Consumer Ideas

VCs are the last people you should look to for advice when it comes to consumer ideas, because the best consumer ideas are rarely _politically safe_

The reason for this is pretty simple, and comes down to two things:

1. VCs are in the reputation business, and although they like funding things that are "high risk" they'll never risk their reputation to fund things that could cause reputational harm to them or their LPs
2. The best consumer ideas when they start operate on the fringes of what's considered acceptable, and that's a *feature not a bug*

A few examples: would you fund a company that is an exchange exclusively used for a currency used to fund online drug deals and hitmen? Would you fund a company started by a founder who created a "hot or not" website rating women at Harvard? What about a company that let's random strangers sleep in your house?

Coinbase, Facebook, Airbnb were all super fringe ideas that were "out there" and nearly unfundable, but the power in the idea was the ability to shift the overton window and find hacks in human psychology that weren't considered mainstream at the time. Could you have gotten canceled for funding Coinbase at the earliest stage? Absolutely. That's why most VCs don't like these ideas.

If you're a consumer founder, you should know that the future looks more like Cluely, and less like whatever the VCs are telling you you need be at conference sponsored by every firm in the valley with fancy stage talks.

And if you're working on something on the fringes or slightly unhinged, ping me I'd love to help.

Recently someone sent me a clip of a Harvard lecture about startups and a student asked Peter Thiel, "do you think the next Mark Zuckerburg could be in this room?" and Peter responded, "Mark would never show up to an event like this"