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Ask HN: We have a great team and capital but can't find a good idea

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Re: Ask HN: We have a great team and capital but can't find a good idea

#571

Post by sethlivingston »

colordrops wrote: post #285
Qwertious wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>My simple advice is to stop looking for ideas and to start looking for problems. I concur, and add that HN could really help OP by complaining about random stuff here. Just complain about the first thing that comes to mind that's been bugging you, OP will really appreciate it!

Humanity is on a sure collision course with ecological disaster and potentially billions of deaths. Do something about climate change. Anything. Every new startup should be addressing the fact that we are on the Titanic and the iceberg is getting closer.

This is terrible advice. OP asks for concrete ideas and your answer is "the sky is falling."

Re: Ask HN: We have a great team and capital but can't find a good idea

#572

Post by triangleman »

colordrops wrote: post #377
aggie wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have a source for the 'disaster' and 'billions'?

There are mountains of evidence that we are on track for several degrees Celsius change by the end of the century. It's enough to make some large metropolitan coastal areas uninhabitable and huge swaths of farmland unusable. It will destroy the economy to uproot half the human population and move, and thus cause mass migration and starvation. I hate to use labels but to believe anything else is to be a climate change…

What if you're wrong? I mean I don't see any of the evidence that you see, just a bunch of computer models that fit a curve.

Re: Ask HN: We have a great team and capital but can't find a good idea

#573

Post by greyfox »

JGaltAteMyBalls wrote: post #520
greyfox wrote: post #176

Funny, i have 2-3 really good ideas that i feel are genuine and have large profit potential, yet i have no team and hardly any programming skills to launch them.

Have you pitched them to anyone honest enough to tell you how bad they probably are?

yes, and i got good feedback. actually from 3 people one of which is my boss who basically said nice idea but good luck (no programming experience) and 2 friends who said they were down to program but wont really do anything until i get some groundwork started.

Re: Ask HN: We have a great team and capital but can't find a good idea

#574

Post by mogget »

lokendrachauhan wrote: post #369

Considering you guys can start with a blank check and work on IP heavy ideas (CMU PhD), it is safe to assume that you guys don’t want to go in something which isn’t less than a billion dollar thing in 5-7 years. So look for pilot projects in such industries where entry barriers are high, defence, insurance, banking, health, oil &gas, etc. Wall Street connections will come in handy to find the right folks to call. As…

Reading through this thread with great interest, I actually have to wonder what the OP's criteria really are. I'd guess that lokendrachauhan's assumption is probably valid, but that is somewhat based on my stereotypes (and being currently involved in a venture that is driven by these kinds of aspirations on the part of the CEO, not always to good effect, IMHO).

@OP, what are your general guidelines for a "good idea"?

Look at the range of approaches discussed: from Dane Maxwell's approach to focused SaaS solopreneur to selling to big industries or the government (long lead-times). Plus, some of the ideas mentioned are stunning. Ideas per se are not lacking. $B+ ideas with low-risk and high differentiation might be ;)

Also, you description of "great team" sounds a lot like "bankable resumes", but it is unclear what experience you guys have that would actually be accretive to building an early-stage startup. There are a lot of smart people who want to be involved in big deals. If your PE guy is not actually serving as an SME for a finance-related product, and primarily brings a rolodex and smell of money on his CV, then maybe he should be an investor or perhaps on the board instead?

Consider also your tech SME, and that you've only 1 tech person of 3. Although I do not assume a doctoral degree means no practical skills (I think there's actually some discrimination against doctorates out there), does this guy also have practical experience in small SW efforts? It seems a red flag that he doesn't have ML application ideas.

I don't intend this to sound mean, in fact I identify with your situation in a few ways, I'm just reflecting some honest thoughts after 3 startups.

Have you considered choosing something, even if it isn't perfect, to use as a "forcing function" to get the juices flowing in your group and vet them as a good team? I understand the opportunity cost of time, but actually doing something might galvanize your thinking.

Good luck!

Re: Ask HN: We have a great team and capital but can't find a good idea

#575

Post by mogget »

sauwan wrote: post #107

Here's my idea. All I ask for is a free one if you use it. A drone fence. Hear me out. Problem: Fencing is FUCKING expensive. For many people who want to keep animals out (garden, animals pooping in the sandbox) buying a fence is really cost prohibitive. Plus they don't always work anyways. Solution: Self driving drones with IR cameras in specific locations. Place a camera or two in strategic locations, and have a dr…

Invisible Fence is a fantastic product that gives great value to many people. Seems to me that this could be the same. Note that Invisible Fence offers expertise in install, dog training, etc, over and above the DIY kits.

We recently put a deer fence around about a half acre and it was not inexpensive.

Another upside is that this would be reconfigurable. And there'd be a ton of ML-extractable insights for customer and the company.

PS: Skimming, I originally read the intent as "a fence to keep drones out", which is funny.

Re: Ask HN: We have a great team and capital but can't find a good idea

#576

Post by rmetzler »

crobertsbmw wrote: post #568
rmetzler wrote: post #438

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm annoyed writing and fixing tests takes half of my time when writing code. Then just don't write tests and wait for what happens, when you find a bug 6 month into production. ;-)

TBH, that's what I do. Most of the time the bug is insignificant enough that it doesn't really matter. Every once in a while I am freaking out trying to get an update through the app store at 1:00 am. For me, it's worth the tradeoff.

Fair enough. I wrote integration code to get shipping info into distributed logistics software.

I would've never done this without TDD because I dreaded to have hidden bugs sending washing machines to the wrong customers.

Re: Ask HN: We have a great team and capital but can't find a good idea

#577

Post by rmetzler »

oelmekki wrote: post #448
rmetzler wrote: post #438

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm annoyed writing and fixing tests takes half of my time when writing code. Then just don't write tests and wait for what happens, when you find a bug 6 month into production. ;-)

There's got to be a solution between those two extremes :) I've started writing only integration tests, this is cool because most of the time it only breaks during refactoring when there actually are regressions. I've also made myself a chrome devtool to record my interactions with browser and generate capybara tests out of it, so it's quite fast to write and rewrite, it never happens anymore that I think "oh, maybe…

Yes, no one said TDD code is 100% bug free.

I'm also not a fundamentalist when it comes to TDD. It really depends on "What can go wrong?" and "How much time does each route costs?"

The other day I showed the guy I'm mentoring how to write tests in go to test some Go middleware code for HTTP BasicAuth. This was some example code he found on the internet. And guess what, it has a basic logic flaw where it doesn't test for correctness of user AND password, but for correctness of user OR password.

Using code like this and not writing tests is really stupid.

When I was in university, I also read lots of papers on TDD. There are many "we had 20 students trying to solve a 2 hour problem with and without TDD"-papers and only a few "IBM and Microsoft used TDD and no TDD to write hardware drivers, these are the results" papers. Guess who I'm trusting more.

Re: Ask HN: We have a great team and capital but can't find a good idea

#579

Post by oelmekki »

rmetzler wrote: post #577
oelmekki wrote: post #448

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's got to be a solution between those two extremes :) I've started writing only integration tests, this is cool because most of the time it only breaks during refactoring when there actually are regressions. I've also made myself a chrome devtool to record my interactions with browser and generate capybara tests out of it, so it's quite fast to write and rewrite, it never happens anymore that I think "oh, maybe…

Yes, no one said TDD code is 100% bug free. I'm also not a fundamentalist when it comes to TDD. It really depends on "What can go wrong?" and "How much time does each route costs?" The other day I showed the guy I'm mentoring how to write tests in go to test some Go middleware code for HTTP BasicAuth. This was some example code he found on the internet. And guess what, it has a basic logic flaw where it doesn't test…

I remember when those papers were hitting headlines. The opinion of anti-TDDs back then was : "yes, it's certainly a good thing for students learning how to code", following the idea that it forced them to consider architecture rather than jumping on adding lines of code, and that experienced developers don't need it as much (thus, the conclusion was that those studies were biased toward people learning to code).

The answer of pro-TDDs was that you always benefit it, even when already experienced. I agreed with them, back then.

I don't remember seeing those about IBM and Microsoft, though. What were their conclusions?

Nowadays, I do what I jokingly call "documentation driven development", as a follow up for "top down development" that cucumber and the likes introduced. I'll usually first write about the problem I'm solving, then generally write about how I solve it, then write about components needed to implement that solution, then what those components do in details, then I write function signatures, and I stop there. I give it a month going back to it from time to time and I always figure out problems with it.

Refactoring that is awesome : no tests to change, no application code to change, it's just manipulating pure architecture, and it's incredibly fast to change while still being able to keep everything in mind. Careful planning is kind of replacing for me what TDD used to do (for the part about designing proper architecture ; I do integration testing for the part about catching regressions).

But really, I feel today that the methodology doesn't matter much : agile or not, TDD or not, this or that, whatever. What matters the most is people. The same methodology will have opposite results depending on who is applying it. I guess some methodologies will be better than others for learning programming, but I have really no clue how to measure that :)

Re: Ask HN: We have a great team and capital but can't find a good idea

#580

Post by kevando »

Many great tech startups began because the founders had the protection of doing whatever they wanted (fb, goog, snap) without worrying about other stuff. You guys had a year to figure this out. Startups tend to happen naturally and they aren't for everyone.
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