- Tar pits are a good place to find fossilized remains because animals mistake them for fresh water, get stuck, and attract more animals.
- The phenomenon of tar pits can be compared to the startup world, where appealing ideas that seem original attract founders.

A tar pit tends to be a great place to find fossilized remains.

And the reason why is that apparently tar pit pools resemble fresh water ponds.

And so animals will come across them, think it's fresh water, step in, get stuck because the tar is very sticky, die, start to decompose, that smell will attract more animals and then you get this kind of cascading negative effect which as I say it out loud describes the phenomenon in the startup world so perfectly.

Yeah, tar pit ideas attract founders to them and they seem like good ideas, they seem like something people want, you know, it's ideas that are like very appealing and and the fact that there isn't already famous companies solving them already attracts more founders.

It looks like you've come up with this amazing original idea.


Speaker 0: A tar pit tends to be a great place to find fossilized remains. Dinosaurs, other forms of life. And the reason why is that apparently tar pit pools resemble fresh water ponds. And so animals will come across them, think it's fresh water, step in, get stuck because the tar is very sticky, die, start to decompose, that smell will attract more animals and then you get this kind of cascading negative effect which as I say it out loud describes the phenomenon in the startup world so perfectly.

Speaker 1: Yeah, tar pit ideas attract founders to them and they seem like good ideas, they seem like something people want, you know, it's ideas that are like very appealing and and the fact that there isn't already famous companies solving them already attracts more founders. It looks like you've come up with this amazing original idea.

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Beware of startup tarpit ideas.