Make something people want to do together

Let's do some unhinged technology brother amateur philosophizing

About a month after we started Y Combinator we came up with the phrase that became our motto: Make something people want. We've learned a lot since then, but if I were choosing now that's still the one I'd pick. [emphasis added]

—Paul Graham

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But what do people want? And what does it even mean, to like, want, man?

I want to sit around and play video games. I want to be a good father. I want a cookie. I want to be healthy. I don’t want to waste my time scrolling myself to distraction, but sometimes—often, if I’m honest—I do. How can these be reconciled? Which are good startup ideas? When you zoom in, the concept of wanting gets complicated.

Can pulling this thread lead us to higher goals?

Lies and delusions

When you build something that people use, you develop a visceral understanding of revealed preference, which is the brute fact that people will say they want one thing, but then choose another when given the opportunity.¹

It’s tempting to think this is simple dishonesty: when I say I want to eat healthy I am lying, and the fact that I eat the cookie is the proof. A more sophisticated take is that we’re kidding ourselves, as in The Elephant in the Brain:

We, human beings, are a species that’s not only capable of acting on hidden motives—we’re designed to do it. Our brains are built to act in our self-interest while at the same time trying hard not to appear selfish in front of other people.

Yes, people really do lie to others and to themselves about what they actually want. But that’s still not enough to explain the weirdness of wanting.

Consider products that change what you want. Heroin makes you feel great but also, famously, makes you want more heroin. Many people who might otherwise be curious to try it are put off because they, quite reasonably, don’t want to become someone who only wants more heroin. Does that mean they don’t really want to feel good?

Or consider the well-known problem of wanting to lose weight but struggling to diet. We’ve had an obesity epidemic despite the fact that “just eat less food” was a simple, widely known, 100% effective solution. Does that mean people don’t really want to be thin?

Then came GLP-1 agonists like Ozempic that are easy to take and make you want to eat less, and suddenly the problem is solved.

Wanting to experience vs. wanting to become

I would like the experience of eating a cookie, but I do not want to be the guy who just ate a cookie.² These are two different types of desire that are often in tension.

Great marketing starts with something you want to experience and incepts or even manufactures something you want to become. You crave a cigarette for obvious reasons, but the job of the cigarette commercial is to help you imagine it will make you cool.

Truly great products deliver the goods. They offer a path to become someone greater than yourself, in a package that you can actually choose. This is the good reason to go to college: you can go and surround yourself with an environment and peer group that will transform you into a more fully realized version of yourself. Ozempic really does make you thin.

Dangerous products lure you, by offering an experience you want, into becoming something you don’t. Heroin makes you feel good but risks turning you into a junkie. Slot machines are fun but can ruin your life. We build digital products like this now too.

Building something great in the sense of becoming-what-you-want means skirting danger. The power to change for the better is also the power to ruin, and it’s up for debate which is which.

What should you want? Is it part of a good life to be powerful? thin? on drugs? rich? cool? happy? Now we’re asking for the meaning of life, which I don’t think can be answered by even the best startup advice.

Good, great, and transcendent

This is the domain of culture.

Culture is not just about getting what you want; it is about learning what to want. It shapes our values, beliefs, identity, taste, and how we relate to other people. And in turn, we shape it, when we choose what to pay attention to, what to elevate, what we contribute back. Culture is nothing less than our personal and shared quest for the meaning of life. The networks that support culture should serve the people who live that life.

This makes me think there is a third order of usefulness to which we can aspire.

Good: Make something people want.

Great: Help people become what they want.

Transcendent: Let people discover what they should want.

That last is well beyond what we can expect from software alone. This is what people look for in religion, in community, and in their relationships with each other.

Software is still eating the world. This affords the opportunity to create new ways to do things, and new ways to relate (or fail to relate) to each other. When software first changes some area of life, sometimes the initial merely ‘good’ products succeed at the expense of old systems that had solutions (however imperfect) for the great and the transcendent.

But that is a temporary, unstable state of affairs. People simply cannot be satisfied by getting what they want. This will cause some to resist the new technologies, but it will also create room for a new class of technology that helps people become what they want, and figure out what they should want in their new, changed world.

Predictions

I don’t claim to know what form those technologies will take, but I will venture two predictions about them.

First, they will be products of enduring value as AI sweeps through and changes much about our world.

Second, they will be things that we use together.

There will be an avalanche of single-player products that people want, from cheat-on-everything apps to AI girl- and boyfriends. But the process of figuring out what to want is inherently multiplayer. People who sever themselves completely from humanity will be lost, dead ends.

The future will belong to those who put new technology to work solving the same old human problems: figuring out what to want, and how to live, together.

1. In startup idea land, it’s generally safe to resolve this to the difference between what people say they want and what they will actually use or buy.

2. I think sometimes these thin desires are illusory. Any time I eat at McDonald’s, I find that my enjoyment of it peaks right before I begin to eat. Then when I take my first bite, I realize that it somehow tasted better in my imagination than it does in reality. The exceptions are Sausage and Egg McMuffins after an all nighter, and single hot fries snuck out of the passenger seat while driving. (or are they exceptions? Am I just imagining this now?)