So often, opportunity is embedded inside a problem:
Origin stories:
Sam Calagione walked past a Manhattan bodega selling moldy, fruit-fly-covered cherries at a steep discount. He wondered what would happen if he crushed them into a pale ale kit. He took the fruit home and brewed the beer in his tiny apartment. Two years later, he and his wife Mariah founded Dogfish Head.
Paul Orfalea was a student at USC when he noticed the long lines outside a copy shop called Magic Machine. Copies cost three cents, and the Xerox machines flashed each time they made one. His reaction: “What does a long line mean to you? Money.” In 1970, he opened a 100-square-foot copy shop near UC Santa Barbara. He founded Kinko’s.
Katrina Lake worked as a junior analyst at a Bay Area venture capital firm, reviewing pitches from entrepreneurs. After meeting more than 100 of them, she realized they were “super unqualified, normal people with lots of ideas just like I was.” She decided she did not want to sit in the peanut gallery evaluating other people’s ideas. She founded Stitch Fix.
Sara Blakely wanted to wear cream-colored pants with open-toed shoes, but she did not like how the seams of her underwear showed. She cut the feet off a pair of pantyhose. The look worked, but the fabric kept rolling up her legs. She spent the next two years developing a product that solved the problem. She founded Spanx.
Jamie Siminoff kept missing package deliveries while working in his garage. He wondered why his doorbell could not alert the smartphone in his pocket. He built a Wi-Fi-connected video doorbell called DoorBot. It was later renamed Ring.
Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia were struggling to pay the rent on their San Francisco apartment. A design conference was coming to town, and the nearby hotels were sold out. They inflated three air mattresses and rented the space to three guests. With Nathan Blecharczyk, they founded Airbnb.
