There's nothing more valuable than an unmet need that is just becoming fixable. If you find something broken that you can fix for a lot of people, you've found a gold mine. As with an actual gold mine, you still have to work hard to get the gold out of it. But at least you know where the seam is, and that's the hard part.

Organic ideas are generally preferable to the made up kind, but particularly so when the founders are young. It takes experience to predict what other people will want. The worst ideas YC sees are from young founders making things they think other people will want.

Focus more on the idea part and less on the startup part. Just fix things that seem broken, regardless of whether it seems important enough to build a company on. Facebook and the Apple I didn't start as companies — they started as projects, and treating them as 'serious' startups upfront would have been a mistake.

Don't be discouraged if what you produce is dismissed as a toy — that's a good sign, and probably why everyone else overlooked it. The first microcomputers, planes, and cars were all dismissed as toys. When YC sees something users love but forum trolls would call a toy, it makes them especially likely to invest.

Young founders are at the forefront of technology — they use the latest stuff because they just picked what to use — which puts them in position to discover valuable types of fixable brokenness first.

PG's argument for why youth is an advantage specifically for organic ideas.

In retrospect, Viaweb should have become its own direct marketer and opened an online store — they would have understood users much better. PG encourages any founder to become a user of their own product, however unnatural it seems.

You may need to stand outside yourself to see brokenness, because you get used to it and take it for granted. In 2004 it was ridiculous Harvard undergrads were still using a Facebook printed on paper — the obvious ideas are sitting right under our noses.