The trick for evaluating startup ideas is the same for evaluating weird arguments.

Just ask yourself "what would the world have to look like for this to work?"

When you see investing as at least partially placing bets on future possible states of the world, things become clear. https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1338416434628726789

This is also part of the reason why "good sounding"startup ideas have particularly bad success rates.

Good sounding ideas usually sound good because they assume that the state of the world will persist as it is now into the future.

And that's nearly always a bad bet!

If you're going to make a bet that world will stay the same into the future, ok, but with all the knowledge we have about the present state of the world, it needs to be magnitudes more ambitious than domain changing ideas.

Usually, however, these ideas are less ambitious.

A telltale sign of unambitious idea is that it doesn't account for the consequences of its own success.

This is also how I spot unambitious people.

If you truly believed you were the one to change your domain in the future, it would necessarily manifest in your actions now.