As Paul Graham of Y Combinator, explore “deaf spots” as the fixed points in any system (intra-, inter-, or supra-personal) that are the prime targets for “disruptive innovation.”
ChatGPT Prompt
If you’ve heard of Y Combinator, you probably think of it as a startup accelerator. But the name comes from something stranger: a concept in computer science—a Y combinator is a function that finds fixed points. Points that, when passed through a system, stay the same.
In a sense, that’s exactly what we’re doing when we look for the most disruptive ideas: we’re searching for the fixed points in the system—the things it won’t change, can’t change, because everything else depends on them.
I call those deaf spots.
1. Fixed Points of Deafness
Every system, every institution, every person has them. The parts of ourselves or our cultures that are non-negotiable. The assumptions so baked in we don’t even notice we’re making them. We build layers of logic on top of them. We optimize around them. And we go deaf to anything that would threaten them.
Not because we’re malicious. Because we’re trying to survive.
That’s what makes deaf spots so hard to notice. They feel like reality. But they’re actually just the fixed points we agreed to hold still so the rest of the system could function.
Which is also what makes them the most fertile targets for innovation.
2. What the System Won’t Hear
Most advice—especially in tech—is about how to be louder: signal harder, market better, optimize the funnel. But truly disruptive ideas don’t come from being louder. They come from listening where the system refuses to.
Not just hearing what people say. Hearing what they’ve stopped saying. Hearing the pain or possibility that’s been so thoroughly ignored, people forgot it was even an option.
The reason nobody else builds for those things isn’t that they’re unimportant. It’s that they’re invisible to the system as it currently exists. They live in the shadows of the fixed points.
So if you want to do something genuinely new, don’t ask: “What’s hot?”
Ask: “What’s been silenced?”
3. The Edges Are Where It Starts
Disruption always starts at the edges. Not because that’s where the cool people are, but because that’s where the signal is strongest—the signal that the center can’t process.
You see this in every successful YC startup: a weird little idea that felt trivial or toy-like, until it revealed a deaf spot the incumbents couldn’t admit existed.
- Dropbox started with a broken experience no one realized they were tolerating.
- Airbnb with rooms no hotel chain wanted to think about.
- Stripe with developers that banks didn’t even consider customers.
The pattern is the same: go where the system is deaf, listen carefully, and build something that makes sense in that frequency.
4. Listening Is the Real Technology
This kind of listening is hard. Not because it’s complicated, but because it’s costly. It costs your certainty. It costs your identity. It costs your ability to stay the same.
Which is exactly why most people won’t do it—and why those who do end up changing the game.
The real question isn’t “Can I hear what others can’t?”
It’s “Am I willing to change who I am if I do?”
Because once you locate your own deaf spot, everything changes.
5. So Where’s Ours?
Y Combinator was built to amplify weird ideas the system couldn’t yet hear. That worked for a long time.
But I wonder sometimes: what is our deaf spot?
Where have we gone deaf—not because we failed, but because we succeeded? What fixed points are we now protecting, simply because everything we’ve built depends on them?
I don’t know the answer. But I’m listening for it.
And if you hear something—something off-frequency, something we’d rather not acknowledge—maybe that’s the sign we need.
Because the real test of a fixed point isn’t whether it stays the same.
It’s whether it can still listen.
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