Sam Altman stated that you can give a founder an idea to start a company, but the issue is that they must come up with new ideas, crazy ideas, and major pivots almost every week, continuously.

He recalled an experiment at Y Combinator: funding 20 founder teams that were strong in other aspects but lacked ideas, all of which failed. The conclusion is that good founders are those who consistently have ideas.

He broke down this ability into intelligence, creativity, and independent thinking, with the core being an intelligence that can view problems from different angles and conceive things that do not yet exist but should. Without this, the role of a founder does not exist.

He wrote more firmly in the Startup Playbook: ideas should ideally precede the company; once a formal company is established and direction is rushed to be found, ideas tend to be less crazy, ultimately becoming reasonable-sounding but derivative solutions, which is the danger of pivoting. Good founders usually have too many ideas rather than too few.

In the same logic, he also wrote: stuffing ideas into founders almost always fails; those who want to start a business but cannot come up with a topic should first practice generating ideas, rather than registering a company first. The environment should be close to those who have a sense of the future, are willing to discuss outrageous plans, are optimistic, creatively smart, have high idea flux, and are not ashamed of silly ideas. The best ideas often sound silly at first, making them fragile.

In market mechanisms, buyers are accelerators and early-stage funds, while sellers are "people who can continuously generate ideas" rather than "those who can execute given topics." The event was driven by YC's real-money controlled experiment: execution can be packaged and sold, while creativity cannot be outsourced, making the combination invalid. Funding flows to those with high idea flux; benefiting are founders who can turn the first seed idea into new decisions every week; under pressure are career manager-type entrepreneurs with impressive resumes who need others to provide topics. Once a company is established, tolerance for crazy ideas decreases, and derivative ideas begin to dominate boardroom discussions.

Source: Public Information