January 2012There are great startup ideas lying around unexploited right underour noses. One reason we don't see them is a phenomenon I callschlep blindness. Schlep was originally a Yiddish word but haspassed into general use in the US. It means a tedious, unpleasanttask.No one likes schleps, but hackers especially dislike them. Most hackers who start startups wish they could do it by just writingsome clever software, putting it on a server somewhere, and watchingthe money roll in—without ever having to talk to users, or negotiatewith other companies, or deal with other people's broken code.Maybe that's possible, but I haven't seen it.One of the many things we do at Y Combinator is teach hackers aboutthe inevitability of schleps. No, you can't start a startup byjust writing code. I remember going through this realization myself.There was a point in 1995 when I was still trying to convince myselfI could start a company by just writing code. But I soon learnedfrom experience that schleps are not merely inevitable, but prettymuch what business consists of. A company is defined by the schlepsit will undertake. And schleps should be dealt with the same wayyou'd deal with a cold swimming pool: just jump in. Which is notto say you should seek out unpleasant work per se, but that youshould never shrink from it if it's on the path to something great.The most dangerous thing about our dislike of schleps is that muchof it is unconscious. Your unconscious won't even let you see ideasthat involve painful schleps. That's schlep blindness.The phenomenon isn't limited to startups. Most people don'tconsciously decide not to be in as good physical shape as Olympicathletes, for example. Their unconscious mind decides for them,shrinking from the work involved.The most striking example I know of schlep blindness is Stripe, orrather Stripe's idea. For over a decade, every hacker who'd everhad to process payments online knew how painful the experience was.Thousands of people must have known about this problem. And yetwhen they started startups, they decided to build recipe sites, oraggregators for local events. Why? Why work on problems few caremuch about and no one will pay for, when you could fix one of themost important components of the world's infrastructure? Becauseschlep blindness prevented people from even considering the ideaof fixing payments.Probably no one who applied to Y Combinator to work on a recipesite began by asking "should we fix payments, or build a recipesite?" and chose the recipe site. Though the idea of fixing paymentswas right there in plain sight, they never saw it, because theirunconscious mind shrank from the complications involved. You'dhave to make deals with banks. How do you do that? Plus you'removing money, so you're going to have to deal with fraud, and peopletrying to break into your servers. Plus there are probably allsorts of regulations to comply with. It's a lot more intimidatingto start a startup like this than a recipe site.That scariness makes ambitious ideas doubly valuable. In additionto their intrinsic value, they're like undervalued stocks in thesense that there's less demand for them among founders. If youpick an ambitious idea, you'll have less competition, becauseeveryone else will have been frightened off by the challengesinvolved. (This is also true of starting a startup generally.)How do you overcome schlep blindness? Frankly, the most valuableantidote to schlep blindness is probably ignorance. Most successfulfounders would probably say that if they'd known when they werestarting their company about the obstacles they'd have to overcome,they might never have started it. Maybe that's one reason the mostsuccessful startups of all so often have young founders.In practice the founders grow with the problems. But no one seemsable to foresee that, not even older, more experienced founders.So the reason younger founders have an advantage is that they maketwo mistakes that cancel each other out. They don't know how muchthey can grow, but they also don't know how much they'll need to.Older founders only make the first mistake.Ignorance can't solve everything though. Some ideas so obviouslyentail alarming schleps that anyone can see them. How do you seeideas like that? The trick I recommend is to take yourself out ofthe picture. Instead of asking "what problem should I solve?" ask"what problem do I wish someone else would solve for me?" If someonewho had to process payments before Stripe had tried asking that,Stripe would have been one of the first things they wished for.It's too late now to be Stripe, but there's plenty still broken inthe world, if you know how to see it.Thanks to Sam Altman, Paul Buchheit, Patrick Collison,Aaron Iba, Jessica Livingston, Emmett Shear, and Harj Taggarfor reading drafts of this.
