(Posted by Aaron Harris, Y Combinator Partner Responsible for Series A)
Experts are usually always right until they are wrong. Unfortunately, it is easy to be fooled into thinking that they are always right. This is because ... they are experts, they are authoritative and educated. This is especially easy to see when it comes to new approaches in existing areas. We tend to believe that extensive knowledge about something gives the ability and the right to predict the future.
The problem with expertise is that it is not necessarily always compatible with being open to new ideas. Expertise can just as easily destroy ideas and block research paths, as it can help invent something new. I myself was guilty of this when faced with new ideas. It is often much easier to hush up an undertaking than to use your knowledge to make something new work for real. (1) Oddly enough, skeptics can seem more expert than they really are, and this in turn contributes to repeated negative feedback.
When you do not have deep expertise in a subject, you are free from the constraints of experience and failure in the field. This means that inexperienced people often have crazier ideas. Sometimes this is a consequence of naivety and even stupidity. However, when these ideas work, they can call it genius and innovation.
This does not mean that every problem can be solved by creative non-professionals. There seems to be a certain level of competence that, when combined with the right environment, promotes productive creation. Unfortunately, I don't see a way to define these levels for different areas.
Without a clear set of rules for judging competence, I tend to judge founders based on what I can learn from conversations with them. This works especially well in areas that I understand well enough. Watching the founder can help clarify exactly what they are doing, but I'm much more interested in how they think and how they test assumptions. With this, I try to determine if I'm investing in potential (good) or track record (not so good).
One good trick is to find out if the tests that founders run are causing new and more interesting questions. Generating questions is a good sign of creativity, while good answers to those questions build the expertise you need to achieve real results.
Technology makes it more likely that a seemingly naive approach to a problem will work because they shorten the iteration cycle when trying to use this approach. Given enough time and resources, you can try each of the possible solutions. (2) In the real world, we have to choose the solutions with which we will work further. This is where good founders stand out from bad ones. Good founders improve over time and become more open, while the worst become more closed and start rejecting new ideas as soon as they hear them.
The same is true for investors. The best of them use new knowledge to discover new ideas, while the worst use the same to reject whole categories of ideas. (3) This is rather short-sighted considering how quickly the world is changing, allowing new ideas to come true. Founding and investing in these new opportunities is what creates companies that are changing the world. This creates new areas in which their experts will emerge, and so on, cycle after cycle.
Notes
- archive.org/stream/ERIC_ED211573#page/n0/mode/2up .
- Just like enough monkeys with enough typewriters will eventually produce one of Shakespeare's plays.
- This differs from the type of investor who defines the boundaries of their competencies and focuses on specific industries. But here, too, there are two options. An investor can be focused on certain industries and at the same time be open to many new ideas in a particular area, while another can say that he invests in anything, just to reject every new idea.
Translation: Lyova Pyzhov
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