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Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

paulgraham.com

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Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

#381

Post by netcan »

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…

The University problem is potentially a "3rd world" problem, especially inasmuch as you interpret it as a learning/teaching problem.

Non consumption is traditionally a good place to start and I would suggest that high school & junior university level is the most disruptive place to start. Non-consumption of senior high school to junior university level education is something in great abundance in poor countries.

There is also probably a more incentive for potential students to play along in poor countries. A 9th-10th year dropout is more likely to be in that position because of access or soem other problem that technological innovation is good at dealing with. More importantly, the ROI on those 2-4 years of education is probably much higher.

If you were to go after job skills/ training as the point of attack (as opposed to general education) poor countries are also a great place to start. For a lot of skills there is demand at the bottom: bookkeeping, graphic design, programming, etc. Bringing a person making <$1-$2 per hour to a point where they can command a $3+ is fundamentally doable. That's a big incentive.

Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

#382

Post by rmc »

tomjen3 wrote: post #343
rmc wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Let's study history and see how Europe and America got wealthy and try to do that.

Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

#383

Post by miguelos »

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…

That's exactly what my future start-up will do! Is anyone interested in making it happen?

Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

#384

Post by miguelos »

akrymski wrote: post #220
dwerew45234sdf wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You talk so abstractly. Can you give some concrete examples of how you would be better than gmail? In what ways will your service be faster than gmail? How much time will I save?

Unfortunately there's isn't much I can say until we launch, but here goes: we've created a social network where email is the mode of communication, and everything is organized around people and organizations. There isn't a single inbox as such, there are people, and groups of people, with correspondence between them. Like in Facebook or a CRM system. What Gmail query do you have to do to see the correspondence betwee…

I don't know what your product is or does, but from what I just read, it doesn't seem to be very innovative.

You're building a faster horse instead of a car.

The solution lays in semantic communication. As long as you mainly communicate with text that someone has to read, analyze and understand, you're doing it wrong.

Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

#385

Post by alexro »

tomwalsham wrote: post #101
densh wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't seem to understand why did you put "Facebook Messages" in a line of great inventions. Isn't it just another "Live Chat"? Am i missing something?

Facebook (and Twitter to some extent) solve one of the biggest problems of email which is the concept of verified sender. I add it to the paradigm shifts as it resolves (in its own [large] namespace) a longstanding problem with email. I add it to the 'transient' list as its solution is purely driven by network effects which leaves it vulnerable to the next player sideways market dissolution.

It's a bit of a stretch to say they solved it. I'm not on FB and so FB to me don't matter. On the other hand, I'm part of an Active Directory of my company, so AD solves this problem for me at work. But none of them guarantee that the email came from the particular person and not from a dog.

Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

#386

Post by miguelos »

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…

Let me disagree.

Unless you plan to discover new ideas by mistake, you absolutely need a vision, and then find the way to get there.

If you start from the bottom (bottom-up), you'll constantly compromise technically, as lots of things are not yet possible to do.

If you start from the top (top-down), you'll "know" that it's possible to accomplish, and you'll only have to find out how to do it.

You have far more chance to solve an enigma if you know there is an answer than if you don't. Visionary ideas make you believe the answer exists, which makes it much more easier to accomplish.

Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

#387

Post by miguelos »

Nervetattoo wrote: post #316
harryh wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> for many people it's just a receipt box There's a good startup idea right there! Sign up on receiptbox.com and give it my email username/password (or maybe some sort of oauth token). It periodically scans my email and looks for receipt emails from well known e-commerce sites. It knows how to parse them and pull out the relavent details (like TripIt does for travel stuff) and it builds a builds a nice searchable cat…

A replacement for email should be a lot smarter and I think what pg hints at is pretty much the same as you're saying here, but broader. If I receive an invitation to something, it should end up in my calendar and whatever gadget I have on me should notify me and ask me if i wanted to participate. If i receive a receipt it should be stored and analysed. For example if the item had a 30 day guarantee it should ask me…

That's exactly what I'm planning to build! I'm not sure if I should go hybrid or all-in.

By hybrid I mean that people could receive regular human-readable emails, but senders could include a small url or tag that links to the semantic information (it could be an event invitation, receipt, valid email confirmation, password changing, task proposal, marketing offer, flight information, etc.).

The "smart" email client could then automatically interpret semantic emails, and act accordingly. It would also hide those emails, and only show you the relevant notification.

Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

#388

Post by bane »

cft wrote: post #374
bane wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Similar, but different story. In the 800s, looking for an immortality elixir, man discovers a solid black chemical explosive. In time (around 1132), this finds itself as an early propellant in ranged missiles. Later it uses in other applications: mining, firearms, entertainment, bombs and myriad others. But the use as missile propellant remains. Looking for similar, but more powerful propellants for these missiles (t…

Ballistic missiles since the early 60s had inertial internal guiding systems, fully independent of any satellites. Navigatinal Satellites would be shot down first in case of an all-out nuclear war.

I believe the UGM-27 was the first to be targeted via something like GPS, but it was only used for determining launch site, and I think that stayed the norm until the late 80's when the GPS systems could be shrunk and hardened for high-g operation. So yes, most Ballistic missiles maintained an inertial guidance system for many years after GPS was launched. But it was the requirement to know accurate position of mobile launch sites (in order to preprogram the missile's flight computers with appropriate inertial target solution) that motivated the system in the first place.

Re: Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

#390

Post by opinali »

waterlesscloud wrote: post #349
opinali wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No; these reasons show why the are is ripe for anyone to do it. The only fallacy in Paul Graham's comment (or in possible interpretations of it) is that Google has a weak spot there so it's an opportunity for somebody else to beat Google. Trust me, we have a ton of resources dedicated to improvements in search and we have lots of cool things coming down the pipe, although maybe not in the velocity that one could dream (e.g. something like intelligent research for scientific papers is firmly in the sci-fi realm today, at least for fully-automated computing).

BTW, Paul's article has a big #fail when he mentions code search as a possible idea; dude, we do have that and it's amazing (but unfortunately we recently shut it down; not sure if this will eventually resurface as part of some other product).

All that said, of course some company can always make an effort dedicated to a specialized niche that we are overlooking and beat Google Search in that niche; an excellent example of that is Wolfram Alpha. Still, not a big deal; to really "beat Google" you need a new general-purpose, full-Web search engine that beats Google's. Not impossible either, but the barrier to entry is simply colossal and it amazes me that people don't realize that and dream that it just takes some cool new idea or clever new algorithm to do that--we are not anymore in 1998, when Google, still working off a garage, started to beat the current top engines like Yahoo! and AltaVista.

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