The best way to have startup ideas is to just notice them organically.

Let's talk about how to come up with startup ideas.

The last way to have startup ideas is to just notice them organically. If you look at the YC top 100 companies, at least 70 percent of them had their startup ideas organically, rather than by sitting down and explicitly trying to think of a startup idea.

So, if you're not planning on starting a company imminently and you just want to put yourself in a position to have organic startup ideas in the future, here are three ways to do that. First is just like become an expert on something valuable. If you're working at the forefront of some field, you'll see good startup ideas in that field.

A great way to do that is to go work at a startup. Harge talked about this in his talk last week. If you're working at a startup, you will become an expert in the thing that that startup does, and that is really putting yourself in a position to have great startup ideas.

Finally, if you're a programmer, one thing that can work is to just build things that you find interesting, even if they're not businesses. They're not clearly startup ideas; sometimes they turn into them over time.