Your Idea Isn’t Special. You Might Be.

A classic VC maxim poses three questions: “Why This? Why Now? Why You?”

In bubbly markets, the first two become suspiciously easy to answer. New tech creates novel opportunities, and everyone wants a first-mover advantage.

Predictably, we end up with clusters of founders pursuing near-identical startups. Lately, I’ve seen groups pitching AI software and AI-enabled services that are so interchangeable they could swap pitch decks and barely miss a beat.

My reflex is to avoid nearly all of these opportunities. Founder Collective is intentionally anti-thematic, and we’re happiest backing teams who are far off-piste. Why? Backing trendy startups is risky. Hot markets force entrepreneurs to find product/market fit while also waging a mutually destructive fundraising arms race. Founders who chase heat often can cool just as quickly when the market shifts.

Yet occasionally, a founder is so exceptional that they override our thematic concerns entirely. The final question – why you? – overshadows the other two.

Some teams genuinely take your breath away based on their rare experience and unique vantage point on the world. I often wish they were pursuing something truer to themselves rather than something the market is shouting about. The best founders usually do that.

Take Coupang. When I funded Bom Kim, he was an excellent MBA student who wanted to build a “Groupon for South Korea,” alongside hundreds of others chasing “social commerce.” Fifteen years later, Groupon is a penny stock, and Coupang is a multi-billion-dollar listed company and one of the largest retailers in Asia.

There’s an asymmetry at work in the maxim at the start of this post.

Exceptional founders can make commodity ideas work.
Commodity founders rarely turn exceptional ideas into reality.

So if you’re pitching a commodity idea, that’s fine. Just understand that investors will be indexing almost entirely on you and the human capital you’ve built over decades, not the concept you assembled over the last ten weeks.

“Why You?” is always the critical question we ask at Founder Collective, but in overheated markets, it becomes decisive.

To boil this post down to seven words: Your idea isn’t special. You might be.