Michael Wolfe, a serial entrepreneur who currently serves as the CEO of user relationship management firm Pipewise, raised a very good point on Quora. He theorized that “it is possible to create a good startup with a good idea, but great startups are often the result of ideas that would have seemed ridiculous if you had heard them prior to seeing them working.”

There is certainly no shortage of companies with value propositions that may appear convincing in light of their success, but are in fact completely bizarre. Wolfe lists Google as one example: at the time of its founding in 1999, it was but one of several search engines struggling to make ends meet. It only came out on top because it removed the ad-supported features that constituted the main source of search revenue in the dot-com era.

Facebook, Dropbox, PayPal, and SpaceX (created by PayPal co-founder Elon Musk) are also among the nearly two dozen firms that made it to the list. Amazon landed a spot too – not because of its wildly successful PaaS platform, but because it managed to persuade consumers that the convenience of online shopping justifies both the wait and the shipping costs.

Divyesh Chandra of the International Institute of Information Technology in Hyderabad highlighted that Quora would also qualify as ridiculous from a venture capitalist’s point of view. The tech-oriented questions and answer site is essentially a Yahoo Answers clone that shares a few similarities with Stack Exchange and Wikipedia. The latter represents perhaps the most ridiculous idea of all: a crowd-sourced encyclopedia that can be accessed and even edited by anyone with a reasonable internet connection.

What will they think of next?