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Billion Dollar Startup Ideas [video]
31–40 of 121 posts
Re: Billion Dollar Startup Ideas [video]
#32Easy - A convenient way to get a covid vaccine /s
Apply a known safe encapsulation process to one of the vaccines that works and make it shelf-stable. That's worth a billion.
Some of the vaccines are a fragile messenger RNA molecule with nothing to protect it. That's good, because it's the minimal molecule that will do the job, reducing the risk of side effects. But it has to be kept frozen at dry ice temperatures before use. The "user friendly" version needs to follow.
See [1][2] for other vaccines for which this has been done.
Merck is working on a pill version.
[1] https://stm.sciencemag.org/content/12/567/eabf2642.full
[2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00928...
Re: Billion Dollar Startup Ideas [video]
#33Re: Billion Dollar Startup Ideas [video]
#34Haven't watched the whole thing yet, but I will push back on some of the popular mythology that everyone thought successful startups we're just toys or would fail in their early days. IMO that's mostly bullshit. Amazon, Google, Uber, Facebook (despite some cherry picked article from the video about it never being able to hit profitability) were all hugely popular right off the bat, and indeed, many people saw them as…
MySpace was massive when Facebook was a year or two old. I had accounts on both and MySpace looked way more attractive compared to FB (it had the feel of Instagram). So no, FB did not take over overnight. And even a few years into FB, no one (yes, no one) knew that FB will go past MySpace and there will simply be no comparison between the two 10 or 15 years down the road. When FB took over MySpace a full FOUR years i…
I wish I could downvote you, but as a direct reply I'll have to settle for replying instead. You seem to have completely misunderstood my argument. I'm not "Monday morning quarterbacking", and I in no way think that Facebook's success was guaranteed.
The point I was making was the idea that it was believed early on that social media was a "toy" or that it would never be profitable or that people poo poo-ed the idea of Facebook in its early days is not accurate, at all. Indeed, the example of MySpace shows that it was already well known that there would be a scramble for dominance in the social media realm.
> So why FB took over MySpace? We don't know. Yes, we don't know in 2020, 16 years later.
Uhh, I think we have a pretty good idea. First and foremost, Facebook was always focused on your real, offline identity, which was rather new at the time. MySpace and the early social networks were primarily based on different online personas (e.g. online usernames, no real name policy, etc.) MySpace tried to get people to add their real names and identities later, but it was basically too late by then. This isn't hypothetical, either, one of the founders of MySpace told me as much in a conversation about a decade ago.
Re: Billion Dollar Startup Ideas [video]
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
All this hoo haa about startup ideas - Just make products that excel at every aspect of what it does and make sure there is a demand for such a product. I see people making a better soap dispenser, the hardware equivalent of what most SaaS startups are working on. You need to invent a new kind of soap that is better than anything else out there. It should take the grime off of everything from kitchen to bathroom scum…
At the same time, selling ordinary things in a better way has also built many fortunes. I know several self-made people running ecommerce businesses in the most mundane spaces. There's plenty of opportunity everywhere.
Yes, you're 100% right. I meant "startup" in the sense of silicon valley rush to become a unicorn giant.
Soap dispenser business is in own right quite interesting. If you made a substantially better soap dispenser, it won't be in the newspapers. It has a shorter lever, but a good business nevertheless.
Re: Billion Dollar Startup Ideas [video]
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
Actually there is no fundamental difference between VRBO.com and Airbnb.com, with VRBO predating Airbnb by a lot, except for a more slick execution. Edit: Per Wikipedia VRBO was launched in 1995.
> with VRBO predating Airbnb by a lot, except for a more slick execution. And "the more slick execution" was key. VRBO was until quite recently basically just classified ads - all transactions were done off platform, which was a major PITA and left a huge vector for fraud. I remember back in the late 00s I rented a place in Europe, and the only form of payment the owner would take was cash, so I showed up and paid 12…
Off-topic but this seemed off to me:
> paid 1200 euros in cash like I was buying half a kilo of heroin
and luckily, the UN has some nice historical data on this [1]. Looks like the EU averaged 50 euros per gram or so. You’d have only gotten 25 grams :).
[1] https://dataunodc.un.org/drugs/heroin_and_cocaine_prices_in_...
Re: Billion Dollar Startup Ideas [video]
#37The world doesn't need more VC-inflated payment platform middlemen taking a cut either Gary :p Other than the Patreon spruik, good vid.
Re: Billion Dollar Startup Ideas [video]
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
MySpace was massive when Facebook was a year or two old. I had accounts on both and MySpace looked way more attractive compared to FB (it had the feel of Instagram). So no, FB did not take over overnight. And even a few years into FB, no one (yes, no one) knew that FB will go past MySpace and there will simply be no comparison between the two 10 or 15 years down the road. When FB took over MySpace a full FOUR years i…
I wish I could downvote you, but as a direct reply I'll have to settle for replying instead. You seem to have completely misunderstood my argument. I'm not "Monday morning quarterbacking", and I in no way think that Facebook's success was guaranteed. The point I was making was the idea that it was believed early on that social media was a "toy" or that it would never be profitable or that people poo poo-ed the idea o…
I just want to point out one thing, for the record.
I'm sorry "Stop Monday Morning Quarterbacking (MMQ)" isn't directed at you per se, but the general direction of whoever is reading my comment.
MMQ is, unfortunately, practiced widely in many prediction/retrospection circles like startups, finance, economics, politics.
I'm speaking from a the point of view of scientific rigor, or at least quantitative data analysis. No one does that when it comes to opining about the cause-and-effect of an event in the past. If you're "the winner", anything you say about why you won, would be taken as gospel. "Winner is always right". Rigorous analysis is very hard, and costly, and to what end? Just so you could say "my reasoning is based on analysis"? That's a very boring thing to say. Unless rigorous-analysis finds utility in applications like decision-making for future startups, and is shown to work over and over again (maybe we'll need AI for that), no one is going to bother with it.
Re: Billion Dollar Startup Ideas [video]
#39The internet is rife with blogs (and now podcasts) about what can be a billion dollar startup ideas. It just depends on where someone sees an opportunity and exploits it. (not as easy, but thats about the crux of it) I wanted to touch upon the other thing Garry Tan mentioned when he said that reason people try the same ideas is because "desire is mimetic". We want what other people want. Same ideas especially ones wh…
> Most of these ideas fold because travel is very cold market for an investor and most dont want to invest. This isn't true. For example, AirBnB has plenty of funding. Investors as the constraint currently happens for capital-intensive opportunities, like nuclear fusion. There's plenty of investors for software as a service. There are lots of other reasons why there aren't more "apps for x." The main barrier for any…
The killer feature that AirBnB cracked was scaling.
Travel advice inherently doesn't scale -- you saw it with Frommers et al. pre-web.
High investment to develop content, constant need to update, and your success cannibalizes your own business. The sorts of people who want travel advice are typically not the sort who want 1,000 other jackass Americans (said as a travelling American) showing up at "that tiny gem of a restaurant."
I'd say Yelp is the most useful travel-related app, precisely because they targeted a different market: what you want now, here (not the best in the world).
Re: Billion Dollar Startup Ideas [video]
#40The internet is rife with blogs (and now podcasts) about what can be a billion dollar startup ideas. It just depends on where someone sees an opportunity and exploits it. (not as easy, but thats about the crux of it) I wanted to touch upon the other thing Garry Tan mentioned when he said that reason people try the same ideas is because "desire is mimetic". We want what other people want. Same ideas especially ones wh…
> Most of these ideas fold because travel is very cold market for an investor and most dont want to invest. This isn't true. For example, AirBnB has plenty of funding. Investors as the constraint currently happens for capital-intensive opportunities, like nuclear fusion. There's plenty of investors for software as a service. There are lots of other reasons why there aren't more "apps for x." The main barrier for any…
AirB&B was not easyly funded at first. It seemed very very foolish at the time to rent your place to a stranger.
The did revolutionis the touristic rental market, and as for any revolution, it was very very difficult at the begining to have followers ( finance, customers, accomodations).