How to get startup ideas, Larry Ellison on Oracle's humble beginnings, and Jeff Bezos' hiring heuristic

Welcome back to the Z Fellows newsletter! Every Monday we share 3 ideas - to help you build companies, ship products, and create your life's work.

1: How to get startup ideas

“The way to get startup ideas is not to try to think of startup ideas. It's to look for problems, preferably problems you have yourself.

The very best startup ideas tend to have three things in common:

• They're something the founders themselves want,

• that they themselves can build,

• and that few others realize are worth doing.

Microsoft, Apple, Yahoo, Google, and Facebook all began this way.

When you have an idea for a startup, ask yourself: who wants this right now? Who wants this so much that they'll use it even when it's a crappy version one made by a two-person startup they've never heard of? If you can't answer that, the idea is probably bad.

The verb you want to be using with respect to startup ideas is not "think up" but "notice." At YC we call ideas that grow naturally out of the founders' own experiences "organic" startup ideas. The most successful startups almost all begin this way.“

Source: How to Get Startup Ideas by Paul Graham

2: Larry Ellison on Oracle’s humble beginnings

“I had all the disadvantages necessary for success.

When you're raised on the South Side of Chicago, you probably want to move someplace nicer. If it doesn't kill you, it makes you stronger.

I've always been very ambitious. I've always been very curious. I moved to Silicon Valley right after I dropped out of college, got a job as a computer programmer. I learned how to program when I was in college and I bummed around Yosemite Valley teaching rock climbing and leading river trips during my early 20s.

The way I supported myself was as a computer programmer and I got involved with more and more interesting and complicated computer projects and decided to start my own company (Oracle).

My original goal when we started Oracle was to build a company of 50 people, people I enjoyed going to work with every day and people that I respected and enjoyed working with every day. It got to be a little bigger than that.

We have 150,000 people inside the company now. We want to make sure we beat Amazon in cloud database. That's the goal, very simple.

Just like playing basketball, if you're playing basketball, you want to beat the Warriors, you want to win the championship. We have the best database in the world.“

Source: Larry Ellison: I had all the disadvantages necessary for success

3: Jeff Bezos’ hiring heuristic

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See you next Monday,

- The Z Fellows Team

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