Schlep blindness is a psychological phenomenon where entrepreneurs unconsciously avoid seeing startup ideas that involve tedious, complex work, even when those ideas could be highly valuable. The most striking example is Stripe: for over a decade, thousands of hackers knew online payment processing was painful, yet they built trivial startups instead because their minds shrank from the complications involved. Overcoming schlep blindness requires either ignorance (which helps young founders) or deliberately asking what problems you wish someone else would solve rather than what you should work on.

• •Schlep blindness causes entrepreneurs to unconsciously ignore valuable startup ideas that involve tedious or complex work
• •Most successful startups require dealing with schleps (unpleasant tasks), and a company is essentially defined by the schleps it will undertake
• •Ambitious ideas with obvious schleps have less competition because other founders are frightened away by the challenges
• •Younger founders have an advantage because they underestimate both how much they can grow and how much they'll need to grow, mistakes that cancel each other out
• •To overcome schlep blindness, ask 'what problem do I wish someone else would solve for me' instead of 'what problem should I solve'

Y Combinator, Stripe, Sam Altman, Paul Buchheit, Patrick Collison, Aaron Iba, Jessica Livingston, Emmett Shear, Harj Taggar