The counterintuitive nature of finding good ideas

Today I was looking at one of the new lectures of How to Start a startup Stanford course, made by Paul Graham (YCombinator patron).

Talking about counterintuitive things about startups, the one that struck me the most is how to get good ideas. PG says that you don’t get good ideas by looking for good ideas, you came up with good ideas in an counterintuitive way.

Most of the tech companies that changed the world started as a side project. People working on interesting problems with other interesting people. You follow your passion and you become an expert of a certain field. In this journey of mastering an interesting topic you face problems and you get ideas. These founders started to work on a problem because they were curious, not because they wanted to start a company.

Then they understood they were into something. People wanted what they were building. People wanted to use it or buy it.
When this happened, these founders turned the side project into a company.

PG sustain that this is the only way of making something really successful and world-changer.