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Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

paulgraham.com

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Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

#341

Post by vacri »

the 'Automatic medical diagnosis' suffers from a common misconception - that people want to 'go to the doctor'. It's pretty rare that people do, and in most cases they avoid doing anything medical unless they absolutely have to.

How would you gather the information to make the 'ongoing diagnosis' if the people aren't going to come to you to do it? And that's just getting the symptoms - what do you do for tests for more info, which people like doing even less?

I also think there are some seriously fundamental technical issues, but I'll leave those off due to 'ambitious'.

Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

#342

Post by sciolizer »

wmeredith wrote: post #285
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…

Solving first world problems gets you first world ROI. Y-Combinator is an investment firm. I'm not judging, I don't have a dog in the fight. But I'm pretty sure that's why you don't see stuff like stopping brown outs in rural sub-Saharan Africa on this list. There's no first-world money in it.

It's a trade off. There's a lot more money in the first-world. But there's a lot more users in the third-world. That's why the third-world is called the majority-world.

Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

#343

Post by tomjen3 »

rmc wrote: post #332
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…

What if we made people in subsaharan africa as rich as europeans & americans? Then the solution to "brown outs" there is the solutions to brown outs here. Better infastructure.

If you can solve that problem, you have will have done the world an amazing service, outperforming even Norman Borlaug, and the idea is certainly ambitious in its scope.

One question though: how would you go about doing it?

Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

#344

Post by akrymski »

revorad wrote: post #328
akrymski wrote: post #190

We're a YC company (www.post.fm) working on one of those ideas - email. We've encountered lots of headwinds as PG mentions, and we've managed to stay strong to our beliefs by keeping the team small and focused, and using our product ourselves to constantly remind us that what we're working on is better than Gmail. It's not been easy admittedly, we didn't come up with some small idea that could grow into an email repl…

Combining a better user interface with algorithms seems like the obvious angle of attack. But I think there might be a better one. Automate the whole thing. Get rid of the interface. You know those virtual assistant services people use to manage their mundane emails? Imagine if you automated all of that. It sounds like a ridiculous idea. How can I allow a machine to reply for me? But I would start with the simplest m…

We do in a way automate classification of mail in certain instances, which allows the user to correct the system in case we get it wrong, but it's important the the UI is intuitive and doesn't seem like a magical black-box full of pretentious AI.

Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

#345

Post by einhverfr »

keithpeter wrote: post #269
einhverfr wrote: post #72

As an amateur historian, I found the Colombus bit a bit interesting, and probably more on-point than Graham might have even known. Columbus, his backers, and his detractors all accepted that the world was round. What they disagreed about was how big it was, and how far it would be to Asia by sailing West. Everybody, pretty much, by that point knew that the world was literally round (and flat only in stories). This wa…

Thanks for the reference. Of course, every sailor knew the Earth was round. Just take a morning off and watch the boats going out of a fishing harbour should your location allow this... I found that pg quote useful as well, in a 'look for local advantage' way. Plan the next step based on how the weather and sea look today . Tomorrow it might be different.

The Simek book is quite interesting. Of course it wasn't just the sailors. By the 13th century, pretty much everyone knew the world was round as it was a common description in popular literature. Their ideas of antipodes were rather funny and something the church struggled against for some time until the discovery of the New World but an end to the question.... And until Vasco de Gama proved them wrong, they might not have believed you could sail across the equator.... but they knew it was round.

But the Simek work is interesting beyond that. It's largely on the basis of his work and the understanding that Europeans often knew more about Asia than Europe that it's fairly clear what a unicorn was: it's what you get when you describe an Asian rhino using a horse as a reference point. (Pliny's description of a monoceros is also frighteningly like a rhino, although some things are exaggerated.)

Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

#347

Post by hackinthebochs »

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…

You're line of reasoning is way off base. You're trying to shoehorn a scarcity-based economy into a post-scarcity society. The idea of "contributing" (the way its currently thought of) will have to go away completely. Private ownership is a social construct. In a post-scarcity world our ideas of private ownership will have to change. Society will simply not allow the owner of Acme robot company to literally own everything (because he has a monopoly on labor). A more communal-based society will necessarily spring up. No one will stand for a monstrously imbalanced society.

Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

#348

Post by gbog »

hythloday wrote: post #247
gbog wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

I object to:

- the idea that changing grammar is a way to fix moral problems.

- any barrier, taboo, or artificial distance between what one think and what one write.

Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

#349

Post by waterlesscloud »

opinali wrote: post #256
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…

We're surely working all the time to make search "more sophisticated"; many special case queries are already smart (from "2+2" to geo, stocks etc., you don't need to go to special sites like calculator, maps and finance). And we surely have plans to go way beyond, but generally, this is Hard Stuff(TM). For things like journal articles, the information is often behind paywalls like ACM, and even when it's not, special…

Listing all the reasons it's hard is why the area is ripe for someone else to do it.

Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

#350

Post by sayemm »

einhverfr wrote: post #72

As an amateur historian, I found the Colombus bit a bit interesting, and probably more on-point than Graham might have even known. Columbus, his backers, and his detractors all accepted that the world was round. What they disagreed about was how big it was, and how far it would be to Asia by sailing West. Everybody, pretty much, by that point knew that the world was literally round (and flat only in stories). This wa…

I'm currently working through SICP and watching the 1986 lectures of Abelson & Sussman, and one interesting bit in Lecture 2b on Compound Data is when a student raises his hand and asks Hal Abelson about the axiom of doing all of your design before any of your code.

Abelson's response: "People who really believe that you design everything before you implement it are people who haven't designed many things. The real power is that you can pretend that you've made the decision and later on figure out which one is right, which decision you ought to have made, and when you can do that you have the best of both worlds."

Probably the same holds true for startups.

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