Cultivating a state of mind where new ideas are born (2023)
Ranked #2 on Hacker News with 31 points and 6 comments.
The Knight: As you know, I am afraid of emptiness, desolation and stillness. I cannot bear the silence and isolation.
Death: Emptiness is a mirror turned to your own face.
— Ingmar Bergman’s workbook, April 5, 1955
In the early 2010s, a popular idea was to provide coworking spaces and shared living to people who were building startups. That way the founders would have a thriving social scene of peers to percolate ideas with as they figured out how to build and scale a venture. This was attempted thousands of times by different startup incubators. There are no famous success stories.
In 2015, Sam Altman, who was at the time the president of Y Combinator, a startup accelerator that has helped scale startups collectively worth $600 billion, tweeted in reaction that “not [providing coworking spaces] is part of what makes YC work.” Later, in a 2019 interview with Tyler Cowen, Altman was asked to explain why.
SAM ALTMAN: Good ideas — actually, no, great ideas are fragile. Great ideas are easy to kill. An idea in its larval stage — all the best ideas when I first heard them sound bad. And all of us, myself included, are much more affected by what other people think of us and our ideas than we like to admit.