I’ve fantasized about the delivery to a person idea for a while. The next frontier after last mile - last foot. I figure drones will do it one day. Also sounds like something Amazon would do.
Startups I Want to Fund
61–70 of 167 posts
Re: Startups I Want to Fund
#62This strikes me as an incredibly boring and typical list. And the core of why is summed up nicely by the author himself, "My favorite pitches solve a problem I'm already concerned about." We have already solved most of the rich-white-guy problems. I am sure he is well-intentioned and strives to understand as much of the world as possible, but if you want to invest in capital-intensive, asset-rich startups with proble…
(author here) 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 bill…
Yes, we have these problems in Africa.
Re: Startups I Want to Fund
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
Could you comment on what increases seed funding chances when pitching a "big hairy goal" ? Team? Progress so far? Clear road map? PoC & tech feasibility?
All of the above. Prove your team is credible and your idea is solid and the only thing holding you back is the money. Even if you don't have the capital to build the full-scale thing, you can still make a lot of progress on the cheap: conduct research, model your business, test components, do user testing, get LOIs from customers, line up your first few hires, and so on.
Interesting, We have done that.
Re: Startups I Want to Fund
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are you guys reading the same list as me? 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?"
To be devil's advocate: 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 c…
Hmmm, Air Conditioners are heat pumps as are fridges. Pumping heat rather than generating it comes in at roughly 1/4 the energy budget.
An innovative "Air Conditioner" that could store the usually dumped heat for later use (Say in preheating water for a hot tap to lower costs of heating) would probably be extremely popular if it was a decent product otherwise (Cheap, durable, easy to install).
Effectively what is needed is a set of technologies that allow heat to be moved around and stored as easily as electricity and for a lower cost than generation.
If we had those then you'd have the best of both worlds, technologies that reduce climate change as well as allowing the non-first world to make life more comfortable in a warming world.
Re: Startups I Want to Fund
#65This strikes me as an incredibly boring and typical list. And the core of why is summed up nicely by the author himself, "My favorite pitches solve a problem I'm already concerned about." We have already solved most of the rich-white-guy problems. I am sure he is well-intentioned and strives to understand as much of the world as possible, but if you want to invest in capital-intensive, asset-rich startups with proble…
Did you just read the first few items and comment? How is building a global satellite network enabling internet access to everyone on earth boring or a "rich-white-guy problem"? Or A/C for the developing world?
Re: Startups I Want to Fund
#66"New insurance companies – renters insurance, title insurance, business insurance, etc have yet to enter the 21st century" 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…
> what can we do to eliminate the need for insurance?
> Air conditioning: A problem easily solved by getting people to live in better climates.
> Some of this list seems silly and easily dismissed as "because physics". Electric aircraft don't make sense and I doubt they ever will.
It's so easy to be an armchair critic and be dismissive of other people's ideas. The only difference is, some people break down large problems step by step and overcome obstacles for over a decade to solve them.
Re: Startups I Want to Fund
#67"federated databases" is not low hanging fruit, its CAP theorem decision time. If he means that he wants the interconnection logic to let him pick which two, and how to homegenise the glue between competing implementations, well yes, that would be nice, but it doesn't "remove" problems from CAP, it probably adds a useful layer of indirection which then incurrs its own asynchronous, transactional, complete, sequenced problem-set.
I feel that its jeremiah like, but it is probably time-machine and cure-for-cancer stuff. You get bits of it.
Re: Startups I Want to Fund
#68Some 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 manage waste pickup from an app?
Spoken like someone who never lived in an apartment complex?
Sure, if you have a house and the garbage truck comes along, you might influence this, although I don't see what's there to manage. I don't see garbage pickup as highly inefficient. I see this where I live, in the city you have paper and organics extra, cans and glass if you're a good citizen and very maybe plastic - whereas on the countryside your town might mandate you separate into 6 bins. But if you have a house you probably have the space for 6 separate bins, I surely don't.
Re: Startups I Want to Fund
#69This strikes me as an incredibly boring and typical list. And the core of why is summed up nicely by the author himself, "My favorite pitches solve a problem I'm already concerned about." We have already solved most of the rich-white-guy problems. I am sure he is well-intentioned and strives to understand as much of the world as possible, but if you want to invest in capital-intensive, asset-rich startups with proble…
This is a pretty sick burn, and you may be being generous. Nothing in this list is a new idea. People have been trying and failing at open app stores for years. Same with touch OS. If "What does the internet-native version of the WSJ or The Economist look like?" constitutes a sleeper market, he may need to get out more.
Solving boring problems that no one else wants to solve because they are too boring is where the market is.
I'm actually disappointed that it is "new kind of ISP" that made the list rather than just plain "ISP/NSP -- whatever way IP is delivered is fine". Making $10/mo profit in being a dumb pipe with 10 million subscribers in the US is a profit of $100 million in a month while being a a dumb pipe.
Re: Startups I Want to Fund
#70Waste pickup - someone posted recently a blog from Taiwan, where they have 4/5 garbage collections per day, people simply wait till they hear the truck outside and walk out with their bag and chuck it in the back Now this really only work in a city that is compact, and quiet enough to hear the garbage truck music Which leads me on to Strong Towns, where the argument is that the sub-urban sprawl model is unsustainable…
I also read that, but I don't see them separating their trash, so what does it actually do? It solved the specific problem of trash piling up, and people have to pay for the garbage bags. But in towns where people don't just usually throw their garbage anywhere and the trash is collected in a timely manner... where is the benefit for this? I'd rather pay the garbage collectors via taxes than run out and chuck the garbage into a truck myself.