Interesting memo.  While some of us got to see a few of the start-ups present, and we would have enjoyed presenting at TC50, we sort of agree with Sarah Lacy on this one.  But in the defense of fledgling start-ups all over the world, we have to ask: was Google, Facebook, Microsoft, PayPal, YouTube, Dell, or Twitter revolutionary when they started?  We're not too sure.

If Google were revolutionary to start off with, perhaps Yahoo! would have picked it up.  Facebook was just another social network, where the killer feature seemed to be finding people in your classes.  Far from revolutionary at the time, though definitely a fun application for college students.  Microsoft started to write BASIC interpreters for a box with lights on it.  PayPal started as a cryptography library for PDAs.  YouTube was a dating site.  Dell sold computers directly to customers.  Twitter was just an online SMS service (depending on who you ask, it was "oh God, they stole the Facebook Status Update and created a company around it").

These are just a few examples, and they could probably be met by others who had really good beginnings and people knew it from the start.  We knew the iPhone would be huge when it came out; it was something we all wanted to have, and it has since changed the mobile market for the better.

While it may seem that start-ups are not very exciting at the beginning, we think they should be given time to grow and change.  We have lots of ideas, but doing a start up is hard work and takes time to become successful.  It's common that start-ups don't quite have their business model set in the first couple of months, and that's alright.  We've seen some people comment that even the most revolutionary ideas (space travel, planet colonization, etc) are not the most profitable, which is unfortunate.  The market can seem to reward sub-par business ideas at times, but being able to predict which ones will be big is going to be difficult this early.

We hear you loud and clear.  Some start-ups can seem boring early on.  But give them time, they'll get there!