PayPal co-founder and Founders Fund partner Luke Nosek shares what a decade of building and backing companies taught him about picking the right problem at the start of a big endeavor. Using three ideas that first struck him as dumb — PayPal, SpaceX, and Facebook — he argues that good problems are strategic (PayPal aimed at the financial system itself), inspiring (SpaceX’s mission attracted the best people in aerospace), and achievable in both the near term and under the laws of physics (Facebook proved itself cheaply in a dorm room). In Q&A he discusses banking regulation as a cartel that blocks newcomers, sequencing-based health startups, and his interest in higher-bandwidth human-computer interfaces such as Leap Motion.
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