Great ideas are everywhere! But you don't need good or even great ideas to make a startup, you need something that a VC will fund and that a big corp will acquire. Analyze that field and surf the gradient.

Find whatever huge entity with lots of cash is throwing that cash around and figure out how to make something that the cash will stick to.

Over the years it has been Autodesk, Microsoft, IBM, Cisco, Softbank, etc.

At first glance this sounds like genius but its not

YC or any successful VC doesn't fund ideas. There is something else the founders have figured out which is key to success and funding. This could be a distribution trick, a key insight, a user growth metric.

Its not hard to imagine YC or a VC coming across the same idea pitched by different founders. Why they picked the team they picked cannot be obvious from trawling the startup directory, that insight is hidden, its literally a secret that should be guarded

Only the ones that will succeed (very few, maybe 1%?) have a secret tho

No. The secret is the gamble

I see Peter Thiel over here =) great insights.

Because that is an abstract way of solving problems. One needs to feel the pain of the customer to gain necessarily greater “domain” expertise in intuitively perceiving conditional possibilities which are necessary in producing value, or regenerative feedback gain in the human system, e.g. society.