Re: Finding Startup Ideas
After writing about how to find startup ideas last year, I started putting some of that into practice in MENA. That experience made one thing painfully clear: I was wrong to assume the conditions that shaped my thinking in the US and Taiwan apply everywhere.
Many of the startup playbooks I internalized simply don't translate.
Take regulations. I had taken for granted the baseline efficiency of government support and infrastructure in Taiwan and the US. But those are outliers, not norms. In many places, slow-moving or opaque bureaucracies shape what’s possible far more than founders like to admit.
Or labor costs. A lot of SaaS and AI value props boil down to saving time or replacing expensive labor. But that story only lands if labor is actually expensive. In markets where it’s not, "AI for efficiency" often sounds like a solution in search of a problem. Timing—and local conditions—matter.
I also underestimated the friction in how the private sector actually works. I assumed a level of professionalism that just isn’t there in some places. There’s a real cost to that—how people work, how they buy, how fast they move—it’s all downstream of cultural norms.
And then there’s venture capital. VC is a local game. In Taiwan, for example, funds are still deeply anchored in semiconductors, and their risk models reflect that. Same with the Middle East—totally different playbook. Expecting them to act like US VCs is a category error.
Startup ideas are just a form of knowledge arbitrage—between markets, technology, and users. They only work if we deeply understand something others don’t. And that understanding never comes from assuming. It comes from thinking, watching, doubting, verifying.
