The Origins of Crazy Good Startup Ideas

Paul Zhao
5 min readNov 29, 2022

Where do they come from, how to find them, and stick to it.

brain shaped vending machine symbolizing the spitting out of ideas
Courtesy: Yoshiyuki Yagi

History (sort of) Forgets

We tend forget how great products or services come about. The iPod, in retrospect, looked almost inevitable. Touchscreen phones are a given. In another decade, Tesla EV’s will seem so intuitive to younger generations that they couldn’t possibly fathom why it took so long to take off (engineering hurdles aside).

When a crazy good idea finally takes hold, it casts a spell of amnesia over the masses. We forget what it took for this — now-accepted marvel — to come into being. It has become the new world order, and in becoming so, it has erased (inadvertently) all trails of historical trials and tribulations in attaining the glorified status of welcomed reality.

Crazy good ideas are not infrequently mistaken for (or dismissed as) simply bad ideas. Crazy good ideas challenge the paradigm that permeates our society, its expectations, and stakeholders. They’re viewed with incredulity. And because crazy good ideas haven’t had the requisite time to mature beyond its basic contours, it can be cheaply shot down.

Picking apart a new crazy idea is easy and rewarding (and normal) in our society. Use an existing framework and launch into an assault. It makes the critic seem and feel…

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Paul Zhao

Father, husband, former entrepreneur, corporate PM. I’m constantly looking for diversions to keep the neurons firing, if only a little.