where demand exists but the solutions are informal, illegal, or under the table.
- College students were downloading music illegally; iTunes legitimized it.
- People were renting out bedrooms against regulations; Airbnb normalized it.
- Informal errand runners thrived in Latin America; Rappi formalized the practice into a billion-dollar company.
Gray markets prove demand. Startups that move them into the mainstream often succeed spectacularly.
Myth #4: You Need a Business Plan
There was a time when founders wrote 200-page business plans, but those days are gone.
Steve Blank, one of Silicon Valley’s most influential thinkers, says: “No business plan ever survived first contact with customers.”
I’ve lived this myself. I once spent months writing a detailed plan, raised money with it, built a team, and built a product. Within two weeks of talking to customers, I realized the plan was completely wrong.
Plans may help you clarify your own thinking, but don’t expect investors to read them. A five-minute conversation with you tells them more than 50 pages of projections.
Myth #5: Someone Will Steal Your Idea
First-time founders are often secretive, afraid someone will steal their concept. In reality, almost nobody wants to steal your idea. And if you’re really worried, you’re probably not telling the story in a way that matters.
The benefits of sharing—getting feedback, referrals, introductions—far outweigh the risks. Make a list of ten people you can talk to this week. You’ll be surprised by how many want to help.
What Actually Matters: Passion
Startups are brutally hard. They’re marathons with no clear finish line, shifting weather, and no guarantee of water stations. The only thing that gets you through is deep, stubborn passion for the problem you’re solving.
As an investor, that’s what I look for: passion and grit. Those are far better predictors of success than the idea itself.
And Yes—Walks Are Awesome
So, go take that walk on the beach. Personally, I recommend the Wavecrest trail in Half Moon Bay, followed by fish tacos at Tres Amigos Taqueria.
As you walk, ask yourself: what problems do I notice? Which ones make me care enough to want to fix them?
That’s where real startups begin—with an entrepreneur who notices a problem worth solving, and who has the passion to keep solving it no matter how hard the road becomes.
That’s where our Launch Path begins.