I've heard probably 200 startup pitches in the last year. Networking events, demo days, founder chats, cold DMs.
And I'd say 180 of them are variations of the same 5 ideas.
Not similar ideas. The exact same ideas with slightly different wording.
"It's like Uber but for X." "AI-powered Y for Z industry." "Marketplace connecting A with B."
Everyone thinks their idea is unique. But they're all drinking from the same pool of "acceptable startup ideas" that VCs have decided sound fundable.
The idea convergence problem
Here's what's happening:
Smart people read the same stuff. TechCrunch, Y Combinator essays, Twitter threads about what's hot. They go to the same events. They follow the same thought leaders.
So they all develop the same ideas about what startups should look like.
Then they pitch those ideas to VCs who... read the same stuff, went to the same schools, invested in the same patterns.
Result: everyone's building slight variations of what already exists, with slightly different positioning.
True novelty is rare. What VCs call "innovation" is usually just "thing that worked in X industry, now applied to Y industry."
The idea sources everyone uses
Most startup ideas come from one of these places:
1. What recently got funded. Someone raises $10M for "AI for legal." Suddenly everyone's pitching "AI for [different industry]."
2. What successful companies do. Airbnb worked? Time for "Airbnb for boats" and "Airbnb for parking spaces" and "Airbnb for literally everything."
3. What YC wants. YC publishes "Requests for Startups." Everyone builds those exact things.
4. What's trending on Twitter. AI agents are hot? Every pitch is suddenly about AI agents.
5. Personal pain points that aren't actually common. "As a developer, I wish X existed" → build X → discover you're the only developer who wanted it.
None of these are truly novel. They're all derivative. Which is why they all sound the same.
Why VCs fund the same ideas
You'd think VCs would want truly novel ideas. They don't.
What VCs actually want:
Pattern matching to past success
Clear analogies ("Uber for X")
Obvious market size
Competitors to validate the space
Hype in the current zeitgeist
Truly novel ideas are hard to evaluate. They don't have competitors. There's no pattern to match. The market might not exist yet.
So VCs fund the things that look obviously fundable: derivative ideas with slight twists that fit current patterns.
This creates a feedback loop:
VCs fund X
Founders see X got funded
Founders pitch variations of X
VCs fund those because they fit the pattern
Repeat
Meanwhile, genuinely weird ideas get dismissed as "too early" or "unclear market."
The problem with derivative ideas
Building a derivative idea means you're competing on execution, not insight.
"Uber for dog walking" isn't a unique insight. It's an obvious application of an existing model. Which means:
You'll have 10 competitors building the same thing
Your only advantage is who executes better
The big players can copy you if you gain traction
VCs will fund multiple similar companies, diluting all of them
Compare that to a genuinely novel idea where you see something nobody else sees. You might be wrong. But if you're right, you own the entire space.
Most founders are too afraid of being wrong to build something truly different. So they optimize for "sounds fundable" instead of "might be massive if it works."
The ideas that actually matter
The startups that matter weren't obvious at the time:
Airbnb: "let strangers stay in your home" sounded insane
Uber: regulations made it seem impossible
Stripe: "payments are solved" was the consensus
Figma: "design tools are a solved market"
None of these were variations of existing ideas. They were genuinely new approaches to problems everyone thought were either solved or impossible.
And all of them got rejected by tons of VCs because they didn't fit patterns.
Why ideas converge in groups
Founder groups make this worse.
You're in a Slack with 50 founders. Someone pitches their idea. Everyone gives feedback. The idea gets refined toward consensus.
Result: every idea in that group starts sounding the same. Because they're all being refined by the same people with the same background reading the same content.
The ideas that survive group feedback are the most defensible, most conventional ideas. The weird ones get filtered out.
This is why the most interesting companies often come from solo founders who weren't asking for permission or feedback. They just built the weird thing they wanted to exist.
What you should do instead
If you don't want your idea to sound like everyone else's:
1. Stop reading startup content. All you're doing is absorbing the current consensus about what's fundable.
2. Look at problems nobody's talking about. The best opportunities are the ones VCs aren't excited about yet.
3. Build something you personally need. Not "as a founder I wish X existed." As a person with a specific problem.
4. Ignore what recently got funded. That's the worst source of ideas because everyone's now copying it.
5. Be willing to look stupid. Every genuinely novel idea sounds dumb to most people at first.
The ideas that sound smart and fundable are usually the derivative ones. The ideas that change things sound weird and risky.
The honest assessment
When I started Nexus, I knew the "AI agent" space was getting crowded. But I wasn't building "another AI agent platform."
I was building the specific infrastructure I needed to make AI agents that maintain state across thousands of interactions. That was my actual problem. Everything else in the market was wrappers.
Is that fundable? I don't know. But it's not derivative. It's solving a real problem I have, not copying what recently got funded.
That's the distinction that matters. Not "is this trendy?" But "is this real?"
Most startup ideas fail the second test while nailing the first.
— Arjun