Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas • Hacker News Board

Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

#241

Post by tomp » Sat, Mar 10, 2012, 2:46 PM UTC

ericd wrote: post #161

I think personal health monitoring is probably the most important thing on that list. The thing that excited me the most when smartphones started becoming popular was the prospect that they could coordinate data collection from a number of sensors always collecting data - basic ones like Nike+, but perhaps also sensors measuring sleep, taking periodic bloodwork, etc. At the same time, perhaps you could automatically…

There is a fundamental difference between a scientific study and data-mining.

Science is based on probability theory. Until we discover the "grand theory of everything", out other theories will be only approximate, and out experimental results not 100% predictable. Therefore, scientists consider a prediction as correct if the chance of predicting something at random is less than some probability, usually 10%, 5% or 1%.

However, for this to work, each study must be based on new data. If you use the same data to check e.g. 10 predictions, each of which has 10% chance of happening even if incorrect, you will in average confirm 1 of your predictions, even if all are incorrect!

Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

#242

Post by jodrellblank » Sat, Mar 10, 2012, 2:52 PM UTC

jacquesm wrote: post #221

tomjen3 wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh please. Humanity is pretty much the definition of a species that should, in all probability, have died out on a multitude of occasions over the years and I am not just talking about the world wars and Nuclear Bombs, but things like the plagues, Spanish flu and all the rest of the diseases; the host of predators for which we are no match at all (a standard monkey is stronger than all but the best trained humans), t…

> No wonder we love and underdog -- there is no greater under dog than humanity. Tell that to the Dodo, the Quagga, the Javan Tiger and the Thylacine. And many others besides.

Weak and winning is "underdog", weak and losing is "loser".

Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

#243

Post by cstefanovici » Sat, Mar 10, 2012, 2:55 PM UTC

For big ideas that others clearly understand to be problems and of which investors are afraid to get in on there always is... crowdfunding! I wrote about the pros and cons of raising money through crowdfunding to pay for your startup here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3687835

Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

#244

Post by patio11 » Sat, Mar 10, 2012, 2:55 PM UTC

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.

Seeing as how you're on HN you may have heard of 37Signals, Fog Creek, and Atlassian. All sell products which are domain-specific improvements for email. They collectively have, conservatively, X00,000 paying users. These are small companies in this problem space - IBM has at least 48 options for I-can't-believe-it's-not-email at every price point between $200k and $200 million. Ditto Microsoft and a dozen other big software companies.

"The web" includes a bunch of stingy twenty something's on the consumer Internet, but it also includes the producer Internet, and the producer Internet is one giant system for turning piles of money into bigger piles of money. Something which makes that happen is cheap at any price.

Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

#245

Post by dgregd » Sat, Mar 10, 2012, 3:04 PM UTC

Guys, please do something which will replace Word and Excel. These tools were good in the '80 and '90.

One of the main reasons I do not like to work for corporations is Word doc attachments hell.

Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

#246

Post by jodrellblank » Sat, Mar 10, 2012, 3:05 PM UTC

tomp wrote: post #239

fauigerzigerk wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OK, but "cleaning" is yet another word for artificial intelligence. I think you underestimate the power of economics. Can you imagine how many people are busy cleaning things? I find it amazing that the difference between tasks like washing cloths and cleaning toilets is so small for humans and so huge for machines. We've had washing machines forever, but we're still cleaning our toilets manually. And cleaning is jus…

Eventually, far out into the future, the trends might actually reverse. Fundamentally, robots are made out of expensive stuff, metal, earth minerals. It can be recycled, but it's expensive, and not 100%. Humans, on the other hand, a pretty cheap, we run on carbon, oxygen and water. In the future, it might make sense for robots to do stuff they're best suited for (e.g. very hard, dangerous work in human-unfriendly con…

Fundamentally, robots can be made out of less stuff than us, by virtue of being a mostly-empty lattice material at all levels, and won't need recycling as repairs happen on smaller scales until the repaired item is as close to new as you want.

Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

#247

Post by hythloday » Sat, Mar 10, 2012, 3:07 PM UTC

gbog wrote: post #116

jamesrcole wrote: post #106

Great post, but minor quibble: The CEO of that company, the "next Steve Jobs," might not measure up to Steve Jobs. But he wouldn't have to. He'd just have to do a better job than Samsung and HP and Nokia, and that seems pretty doable. That really should be: The CEO of that company, the "next Steve Jobs," might not measure up to Steve Jobs. But they wouldn't have to. They'd just have to do a better job than Samsung an…

Hell, thanks, you just pointed out that pg is not PC. Hope he will never start writing in this silly new grammar.

Whether you find "they" as a third person singular pronoun objectionable, it's not "new"--it goes back to at least Shakespeare (through Austen).

Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

#248

Post by DanBC » Sat, Mar 10, 2012, 3:09 PM UTC

tomwalsham wrote: post #86

jballanc wrote: post #76

Man finds a black kind of rock that burns; discovers that you can get a lot of this rock if you dig deeper, but deep mines have water. In order to successfully mine this rock, man devises a steam powered engine (neatly enough powered by this same rock) to pump out the water. No, not the steam engines you're familiar with. This is the Newcomen Steam Engine: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newcomen_engine The Newcomen Eng…

This perspective is interesting when applied to communications. Parlay. Courier. Pigeon. Mail. Telegraph. Telephone. Transatlantic Comms. Fax. Early Internet. Email. Text Messaging. Live Chat. Voip. Twitter. Facebook Messages. Video Chat. It's a naîve summary of communications history, but look at the persistence of some of the early players. Many have not been replaced to this day - snailmail, POTS, Fax, Email, Chat…

Killer app for email is idiot-proof cryptographic signatures and cryptography.

It's baffling to me that a squiggle on a bit of paper is more trustworthy than a properly implemented cryptographic signature.

Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

#249

Post by thejteam » Sat, Mar 10, 2012, 3:10 PM UTC

kolinko wrote: post #187

olalonde wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't all governments have a monopoly over their country's prisons?

I think in U.S. prisons are private enterprises.

This is highly dependent on the locale. Some places have outsourced prisons, usually with poor results. Most have not.

Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

#250

Post by leoc » Sat, Mar 10, 2012, 3:21 PM UTC

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…

It's probably worth mentioning how Steve Jobs was introduced to (what became) Pixar:

http://engineering.stanford.edu/profile/alvy-ray-smith-ms-19...

> One of my champions at Xerox PARC was Alan Kay. So I knew Alan Kay, who was by this time a fellow at Apple. And Steve Jobs had expressed some interest in computer graphics, so Alan Kay said let me introduce you to the guys who do it best. So Alan Kay brought Steve up to spend an afternoon with us at Lucasfilm. That’s when we first got to know each other. I had actually had one earlier conversation with Steve at some design conference on the Stanford campus one summer, but that was just a first meeting sort of thing. The first serious meeting with business possibilities was that one at Lucasfilm with Alan Kay.

> Shortly after that, Steve and Apple broke up. And meanwhile, Lucasfilm was trying to sell us. Steve ended up buying us from Lucasfilm for $5 million.

So not only was Jobs alerted to Pixar by an existing contact, in buying it he was to a large extent reusing the business model that had already worked with the Macintosh: take PARC goodies and commercialise them, hiring some of the PARC guys themselves.