Startups I Want to Fund

I feel like a more creative and productive question is, what can we do to eliminate the need for insurance? Can we have a network of doctors offices in major cities that we pay a monthly fee to access, where the billing and costs are transparent and sane? Can we approach home owners insurance the same way we have community credit unions and reduce the admin overhead and the profit cut of the middlemen?

"New staffing agencies"

How about eliminating the need for staffing agencies? Let's get platforms like Task Rabbit more ubiquitous and inside niche industries that haven't adapted. Labor on demand without as much of a middleman. There's obviously issues with the current iteration of ride-share apps etc, but it's something that can be improved and it obviously works better than the traditional industry (taxis in this example).

"What does the internet-native version of the WSJ or The Economist look like?"

Reddit, clearly.

Air conditioning: A problem easily solved by getting people to live in better climates. With more jobs becoming decreasingly location dependent, this makes sense.

Some of this list seems silly and easily dismissed as "because physics". Electric aircraft don't make sense and I doubt they ever will. Space launches will always be expensive due to fuel (I realize as of right now, fuel is a very low percentage of cost - but theoretically even if everything else was free, fuel still makes it too expensive for consumers). Alternative energy is an extremely expensive field. I could go on.

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Problems that I think are worth fixing:

Make a small dent in societal progress to change how people interact and view strangers. Make a small step towards everyone not dehumanizing each other. Create a movement to bring people together and lessen the attitude of people living in big cities having to keep their eyes down and not interacting with others. Pokemon Go is a great example of this.

Make the government more accountable, make people more involved in elections. The amount of misguided or wasted taxpayer dollars is staggering. Even small improvements in our representatives could easily mean billions of dollars going towards things like schools, healthcare, and basic needs of citizens rather than buying missiles and $10,000 bolts.

Instead of focusing on new ISPs, focus on new methods of distributing traffic that prevents the erosion of privacy and the rise of censorship. Take Freenet and make it mainstream. It won't be the solution to everything but it can solve a lot. It will require a lot of changes and new tools/applications to make this happen but it's possible.

Help employers make the shift towards remote workers. Let people live where they want. Don't make them tied to a chair for 9 hours a day. Don't make them sit in traffic for an hour a day. The impact on the environment and mental health would be huge.

Help people disconnect from technology. Fund activity centers in big cities that provide attract options and attractive social groups. Board game meetups on meetup.com are super popular. So are the dancing ones. Bringing in more people and providing better spaces for this would help a lot of people much happier. It provides a lot more opportunities for socializing and finding meaningful connections, which I think most or many people lack.

If your take here is that I'm interested in "rich-white-guy" problems, I'd encourage you to re-read the list from the perspective of emerging and frontier markets. Most of what I have listed there is actually more important in those places than it is in Silicon Valley. For example -- receiver-centric package delivery is a far bigger deal in places that don't have addresses than it is in the US (and billions of people around the world don't have addresses!). Ditto with energy, waste management, etc... even an open web platform is a bigger deal in India than it is here.

Personally, I spend more time these days focused on those markets (especially Haiti and Africa) than I do on the US.

How would you categorize the following as a "rich white guy problem"?

"Air conditioning – As more people in hot climates enter the middle class, and as climate change accelerates, the demand for air conditioning will explode. What innovation is possible here?"

The worst possible outcome of using more air conditioning is more pollution. Pollution (on a global scale) and the associated potential climate change are considered pretty first-world (rich white dude) problems. Pollution on a local scale is definitely more legitimate, but that's overwhelmingly due to combustion engines (cars) and not power generation, which doesn't typically happen in city centers.