The Idea Maze

Chris Dixon's August 2013 post arguing against the pop-culture view that startups are about a single eureka idea. Borrowing Balaji Srinivasan's "idea maze" framing, he argues that a good startup idea is actually a well-developed multi-year plan that contemplates many possible paths through a domain. A good founder can anticipate which turns lead to treasure and which to death; a bad founder runs into the entrance of, say, the movies/music space without knowing the dozens of previous attempts and what killed each one.