Should You Follow Your Passion?

**Dalton Caldwell** (0:00)
Guess what gives you passion? You want to hear the secret? Guess what keeps you attached to an idea? The 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.

**Michael Seibel** (0:18)
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. 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.

**Dalton Caldwell** (0:51)
Michael, let's start with the definition of solution in search of a problem. What do we mean by that? 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. And as long as technology has existed, this has been an issue. Remember reading about the patent system? There's millions of patents for products like better mousetraps or whatever that there's actually no market for whatsoever. And so this is, you know, as long as humans have been banging rocks together, there have been rocks that were solutions, but they weren't useful for anybody. And so look, this happens a lot with technologists. That happens a lot with Silicon Valley, where they start with a technology thing is cool, and they try to find a market for it second.
Now, the core thing that I want to talk about here that you sort of zeroed 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.

**Michael Seibel** (1:55)
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. And in school, you're not really rewarded for having opinions on things. You're rewarded for accomplishing specific tasks.
And so you're also rewarded when you're doing things that your smart friends are also doing. And so I think when they apply that model to their startups, they think, okay, someone invested in me. That's like getting an A on a paper, right?
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.

**Dalton Caldwell** (2:47)
Well, and 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. And so what's brutal about this is you have to really look in the mirror and understand the difference between superficial similarity of what you're doing and kind of going through the motions versus the damn thing you actually work in.

**Michael Seibel** (3:13)
You know?
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 stuff and you're like, all right, I believe you. I believe you, Dalton. I'm not gonna do a blank startup because it's the coolest technology right now. How do I figure out what to work on?

**Dalton Caldwell** (3:36)
You know, I think a lot of people get told to follow your passion. You know, I'm looking for a project. 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. And so you're like, okay, Michael, we figured out our passion is the environment.
That's our startup.
And so again, I think when people give the advice of follow your passion, they're trying to be helpful. What do you think that actually means in a way that is actionable when someone is saying that? What does it mean to follow your passion when you're finding a startup?