"[music] >> Hi, I'm John and I'm a partner at YC. I often meet founders who have lots of ideas about what to work on and can't decide between them. Sometimes they're working on multiple things. Often t..."

"the perfect idea. In some ways, this is an understandable impulse. Startups are hard, so shouldn't you figure out the best idea before committing? The problem with this approach is that it's impossibl..."

"figure out which one will actually work. There are a couple problems with this approach. The most serious is that it tends to produce bad data. If you don't actually go deep on an idea, but instead ju..."

"I mean by going deep? The first thing is that you should burn the other boats. That is, you should explicitly foreclose your other startup idea options. Stop working on them. Tell any customers that y..."

"whether you talked to 20 owners. The question is if I dropped you into a cleaning business tomorrow, would you know how to run it? Do you know what their daily crises are? Do you know whether answerin..."

"era that you should look out for as you go. The first is that the idea sits at the edge of what models can do today. This might mean that your product barely works on today's frontier models, but will..."

"They're both extremely hard. They both place extreme demands on your time. So, aim at the version that, if it works, rewrites a sector of the economy. Because that's also the version that protects you..."

"a pivot on and a better sense of how to execute going forward. But more importantly, you will often come away from the process with a new idea that will actually work. When most founders begin, they'r..."

"Learn everything you can about the customer and try to execute for them. In the early idea fog, where you can only see 10 ft in front of you, the temptation is to take a few cautious steps in every di..."