Ideas for Startups
October 2005(This essay is derived from a talk at the 2005 Startup School.)How do you get good ideas for startups? That's probably the number one question people ask me.I'd like to reply with another question: why do people think it's hard to come up with ideas for startups?That might seem a stupid thing to ask. If people can't do it, then it is hard, at least for them.
- ▪October 2005(This essay is derived from a talk at the 2005 Startup School.)How do you get good ideas for startups?
- ▪That's probably the number one question people ask me.I'd like to reply with another question: why do people think it's hard to come up with ideas for startups?That might seem a stupid thing to ask.
- ▪If people can't do it, then it is hard, at least for them.
Paul Graham — Essays files mainly under blogs. We currently carry 219 of its stories.
Story provenance
Source · retrieval · rights · ranking — open for full record
inspect →
Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | Paul Graham — Essays |
| Canonical URL | http://www.paulgraham.com/ideas.html |
| Publication time | Not provided by source |
| Retrieval time | 2026-07-26T08:49:07.854Z |
| Last seen | 2026-07-26T08:49:32.149Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | None |
| Cluster logic | Not yet clustered, or no peer story found in the clustering window. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Want to start a startup? Get funded by Y Combinator. October 2005(This essay is derived from a talk at the 2005 Startup School.)How do you get good ideas for startups? That's probably the number one question people ask me.I'd like to reply with another question: why do people think it's hard to come up with ideas for startups?That might seem a stupid thing to ask. Why do they think it's hard? If people can't do it, then it is hard, at least for them. Right?Well, maybe not. What people usually say is not that they can't think of ideas, but that they don't have any. That's not quite the same thing. It could be the reason they don't have any is that they haven't tried to generate them.I think this is often the case.
…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Paul Graham — Essays.