"A college kid would never have come up with what I'm building, because they wouldn't realize the problem I'm trying to solve actually exists."

This is such a key point. Sometimes it takes years, if not decades, of experience to even know that the problem exists. Put another way, if the problem can be solved by a 22-year-old with no experience in the field, there's a good chance they've misunderstood the problem.

... And years of work experience to understand organizational dynamics to setup a healthy business helps too. It's more than the idea that matters, but can you build and run the team that will make that idea a reality. I know that when I was fresh out of college I didn't understand organizational dynamics at all. I've read many examples of young startups failing because of rookie management mistakes.

Yes, coming up with the problem is often the hard bit.

But it happens the other way too, in that many young inventors tackle problems because "they didn't realize they were 'impossible'". More knowledgeable folk can do this too, but it requires a certain... disrespect for authority. Like Einstein's flexibility with time and space (though he was young then; he didn't make breakthroughs in later life, possibly because he himself became an authority).

Fortune favours the delusional.

It's not a matter of "didn't realize it's impossible". The problem young startup entrepreneurs have is they don't realize that valuable problems exist. Valuable problems tend to be industry-specific and narrowly defined, so you need to be at least aware of the problems of an industry, and the existing solutions/workarounds. Without industry experience at anything but being a college student and reading HN, how are you going to find problems to solve? That's why you see so many me-too social apps. You solve what you know, and if your most extensive experience with computers is Facebook and Twitter, that's your space for problems.

There are a couple of other factors to consider. First, there are problems that can be solved with new tech that couldn't be solved with old tech. The web opened up a huge front of new solutions over the past 10-20 years. Mobile is opening up another wave of solutions.

And finally, consider the "aspirin or vitamin" question. Vitamins are tempting, but aspirin sells better. Me, I'm working in more or less the monitoring space for configuration management. My key competition isn't other monitoring tools, it's the DevOps movement and automation tools like Chef and Puppet. When people have enterprise configuration management suck, those are the recommended solutions. But they're vitamins being sold as aspirin. Simply getting to where there's organizational buy-in to go to DevOps or to automate what was once manual is a whole fresh sort of pain. My competitive advantage is a near-painless dose of aspirin - immediate relief without having to change the whole model.

Ain't no college kid coming up with that.

There's an obvious reason for Einstein to have gotten stuck: the subject of his later research, a quantum theory of gravity, really was too hard. The problem remains open today.

cough(Soylent)cough

Soylent lulz as if that hasn't been done and done again. It's just snake oil under different name.

Please point me to an existing product I can buy today.

I've never looked forward to a product launch as much as this.

Ensure (http://ensure.com/)

Fortisip (https://www.nutricia.co.uk/fortisip//)

Which Ensure is formulated to replace food entirely? As far as I can tell, if I drank enough ensure to get 2400 calories, the other nutrients would be out of wack. As in, a given portion does not have the same DV% of each nutrient.

I'd never heard of Fortisip but from what I can tell it and ensure are both considerably more expensive than regular food, and actually more expensive than eating out.

I'm not a doctor and I'm not going to give you potentially dangerous advice for you to fuck about with while experimenting on your nutritional intake.

Recommended daily calories are 2000 for adults.

One week of soylent is $65. 48 bottles of Ensure Plus is about $80. 6 bottles of Ensure Plus would be 2100 calories.

To be fair, $65 is the pre-order price and includes a shaker bottle (worth $10) and free shipping.

Looking at the nutritional info if I drank 6 bottles of Ensure Plus each day I would be ingesting 360% of the recommended amount of Manganese and only 60% of the recommended amount of sodium. The rest of the listed nutrients would be at about 150%.

I don't think Ensure Plus is a substitute good for Soylent. It's a supplement not a food replacement and it's formulated and priced as such.

> Looking at the nutritional info if I drank 6 bottles of Ensure Plus each day I would be ingesting 360% of the recommended amount of Manganese and only 60% of the recommended amount of sodium. The rest of the listed nutrients would be at about 150%

Most nutrients with recommended amounts are healthy at higher than recommended amounts within fairly wide bounds, but the usually-listed recommended amount for Sodium is much higher than is minimally necessary, and is actually the upper limit recommended for about half the US population. So, actually, I'm not surprised that something intended as a broadly-usable food replacement would go over on most nutrients and under on Sodium.

http://www.cdc.gov/features/dssodium/

Nutrition isn't one-size-fits-all.

> It's a supplement not a food replacement

You are wrong.

(http://abbottnutrition.com/brands/products/ensure-plus-retai...)

> For interim sole-source nutrition.

edit: removed unnecessarily grumpy sentence.

Interim means provisional or temporary. Doesn't exactly inspire confidence. I have no idea whether Soylent is actually safe as a permanent sole-source nutrition solution but that's what they're marketing themselves as, and Ensure is not.

You can keep moving the goal posts but the fact is that Soylent is not new.

> [about use of word "interim"] Doesn't exactly inspire confidence.

> [about safety of Soylent for sole use nutrition] I have no idea whether Soylent is actually safe as a permanent sole-source nutrition solution

This is an amazing sentence. It's fucking mind-boggling the amount of cognitive dissonance that the Soylent marketing guys have created. They deserve the funding for that alone. Like, God-Tier troll and God-Tier marketers.

They are not marketed this way, because the producers are not insane and/or incompetent. Soylent is more expensive than eating food.

Not if you take into account the time and effort of cooking/cleaning/shopping.

Soylent is prepared food. It's a substitute for cheap restaurants like Taco Bell or Subway, not cooking rice and beans at home.

EAS Myoplex? There are a myriad of other Meal Replacement Powders on the market that has been around for decades, some of them designed to completely replace meals with specific ratios such as 40/40/20 (protein, carbs, fat) or more commonly, low-carb versions. Seriously, go to bodybuilding.com and look under the meal replacement category and you'll find a bunch of products that has figured this shit out decades before soylent.

fatty fish or fatty meat

I'm 46. I came up with my idea at 28 but it was complex and ambitious -- and it just kept growing and changing. It was chaos in my mind. But I would work on it, and then come up a level, see things from a higher perspective and everything would shrink and consolidate, gain order and orthogonality. This happened over and over, till I got it down to nothing. This took a huge amount of time and there is no way I could have come directly to it at 28.

I'm as creative and as smart as I was then, I don't think that has changed. But I'm wiser now -- about Computer Science, about systems -- and I have that perspective, which has made all the difference.

just curious but are you saying you founded a startup at 46, of which the original idea was conceived when you were 28?

I think you should pivot, catcanhazitrainbook.com is available, and the growing acceptance of domestic purrtnerships is nothing but pure up and to the right. I agree, college kids don't realize that felines have been marginalized in the new twerking paradigm - and how unfair is it that we send all these tweets around with no cats to chase them? You can get out in front of this and really change the world with your rockstar ninja buckets of vc fueled distributed map reduce haskell most viral housepet centered social network ever.

> That all said, my 40s have been the best creative period of my life, by far.

Agreed. Wrote my first novel in my 40s.