Ask HN: We have a great team and capital but can't find a good idea

Childhood education in the States. Find some teachers in your area and ask them what they could do with x in y time.

Send me an email, let's chat for a half hour and I'll give you several ideas that I'd use and pay for in my industry if they existed.

I have an Agtech startup I've been working on for the past year, but am stepping away from it for personal reasons. It's R&D heavy, so I haven't got customers yet, but I believe there is real opportunity (said every customer-less startup founder ever). It's in an emerging market (agriculture) with booming investment dollars available. Right now the product is largely IoT, but there is scope for a lot of machine learning and blockchain in the near future which would keep your PhD interested.

I've put a lot of hard work into this and would love to see it in somebody else's capable hands rather than going to waste - would you like to talk it over more? Drop me an email at sajrobb at gmail dot com.

Because great teams seemed more important than great ideas, YC tried funding teams without ideas, but it didn't work.

Market research is deadly, because that's what big companies do. If there's an objectively verifiable opportunity, they are already on it.

This is what's so interesting about Christensen's "disruption" - part of the definition is that the opportunity is not appealing to incumbents. It's too small, not wanted by existing customers, etc.

So perhaps the key thing missing from "great teams without ideas" is the passion (aka craziness) to wholeheartedly pursue something that can't be objectively verified. And then, to discover unforseeable problems and solve them; or, to pivot to a new idea, serenpiditously picked up along the way... the journey provides the destination.

So... just start. "Scratch your own itch" is a good way to identify an unmet need, just something to start with. Don't consider market size etc. Also, don't commit much money to it, just your time, treat it as an experiment.

Competition isn't in the number of vendors in a space, but rather who reaches a market the best. I wonder if some of those ideas would look a little different.

Another source for uncovering pain is consulting - less about the income and more about uncovering needs and gaps tied to marketplace needs.