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Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

paulgraham.com

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Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

#51

Post by dgallagher »

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…

You're talking about highly-focused, or micro, search. Yeah, Google doesn't seem to do that very well. They have a few segments, like book search and image search, but it's not specific enough.

One thing I search for sometimes are code examples in a particular language. Search for something in C on Google and you end up with lots of stuff for C++, C#, etc... Github, with its large repository of public code, lets you filter by programming language, and is much better than Google in these cases.

Bing copies Google. DuckDuckGo returns different things than Google, but otherwise is a copy. There's no micro search engine for specific topics and sub-topics, outside of site-specific search. Market opportunity...

Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

#52

Post by ilaksh »

I think that the hard part of tackling these ambitious projects is (often) not the actual engineering but rather making the ideas popular and fighting against the status quo. Another hard part is how difficult is the transition from how we do things now to the new way.

So most of these things he mentions, people are working on them, or something similar, or even have functional software. That software just isn't popular. Not because it isn't useful, but because it didn't catch on.

And a lot of these ideas aren't really useful until they reach a critical mass of users, which makes it even harder.

The big ambitious thing I wanted to mention was DONA (data-oriented networking or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content-centric_networking). You might be able to combine that with some type of semantic knowledge storage and engineering along with a type of e-democracy. People have working examples of these things, its just hard for people to pick them up and start actually using them and then mention them to others for them to become trends.

Before (or instead of) human-controlled knowledge engineering we may see Google (http://mashable.com/2012/02/13/google-knowledge-graph-change...) (or possibly some start up) come out with a Watsonish system that builds huge knowledge graphs by actually comprehending the semantics of web pages it spiders and then lets you query them more naturally. (Which I guess that type of system does exist, just didn't catch on, maybe because it wasn't quite up to human level comprehension or didn't become popular for whatever reason.)

Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

#53

Post by pm90 »

Donald wrote: post #27

"Google used to give me a page of the right answers, fast, with no clutter. ... And the pages don't have the clean, sparse feel they used to." If you disable Javascript and cookies for *.google.(tld), you'll be greeted with Google circa a few years ago: http://imgur.com/LDBLk .

This is great..Thank You!

Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

#54

Post by ajju »

SkyMarshal wrote: post #28
ajju wrote: post #4

If you want to take on a problem as big as the ones I've discussed, don't make a direct frontal attack on it. Don't say, for example, that you're going to replace email. If you do that you raise too many expectations. Your employees and investors will constantly be asking "are we there yet?" This is critical. I have tried it the other way, and struggled for these very reasons. I think the way to use these big ideas i…

>This is critical. I have tried it the other way, and struggled for these very reasons. It's also the Lisp philosophy of building up from small functional pieces, rather than starting with an overdesigned top-down blueprint.

As a programmer, I intuitively understand the value of building up from small pieces.

I think what Paul is saying in the first part I quoted is different though. He is saying don't even say you are going to build the "grand vision" because it sets unreasonable expectations and defocuses you from making incremental progress.

The second part I quoted is about avoiding top-down design / blueprints and you are right on the money there.

Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

#55

Post by stevenj »

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.

"I would pay for this" is a terrible way to think for an entrepreneur.

Peter Drucker said: "The purpose of business is to create and keep a customer."

So an entrepreneur tackling this problem would already have at least one prospective customer, thus they'd immediately be in business. And who knows, maybe something "big" grows out of it (e.g. maybe you discover there's a big market for this in the enterprise space).

Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

#56

Post by dminor »

politician wrote: post #38
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…

Perhaps, but as Bentley and Gulfstream discovered, there is a tidy profit to be made servicing the niche needs of high-profile individuals.

Undoubtedly, but tidy profit and frighteningly ambitious are two different things.

Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

#59

Post by mmphosis »

0. free internet

   - as in beer and as in liberty
1. a new search engine

   http://duckduckgo.com/
2. replace email - with a todo list?

   - as I look at that old Palm IIIxe sitting in the cradle on my desk,
my mind swims in the ideas of all the databases on all of the devices everywhere all being in sync

3. replace universities

   - yup, and recreate the free university of olde
4. internet drama

   - indie drama titles (movies/shows/etc) on netflix / apple
   - or just read the comments ;)
5. the next steve jobs - but I am still impressed by the iPad3 rollout and it's screen

   - raspberry pi
6. bring back moore's law

   - easy parallelism in software
   - it's a compiler -- that's the hard part
   - a compiler on the web as a web "service"
   - an optimization marketplace: people in the machine doling out smart answers
7. ongoing diagnosis

   - how about ongoing prevention? because cancer is a symptom too
   - why limit yourself to 1000 years of ?barbaric? western medicine?
   - why not look at all of humanity's history of medicine from all cultures?
8. tactics

   - remember that columbus was a tyrant, and he didn't "discover" anything.
   - start small
yup, the best plan is not to have one, and never make one, when it's a fait accompli then you announce the plan

Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

#60

Post by tlb »

erichocean wrote: post #43
patio11 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Pixar did it for 16 years (1979-1995) before they released a movie.
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