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Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

paulgraham.com

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Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

#41

Post by duck »

diego wrote: post #31
duck wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think email needs to be changed from top to bottom, but offering speed alone would be a hard sell to launch with. You can get the Microsoft offering (Exchange Online or packaged with Office 365) starting at $5 a user. Microsoft can afford to spend money on it. I've used it and it is a lot faster than GMail (although it wasn't enough for me to switch).

One thing I noticed is that email is a problem for "important" people who receive tons of messages per day. They must read/answer that one vital email right away. Kevin Rose talked about this a few years ago, and I've heard many high-profile investors complaining about this. For the vast majority of the people on the planet, GMail is just good enough. Yahoo Mail and Hotmail are still doing well. Perhaps email is perc…

GMail is just good enough

It is, but only in terms of what we think of email in today's usage. I think the next step will be where you can make the messages dynamic which would basically allow you to receive/deliver an interface to an app. Of course with all that power comes the issue of how to control it, but that would be an interesting problem to solve. Imagine instead of getting a notification email for an update on a Basecamp todo list, you would see the actual todo list and could manage right from your inbox.

Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

#42

Post by dgallagher »

diego wrote: post #22

"GMail is slow because Google can't afford to spend a lot on it. But people will pay for this. I'd have no problem paying $50 a month." Ok. Number of Paul Grahams in the world times $600/year = ? Most people on the web are ridiculously stingy. "I would pay for this" is a terrible way to think for an entrepreneur. Believing that what we think represents the masses is a rookie mistake.

Rich people have the same number of seconds per day as poor people, except each second is worth more. Right now everyone is driving a black Model-T; there isn't a premium edition of email available, though one is certainly desired (personal assistants and secretaries currently fill this gap).

If the cost of a premium email/task-list system is less than the dollars saved in time, and less than an assistant, people will buy it. Aim for the higher-end market, solve their problems first on their dollar, and later expand downward to everyone else.

Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

#43

Post by erichocean »

patio11 wrote: post #24
erichocean wrote: post #12

In my experience, Sand Hill Road does not want "frighteningly ambitious" startup ideas if substantial capital expenditure is involved. (In fairness, they are willing to hear those pitches – I guess that's something.) > Now Steve is gone there's a vacuum we can all feel. Pixar got funded only because Steve Jobs (Steve Jobs!) paid for it of pocket to the tune of $50 million total. It's Pixar that made him a billionaire…

So if I wanted to do PixActing like I wanted to breathe, my five year plan would be a) get VC funded for anything, b) achieve a modestly successful exit, and then c) recruit one similarly situated person and just shake the money tree. Without making disparaging comments about identifiable businesses, it is not a controversial observation that proven entrepreneurs with existing networks have vastly superior access to…

I'm basically doing that, actually. Fohr has ridiculous technology, and I'm parting it out (feels like chopping a car) as you describe.

I can do Fohr without the capital, it'll just takes me longer as hardware gets cheaper and my own net worth goes up.

18 month ago, it would have cost over $100 million to operate Fohr, so time is on my side.

Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

#45

Post by mgkimsal »

duck wrote: post #41
diego wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One thing I noticed is that email is a problem for "important" people who receive tons of messages per day. They must read/answer that one vital email right away. Kevin Rose talked about this a few years ago, and I've heard many high-profile investors complaining about this. For the vast majority of the people on the planet, GMail is just good enough. Yahoo Mail and Hotmail are still doing well. Perhaps email is perc…

GMail is just good enough It is, but only in terms of what we think of email in today's usage. I think the next step will be where you can make the messages dynamic which would basically allow you to receive/deliver an interface to an app. Of course with all that power comes the issue of how to control it, but that would be an interesting problem to solve. Imagine instead of getting a notification email for an update…

for some reason, shades of two-way-rss hype just came flooding back from 2006.

Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

#47

Post by sskates »

diego wrote: post #22

"GMail is slow because Google can't afford to spend a lot on it. But people will pay for this. I'd have no problem paying $50 a month." Ok. Number of Paul Grahams in the world times $600/year = ? Most people on the web are ridiculously stingy. "I would pay for this" is a terrible way to think for an entrepreneur. Believing that what we think represents the masses is a rookie mistake.

Somehow people manage to pay Dropbox hundreds of millions of dollars a year, in spite of their stingy-ness. The email version of Dropbox would almost certainly be a bigger market.

Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

#48

Post by tobiasSoftware »

Alex3917 wrote: post #7

The problem with search is that not only is Google getting worse, but I've also mostly outgrown it, in that it isn't sophisticated to answer pretty much any scientific question I would want to ask. - No way to search for a scientific question and get a summary of the current scientific consensus or viewpoints on specific issues - It's really hard to access academic journal articles online. - Even when you can access…

I use it more as a way to shortcut sites. For example, if I want to Wikipedia "pi" instead of typing www.wikipedia.org, in the address bar, then typing in "pi" in the site's search bar, I enter it in Google and find the link. Firefox's awesome bar is gradually taking over as I can favorite things and "search" for them using that just by typing in a couple letters, but I still use Google for anything I haven't favorited.

Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

#49

Post by ilaksh »

tobiasSoftware wrote: post #40

I have my own to add which I'll tackle if I ever get smart enough. Code is horrible right now. The problem is that code is written linearly, when in our minds it is a graph. It's usually a bad sign when our minds see things differently than our computers do. I think if we could properly abstract the concepts, and change both our linear list of functions and our unsorted list of files to a single graph structure, we c…

I just read an article today or yesterday about the reason that VIM's cursor keys are h,j,k,l or whatever.

I think the reason that code is ASCII text is pretty much the same reason VIM's cursor keys are h,j,k,l. All they had was a terminal so it had to be ASCII.

If you think about it, all information is structured and multidimensional. But people can only make one sound at a time, so information must be serialized to be communicated.

There are some easy starting points for understanding why we should get away from pure ASCII source code. One of them is to try first coding a complex UI with pure text and then build the same UI using a graphical editor with widgets.

Another one is this: just answer this question -- why can't I represent division in my source code using a numerator over a divisor the way that we are taught to write mathematics? Should we continue to pretend that we are required to edit our code on terminals from 1979?

Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

#50

Post by SatvikBeri »

tobiasSoftware wrote: post #40

I have my own to add which I'll tackle if I ever get smart enough. Code is horrible right now. The problem is that code is written linearly, when in our minds it is a graph. It's usually a bad sign when our minds see things differently than our computers do. I think if we could properly abstract the concepts, and change both our linear list of functions and our unsorted list of files to a single graph structure, we c…

I've been thinking exactly the same thing! My workaround so far has been to use IDEs that have some project management features, and separate the code into separate files.

For example, SAS Enterprise Guide lets you create a project flow like this: http://blogs.sas.com/sasdummy/uploads/egparallel4.png

Note some of the advantages: nice code structure, easy (minor) parallelization, easy code segmentation, ability to examine intermediate data, etc.

I haven't found anything nearly as useful for SQL or more general languages. I would love to see something similar in Clojure/Python.

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