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Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

paulgraham.com

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Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

#301

Post by ahoyhere »

eftpotrm wrote: post #291
ahoyhere wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about this? "In the developing world, 24,000 children under the age of five die every day from preventable causes like diarrhea contracted from unclean water." - UNICEF That's 54 jumbo jets a day. I also remain unimpressed by the ambition of his list. And by yours.

OK. One of the core problems the world faces going forwards is resource supply - water, food, fuel. It's long been predicted that the next large-scale war will be over water supplies; there are already a number of simmering conflicts that go back to access to water. Why are we running out of resources? Significantly, because there's too many people for the resources we have. Why do we have too many people? Explosive…

OLPC has been such a failure because it was designed without understanding or respect for the situation the people live in. I agree with you about medicines etc. being bandages and education being the most important thing. But I think when you veer into "universities" and "cheap computers" that things become sketchy.

Replacing universities doesn't help the developing world, not really, because the education would have to be tailored to them.

If you want to read a book about one of these problems (sanitation) and how aid efforts tend to go totally haywire for the same reasons OLPC does, read The Big Necessity.

The needs are more basic. People require self-sufficiency in the basics before having a tablet computer is going to help.

Agree with you on female education… especially also business education and entrepreneurial loans. In this vein, there is a great charity here: http://www.girleffect.org/question

And there is that Indian entrepreneur who developed affordable sanitary pads for women:

http://www.rnw.nl/english/article/entrepreneur-a-passion-per...

Note that this wasn't a charity effort, but a social entrepreneurship effort. And pads are important. Women are not just uneducated, they are hampered even when healthy.

Finally, many people in developing countries have a cell phone which they can use via SMS to determine market prices for their farmed produce etc., which is already a great boon.

I personally know some folks, who grew up in Africa, who are doing great & interesting things to serve these people where and how they are, not by assuming they need somebody to come in and "revolutionize" them. (Which will inevitably fail.)

Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

#302

Post by erichocean »

ricardobeat wrote: post #282
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…

I'm curious. How does that work? You transform the film action into 3D and can then manipulate the animation? The video on AngelList looks like just a rendering demo, and I can't find any other references.

See: http://erichocean.com/fohr/index.html for more info on how the tech works.

Filmmaking is a technical and artistic discipline, and only the films themselves are sold to a mass audience, so my pitch really only makes sense (and is tailored to) those in the industry.

Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

#303

Post by erichocean »

lusr wrote: post #131
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…

Looks pretty interesting but I find myself having to guess what you're doing. It's important to be concise and reference things people already know ("Pixar") when you want to convey information quickly, but it's unclear what the value of the technology is in the 2 paragraphs I could find written about it. Everyone knows "Pixar" by name but I'm struggling to understand what you're doing. Is it animation software that…

Please see my reply to @ricardobeat in the parent post.

Part of the issue is that Fohr has two sources of funding. One source is for the technical side of the company, which I expected tech funding to pay for. The stuff on AngleList is basically only about that.

The other source is film funding for the first computer-photographed film, Carpathia. I have a completely different talk for that, which is more about how the tech is actually used to make a live-action film.

Point is, AngleList is only a small (but expensive) part of the story.

Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

#304

Post by Agathos »

mgkimsal wrote: post #45
duck wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I thought of 2009, when Google Wave was announced.

Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

#305

Post by DennisP »

waterside81 wrote: post #270

These ideas, and the idea that they are frighteningly ambitious, clearly come from the personal experience of living in northern California and dealing with tech startups most of your time. These are largely first world problems. Here are some ambitious ideas: - distributed power generation that's cheap enough and renewable enough so people in rural parts of sub-Saharan Africa don't have brown outs anymore. - synthet…

Check out the Google Solve for X videos. One presentation is about a clever new idea for cheap desalination: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=R...!

Another is about synthetic food...the presenter said his company could feed the entire world from an area the size of Rhode Island: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=r...!

Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

#306

Post by marvin »

paulhauggis wrote: post #274
marvin wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems like a lot of people disagree with you, but I agree with this viewpoint. That the Luddite fallacy will be a fallacy forever is a fallacy in itself. I've said this before, but I keep repeating my viewpoint. At some point, we will have automated too many of the "useful" things to do for there to be enough work in the private sector for everyone. There are only so many cars, houses, gadgets and foods humanity n…

"We will have to find some sort of tax system that makes it possible for those who can't participate in the elite to also live their lives" Rather than a tax system that gives them pretty much no incentive to get a job (if you were essentially paid to do whatever you wanted to do, would you want to get a job?), it would probably be better to have government enforced jobs (IE: you want money from the government, you n…

As I've said before, Norway has a de facto system that works like this already. Anyone that's deemed unfit to get a well-paying job gets a fixed monthly payment from the government.

What if you want more money than you can get through this system? Then you have to do work that pays. Money and status works relative to your peers, so there's an incentive to earn more if your peers are richer than you. I don't see that this is a problem if the society is wealthy enough.

Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

#307

Post by icebraining »

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…

The only reason you can't do that already is because email clients prohibit it for security reasons, and Hotmail is already experimenting with emails that allow that within a sandbox.

Emails can send HTML and JS, there's nothing innovative about it. You only need to convince developers to add JavaScript sandboxes to their email clients.

Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

#308

Post by telent »

nl wrote: post #277
telent wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a nit pick, but much economic activity these days is nothing to do with alleviating scarcity and everything to do with introducing artificial scarcity where it didn't previously exist. See e.g. Intellectual property.

Economics != economic activity (at least in the context you are using it). TheCowboy is right: Economics is still at its heart the study of the problem of scarcity.

I said it was a nitpick, but the post to which I responded did say "all economic activity".

Does it even matter? It matters if it means our fully automated jobless future is penury and starvation instead of the post-scarcity Culture we're looking forward to.

Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

#309

Post by Nervetattoo »

waterside81 wrote: post #270

These ideas, and the idea that they are frighteningly ambitious, clearly come from the personal experience of living in northern California and dealing with tech startups most of your time. These are largely first world problems. Here are some ambitious ideas: - distributed power generation that's cheap enough and renewable enough so people in rural parts of sub-Saharan Africa don't have brown outs anymore. - synthet…

I think the best ideas improves first world issues while fixing third world problems. Energy generation for example, if you managed to figure out how to generate power/propulsion using a cheap and small physical object and a renewable resource you both solves first world issues and third world problems.

Education needs to catch up with the world in the first world, but if you do that in an async manner online then you can at the same time solve the problem with education in africa.

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