It is not so much an as-hominem attack as a reality check on the level of abstraction. The rocks that came back from the moon are (for insurance purposes) "priceless", but yet the moon was not a for-profit expedition. On the contrary, why not sell some "priceless" rocks for an infinite sum and alleviate world hunger? But somewhere in-between what sounds logical and what is reasonable to expect there intervenes some other considerations.
Why do so many founders build things no one wants? Because they begin by trying to think of startup ideas. That m.o. is doubly dangerous: it doesn't merely yield few good ideas; it yields bad ideas that sound plausible enough to fool you into working on them.
At YC we call these "made-up" or "sitcom" startup ideas. Imagine one of the characters on a TV show was starting a startup. The writers would have to invent something for it to do. But coming up with good startup ideas is hard. It's not something you can do for the asking. So (unless they got amazingly lucky) the writers would come up with an idea that sounded plausible, but was actually bad.
None of this is to discourage. Its more to get the dialogue on a track where what is actually hard is actually at least given some respect.
Why do so many founders build things no one wants? Because they begin by trying to think of startup ideas. That m.o. is doubly dangerous: it doesn't merely yield few good ideas; it yields bad ideas that sound plausible enough to fool you into working on them.
At YC we call these "made-up" or "sitcom" startup ideas. Imagine one of the characters on a TV show was starting a startup. The writers would have to invent something for it to do. But coming up with good startup ideas is hard. It's not something you can do for the asking. So (unless they got amazingly lucky) the writers would come up with an idea that sounded plausible, but was actually bad.
None of this is to discourage. Its more to get the dialogue on a track where what is actually hard is actually at least given some respect.