Stanford students have a reputation of being decidedly irreverent and not taking themselves too seriously. An over barring administration, a more selective admissions process, and the infiltration of investor dollars chasing students seem to have endangered this key element of our ethos.

I think I’m part of this trend. Throughout high and middle school, most of the projects I built fell into two camps: projects I thought were fun such as tinder for sneakers, spam bots, crypto trading bots… and projects that I thought were cool like distributed off the grid radio-based internet networks and neural networks synthesized based off text descriptions.

And while I did build a fair share of practical projects, these were not the result of some market research or user interview. Instead, they were things that I wanted to exist.

But arriving to campus, and seeing your classmates drop out to build companies, puts a pressure on you to do the same. Forget toy projects and fun technical problems; build real businesses.

So you contort yourself to fit some market and end up building some really boring products. For me that ended up being SwiftGift, software to help nonprofits track donations of stock.

While these “boring” projects are good learning exercises, they are not great ways to start startups. The products produced often fit into a competitive or niche market rather than make or distort one. Ironically fun projects have a higher likelihood of breaking through and truly transforming markets as they often take advantage of some personal insight. That’s why they are fun.

Nonetheless, there is a degree of practicality when working on boring projects. You probably reach early millstones faster so have a high learning rate for startup skills.

But these sorts of projects often have a great deal of deferred risk and might just be software businesses rather than real startups.

So I think it is appropriate to work on boring projects. But not the best way to start venture backable companies and definitely not a replacement for fun hacking. Good startups transform markets. Fun and casual hacking builds off insights and helps find new ones as you’re often in newly trotted territory.

Stanford’s and my own loss of fun isn’t just detrimental to student moral, but ironically threatens the ability to get serious about solving big problems. ∎