"We want to make our own rockets and spaceships from scratch. But that's just the beginning, to pave the way to settling Mars and making it affordable for middle-class customers to relocate to Mars." I imagine if Elon Musk had pitched SpaceX for YC, it would be a strong candidate for this.
Yeah, pretty much any of his recent ideas/companies are "frighteningly ambitious".
I do wonder how YC would handle someone that is as ambitious and skilled as Musk, but without his financial success. (Un?)Fortunately for them I think that is a pretty rare combination, so they probably don't have to worry too much.
I think it's pretty clear that the amounts YC invests wouldn't be enough to really "build an MVP" for Elon Musk's ideas. It's not something you do unless you already have a lot of money.
Elon Musk talks about this, in one of his interviews, how Tesla and SpaceX are something that requires a lot of money to begin with. Because they are big risks.
It is a mantra here that there is an enormous amount of timing and luck involved in creating a successful startup.
I would expect the majority of people with Musk's skill and ambition to lack his level of financial success. Certainly the percentages will be better than the general population, but it's not guaranteed or even likely.
In my opinion, if people really think timing and luck matter more than skill and determination, then they shouldn't be doing startups (unless their goals aren't to create an awesome/important company, but to have fun or something else).
Timing and luck (from what I have seen) really only seem to matter for things where it doesn't really require a lot of domain expertise. Of course, those are what first time entrepreneurs (at least of the Hacker News variety) are most drawn to, for what should be obvious reasons.
Perhaps it is just due to there being more information about Musk than other founders, but I haven't heard of any YC founders having the level of technical skills and abilities that Musk has. He is older than most, though, and has been at it for a while, so this shouldn't really be surprising.
You kinda can. Life isn't a comic book, and if you saw Elon Musk when he was 15, he wouldn't have any special aura of destiny glowing around him. I'm not saying that everyone can grow up to be Elon Musk, but he didn't have any sort of special license which allowed him to do it, either. In the end, superheroes are composed of people who try to become superheroes even though the rest of the world spends the first decade thinking they're committing lese majeste because they don't have a superhero license.
Great point. And if you look at Elon's record, he's shown a pattern of setting increasingly ambitious goals after working his way through (relatively) easier projects -- e.g., going from two software startups into hacking hardware, going from trying to contract with existing Russian rockets to designing and building his own rockets, going from modifying an existing car into an electric to designing and building his own electric car from scratch.
