Every entrepreneur going top-down (aka not merely “scratching your own itch” and improvising, but genuinely trying to find the global optimal product to create from the start) needs to go through the Idea Maze (cdixon writeup) - having run the business idea through a gauntlet of all the first- and second-order questions that necessarily arise.

Both Bezos and Musk did their mazes starting from a basic ground truth about the future (the Internet will consume the world, and humanity will move to a solar electric economy) and worked their way backwards to a non-obvious first product (books, and sports cars) to go to market with.

Most founders and VCs vaguely believe AI will transform software and transform most industries, but the exercise of working that backwards to the non-obvious first product is the real billion dollar question.

Moravec’s paradox guarantees that there will always be domains where humans are more efficient than machines. There is no point trying to compete with humans on home turf (conceptual understanding, intentional creativity, deep empathy…); machines should focus on doing things humans are bad at (storage, search, scheduling…).

We’ve started with “What AI Can Do” and refined it to “What AI Can Do Better Than Humans”. Interesting questions for AI founders.

Shishir Mehrotra (YouTube, Coda) has been calling these Eigenquestions, a pseudointellectual name for the smallest set of questions that have a good branching factor that prescribe all future questions because they dominate product strategy