Hard Startups
This is basically drivel. My personal motto is "we chose to go to the moon, not because it is easy, but because it is hard!" The trend of startup failures has nothing to do with the difficulty of the problem they were trying to solve, and everything to do with the fact that smart people can spot when a startup is just a copy of something else already successful.<p>Yes, startups doing photos sharing apps increased after Instagram was created. That's because most people are idiots and just won't realize they aren't going to disrupt a new industry. Venture capitalists also frequently invest in failures because they too are idiots.<p>The reason there are only 2 startups trying to do cold fusion energy is because nobody has any clue on how to make that happen, where as social media apps can be designed and built in an assembly line.<p>Yes, trying to invent a new industry is infinitely harder, but for the most part we all know that startups aren't going to invent successful cold fusion. Either someone will invent it by accident, or some chemist/physicist is going to figure it out as part of a think tank funded by either the government or by one of the existing fortune 50 companies.<p>Picking a hard problem to solve can't make it easier for your startup to succeed because the hard startups are basically trying to get retardedly lucky. There is no mythical group of employees who you can identify as being the group who will invent cold fusion, which is why these kinds of startups always fail. Funding one of them is throwing money away, where as funding a photo sharing app has a small chance of breaking even if they at least have a unique selling point.