The best founders don’t have just one idea for a business — as per Y Combinator’s research, they have plenty.
This insight comes from Sam Altman, who served as President of Y Combinator from 2014 to 2019 before founding OpenAI, where he now serves as CEO. Speaking from his experience overseeing hundreds of startup investments at the world’s most prestigious accelerator, Altman shared a counterintuitive finding that challenges conventional wisdom about entrepreneurship. His observation stems from a deliberate experiment that Y Combinator conducted, testing whether exceptional founders without ideas could succeed when given business concepts.
“You can give a founder an idea and they can start a company,” Altman explained. “The problem is they need to come up with new ideas for a company. Basically every week you have to come up with crazy new ideas, big changes all the time.”
This reality of constant ideation reflects the dynamic nature of startup life, where pivots, feature additions, and strategic shifts are routine. But Y Combinator’s experiment revealed something surprising about the relationship between founders and ideas.
“We tried an experiment once at YC where we funded 20 teams of strong founders that didn’t have ideas, but were otherwise really good,” Altman revealed. “And what we learned is they all failed. And what we learned is that the good founders are the people that have ideas all the time.”
The failure rate was absolute—a striking result that led to a fundamental realization about what distinguishes successful entrepreneurs. According to Altman, this pattern pointed to something deeper than just business acumen or execution skills.
“So there’s an intelligence component to this. There’s a creativity component to this. There is an ability to think independent thoughts component to this, but whatever you want to call this,” he continued. “This idea of this particular kind of intelligence that leads to seeing problems in different ways and thinking of ideas that don’t yet exist, but should—you’ve got to have that in a founder.”
The implications of this finding extend far beyond Y Combinator’s portfolio. It suggests that the entrepreneurial mindset is fundamentally about pattern recognition and creative problem-solving rather than just executing on a single breakthrough insight. This aligns with broader trends in the startup ecosystem, where successful companies like Twitter, Instagram, and Slack all emerged from significant pivots—requiring founders who could continuously generate and evaluate new directions. The research also helps explain why serial entrepreneurs often outperform first-time founders, as they’ve developed the mental muscles for constant ideation and iteration that Altman identifies as crucial to startup success.