Schlep Blindness

Paul Graham argues that many good startup ideas go unnoticed because of "schlep blindness," an unconscious aversion to tedious, unpleasant work that keeps founders from seeing ideas involving painful tasks. He cites Stripe as the clearest example: for over a decade, many hackers who had processed online payments knew the process was painful, yet they chose to build recipe sites or local event aggregators instead of fixing payments. He adds that ambitious ideas face less competition because others are frightened off by their challenges, and that younger founders have an advantage because they underestimate both how much they can grow and how much they will need to.