Should You Follow Your Passion? – Dalton Caldwell and Michael Seibel

Guess what gives you passion? You want to hear the secret? Guess what keeps you attached to an idea? That damn thing — working, success, users, revenue numbers — that makes a lot of these folks that have no particular ideas suddenly care a lot more when they actually are running a business that appears to be working.

Hey, this is Michael Seibel with Dalton Caldwell, and welcome to Rookie Mistakes. We ask YC founders for their rookie mistakes so we can share them with you and help you avoid them. A YC founder wrote in and said, "We chose to create a company around a hot technology. We were really excited about the tech. We eventually raised funds because there were enough investors who were excited about it too. But now looking back, I think we had it backwards. We were the classic Silicon Valley startup in search of a problem."

Michael, let's start with the definition of "solution in search of a problem." What do we mean by that? The solution in search of a problem is where you build a thing and you're like, "We have this thing; we just need to find someone who wants it. We need to find a use for it. We have the solution, and let's go out and find a problem for it."

As long as technology has existed, this has been an issue. Remember reading about the patent system? You know, there's millions of patents for products like better mouse traps or whatever that there's actually no market for whatsoever. This has been a problem since humans have been banging rocks together. There have been rocks that were solutions, but they weren't useful for anybody.

This happens a lot with technologists and a lot with Silicon Valley, where they start with the technology they think is cool and try to find a market for it.

Now, the core thing that I want to talk about here, that you sort of zeroed in on, is founders with no particular opinions about what the market should be and no ideas on who the customers are or anything. They're just sort of floating in space. The best explanation that I come up with is that there's a bit of a school metaphor here. I think that people are trained in school for so long that they try to see startups like school.

In school, you're not really rewarded for having opinions on things; you're rewarded for accomplishing specific tasks. You're also rewarded when you're doing things that your smart friends are also doing. I think when they apply that model to their startups, they think, "Okay, someone invested in me. That's obvious; that's like getting an A on a paper."

I'm doing an idea that my friends think is really cool. That's like getting into a college my friends think is really cool, right? It's just kind of this rinse and repeat of the strategy that's worked for them in the past.

You see the superficial similarity between what you're doing and things that appear to be working, and you try to hide from the fact that you have no idea what you're doing or you don't believe it. You have no particular opinion of what it is.

What's brutal about this is you have to really look in the mirror and understand the difference between the superficial similarity of what you're doing and kind of going through the motions versus the damn thing actually working. We talked about the surface issues; let's go deeper. How are you actually supposed to figure out what to work on? Like, that's the real thing.

Okay, so let's say you find yourself attracted to this stuff, and you're like, "All right, I believe you. I believe you, Dalton. I'm not going to do a blank startup because it's the coolest technology right now." How do I forget what to work on?

You know, I think a lot of people get told to follow your passion. You know, I'm looking for a project. Again, that's a good tell: if you call it a project, that's a bad sign. We're looking for a project we are very passionate about, and so you sort of go through this like spirit journey of what all the problems are that face humanity or something.

So you're like, "Okay, Michael, we figured out our passion is the environment."