Charm Industrial seems interesting. How can I learn more about this company?
Startups I Want to Fund
11–20 of 167 posts
Re: Startups I Want to Fund
#12Some ideas: 1. Social Silo-busters: Couple the evils of the garden walled social network approach with posts on how hard is it to make friends later in life, add a pinch of all that useless time spent in the car commuting (scraping the bottom of Spotify or Audible) and you arrive at: ad hoc voice-based social networks based on proximity, e.g. through limited range (100m) FM transmitters (one cheap way would be to use…
> ad hoc voice-based social networks based on proximity
At the risk of being whooshed (the other points do seem sincere and "real"), do you mean... conversation? Like, you know, encountering another person in meat space and speaking to them?
Re: Startups I Want to Fund
#13Some ideas: 1. Social Silo-busters: Couple the evils of the garden walled social network approach with posts on how hard is it to make friends later in life, add a pinch of all that useless time spent in the car commuting (scraping the bottom of Spotify or Audible) and you arrive at: ad hoc voice-based social networks based on proximity, e.g. through limited range (100m) FM transmitters (one cheap way would be to use…
> ad hoc voice-based social networks based on proximity At the risk of being whooshed (the other points do seem sincere and "real"), do you mean... conversation? Like, you know, encountering another person in meat space and speaking to them?
Yes, but scope could be larger: If you like chatting with someone you can add them to your contacts.
Another take on this would be voice-based reddit, e.g. voice chat rooms organized around topics, similar to subreddits. Everybody takes turns to talk with voice activated microphone on their phone while commuting.
Re: Startups I Want to Fund
#14Charm Industrial seems interesting. How can I learn more about this company?
Re: Startups I Want to Fund
#15Some ideas: 1. Social Silo-busters: Couple the evils of the garden walled social network approach with posts on how hard is it to make friends later in life, add a pinch of all that useless time spent in the car commuting (scraping the bottom of Spotify or Audible) and you arrive at: ad hoc voice-based social networks based on proximity, e.g. through limited range (100m) FM transmitters (one cheap way would be to use…
> why can't I see the most ordered 5 items
There are restaurants where the whole menu is one page.
> Similar idea for supermarkets: why not have a giant screen at the entrance showing most bought products
If you want that just enter a small shop, it will have the most popular items (typically in a choice of one) :)
Re: Startups I Want to Fund
#16It's hard to get excited about these potential startups. Most of these ideas are not going to make my life any better in a major way and yet the author claims he's excited by "big, scary problems."
I'm not excited by them either, but it is his money, not mine, so I don't really see that my lack of interest is relevant. If those are the topics he loves, and he wants to fund them... more power to him.
Yes, no argument that it is his right to do what he wants with his money. I'm thinking about it in the context of Tyler Cowen giving smart people money for moonshots. In his book Complacent Class he touches on how there are less big ideas now and that is leading to stagnation.
Re: Startups I Want to Fund
#17How do you see these two sentences resolving into a single company that you would fund? > A normal first check from me ranges from $50k to $250k. > I’m very bullish on a capital-heavy, asset-full future for startups.
YC invested a small amount in a supersonic airplane company and a nuclear power company. Ostensibly, you can start proving that people want what you are building and developing technology before going to market.
Re: Startups I Want to Fund
#18Earlier quoted context omitted.
> ad hoc voice-based social networks based on proximity At the risk of being whooshed (the other points do seem sincere and "real"), do you mean... conversation? Like, you know, encountering another person in meat space and speaking to them?
Yes, but scope could be larger: If you like chatting with someone you can add them to your contacts. Another take on this would be voice-based reddit, e.g. voice chat rooms organized around topics, similar to subreddits. Everybody takes turns to talk with voice activated microphone on their phone while commuting.
I don't believe one can build lasting relationships like that. A lot of communication is non-verbal.
Re: Startups I Want to Fund
#19How do you see these two sentences resolving into a single company that you would fund? > A normal first check from me ranges from $50k to $250k. > I’m very bullish on a capital-heavy, asset-full future for startups.
(author here)
Angel investors almost never provide the bulk of the capital for a startup. We provide initial money, advise, and introductions to help raise more. So, yes, I expect the bulk of the "heavy capital" to come from institutional investors in later rounds.
Also note that I invest in follow-on rounds, so my total investment in a startup might get much larger than $250k.
Re: Startups I Want to Fund
#20I just want to second Andrew's list. I'm a developer with probably 1/100 as much money as he has, but this is the first list I've seen in a long time that mentions specific low-hanging fruit that has the potential to actually improve lives (vs the mostly vacuous or profit-oriented areas I've seen in other lists).
I look at problems in the world as a series of solutions built from first principles. So if you want a distributed mesh network, you need a supplier that can make millions of boxes for roughly 1/10 their retail price, or you need software that can run on existing phones/routers/computers. Then you need open software with tests for all the edge cases so you know it's free of bugs. Then you need an algorithm for things like web of trust or onion routing. Then you need a compelling use case (easy, no more internet and/or cell phone bill) and a way to prove it's safe so it goes viral. And so on. No one step of the process is insurmountable, or in many cases, especially difficult.
Once we have that box, other ideas like content-addressable memory (things like IPFS) become feasible and we end up with an internet running thousands of times faster than what we have now, because media can be seeded once to each city and then cached by downloaders.
So of course that's a barrier to entry, because few players in the existing paradigm want to disrupt the status quo. But that's no reason to settle for the wildly expensive and slow technology that we are stuck with now. Pretty much every item in his list works along these same lines.