I like much of this list - doesn't strike me as first world problems at all (I am not from the first world).
Having spent the last two years building a climate action platform I have lots of climate change problems with startup worthy solutions, but the item that really struck me was the online zoo. As an animal lover, the very idea of zoos - even the most enlightened ones - is problematic. Instead, why not let the mountain go to Mohammed?
Who wouldn't want to be a blue whale for a day. Or an eagle? Or a tiger? What might it be like to be an Octopus?
These are questions I have researched as a scientist, but in order to truly revolutionize the science, we need data. Lots of data and the best way to collect that data would be to create interfaces that allow people to see/smell/hear the world from the animal's perspective. It's like anthropology but with other species.
That's where the digital is actually better than the physical - while I can go to a regular zoo to see a tiger pace up and down, I can't actually be the tiger.
I bet people would be willing to pay money to be a tiger for a day. And you don't want that tiger to be in a zoo when you're the tiger. Much better if it was out there in the jungle where it was meant to be.
We need an unzoo.
Seems outrageous, but it's the one project I can see in this list advancing the frontiers of knowledge, saving other species and creating a business.
> Instead, why not let the mountain go to Mohammed?
Isn't this already fulfilled by nature documentaries?
> That's where the digital is actually better than the physical
I really disagree. While it would be neat actually be a tiger for a day, seeing and hearing what a tiger hears through your digital display is not the same.
I would wager that digitally experiencing nature from our comfortable cities does not raise that same connection to nature that one gets from actually being out there and experiencing it with _all_ of their senses.
Seeing a forest is one thing. Hearing, smelling and feeling a forest as your walk through is a completely different experience. Without that more complete experience I doubt people will form meaningful bonds with the natural environment to the point that they want to change their behaviours to protect it.
> Isn't this already fulfilled by nature documentaries?
Yes, a David Attenborough or Jacques Cousteau can make the natural world come alive. But an interactive digital platform will enable very different forms of storytelling.
> seeing and hearing what a tiger hears through your digital display is not the same
Of course not, just as being a Masai tribesman for a day or even living with them for three years as a peace corps volunteer is not the same as herding cows in Kenya. While stories never transport you into the real world, we all love the idea of platform 9-3/4. They serve different cognitive functions.
>I would wager that digitally experiencing nature from our comfortable cities does not raise that same connection to nature that one gets from actually being out there and experiencing it with _all_ of their senses.
Too broad a brush in my view. For example, there are things that you can do digitally that you can't do in person. However deep you go into a forest, you will never see it with a tiger's eyes because your bodies are different and your brain is different. Forget tigers and forests, you experience your home differently from a dog or cat that you have as a pet. Seeing your home through their eyes - however crudely - will be an act of interspecies empathy that you will never get through other means. It's possible some creatures are so different that their world will be incomprehensible to us even if we stream their senses 24/7. We won't know until we try. It remains an empirical question as to how much of that gap is bridgeable.
> to the point that they want to change their behaviours to protect it
I don't think we are at a point in human history when changing individual behaviors will save the planet, either from climate change or from ecological collapse. We need large scale political action with laws that have teeth and means of enforcing them at a planetary scale. The problem I am trying to solve here (or rather, claim as one needing solving) is a different one: how to transport ourselves into the bodies of other creatures? It's the animal equivalent of reading Dostoevsky to understand Russia - a problem very different from pouring billions into strengthening your computer systems because Russians are hacking your elections.
I just want to second Andrew's list. I'm a developer with probably 1/100 as much money as he has, but this is the first list I've seen in a long time that mentions specific low-hanging fruit that has the potential to actually improve lives (vs the mostly vacuous or profit-oriented areas I've seen in other lists).
I look at problems in the world as a series of solutions built from first principles. So if you want a distributed mesh network, you need a supplier that can make millions of boxes for roughly 1/10 their retail price, or you need software that can run on existing phones/routers/computers. Then you need open software with tests for all the edge cases so you know it's free of bugs. Then you need an algorithm for things like web of trust or onion routing. Then you need a compelling use case (easy, no more internet and/or cell phone bill) and a way to prove it's safe so it goes viral. And so on. No one step of the process is insurmountable, or in many cases, especially difficult.
Once we have that box, other ideas like content-addressable memory (things like IPFS) become feasible and we end up with an internet running thousands of times faster than what we have now, because media can be seeded once to each city and then cached by downloaders.
So of course that's a barrier to entry, because few players in the existing paradigm want to disrupt the status quo. But that's no reason to settle for the wildly expensive and slow technology that we are stuck with now. Pretty much every item in his list works along these same lines.
Start with the routers. Build a better home router. Sort of like Ubiquiti kind of is doing. Build one that does
- local caching and P2P sharing of media / photos etc
this gives ISPs a genuine incentive to use it - if routers can build a mesh network (or at least not push back to ISP core) for 20/30 % traffic will that be savings?
- Router acts as first responder to bot nets / malware from within the house
Another good isp feature but great for the rest of us. IOT devices are only going to get worse and more vulnerable- but an intelligent router would be able to stop it sending ACK packets at cloudflare or whatever at source. And let you know that your fridge has been hacked and what to do about it.
- Actually get updated with new firmware ... ever
I think the household router / household hub is an important leverage that is under looked a lot.
What I've been told is that ISPs could easily stop most ddos attacks now, but simply don't give even the tiniest crap about it. Also, they tend not to like p2p, so I don't think you can sell this to ISPs.
I'm pretty sure (exISP) that routing costs. At a minimum you have to maintain free peering infrastructure at IXs perhaps, or if you are not a Tier 1 you basically pay for upstream access.
Its why cacheing is all ISPs really care about. Its why Akamai makes ISPs happy by adding a edge router in their network. Presumably netflix too.
There's a great list of products that should exist, but they're expensive and time consuming to do well, and nobody but JetBrains knows how to get people to pay for them.
Even Microsoft is giving away most of their dev tools these days.
Jetbrains can make people pay for them because their products are just insanely good value for money. I currently get their whole suite for $15 a month, and I get to use them at work and for freelance assignments. I mean, it’s a no-brainer.
Mesh routing will necessarily be slower than backbone routing. And if you're pushing "no more internet and/or cell phone bill" you're saying that operating this network isn't going to be profitable, or will have to have a surveillance-advertising business model. You're also eliding the question of paying for content.
> thousands of times faster than what we have now
The last link is always the slowest. Moreover, much of the most interesting internet stuff really is global communications and dynamic websites, rather than easily replicated static content.
Are all of the people, expert resources, available to build this if the monetary and time resources were available? The societal benefit, as a safeguard at minimum, is obvious, however of course execution and adoption is the more challenging part.
1. Social Silo-busters: Couple the evils of the garden walled social network approach with posts on how hard is it to make friends later in life, add a pinch of all that useless time spent in the car commuting (scraping the bottom of Spotify or Audible) and you arrive at: ad hoc voice-based social networks based on proximity, e.g. through limited range (100m) FM transmitters (one cheap way would be to use a rPi: https://www.raspberrypi.org/magpi/raspberry-pi-fm-transmitte...)
2. "Why can’t I manage waste pickup from an app? What might a re-invented garbage truck look like?" These are spot on! You see news of these everyday but they are very slow to appear. Make a DARPA like challenge to sort waste.
3. Sleeper Markets. Again, he's right in that there are vast markets relatively untouched by technology. Examples: The buzzer for restaurants, why can't it have a screen to display menu, or let your preorder? At a restaurant, why can't I see the most ordered 5 items and have to go through pages of menu? Similar idea for supermarkets: why not have a giant screen at the entrance showing most bought products, interesting product pairings and other data that may be useful?
> Examples: The buzzer for restaurants, why can't it have a screen to display menu, or let your preorder?
those things are dropped, lost, chewed on by children for 8 hours a day, etc. they've got to be as cheap as possible. also who'd stare at the shitty little screen that's nothing but ads, when they could stare at ads on their expensive slightly larger screen that they carry around all day?
if you want really a menu, the host will be thrilled to hand you one. there's a box of them under their station.
> At a restaurant, why can't I see the most ordered 5 items and have to go through pages of menu?
because then they'll have fewer opportunities to upsell you on more expensive dishes, and alcohol.
> Similar idea for supermarkets: why not have a giant screen at the entrance showing most bought products, interesting product pairings and other data that may be useful?
who cares what's most bought at the grocery store? knowing that my store sells ramen by a truckload doesn't get me buying anything the store wants to actually sell.
In this case, it's a municipal service that people don't fundamentally want to pay for and it's hard to make "premium". So you'd have to sell to municipalities on cost.
> The buzzer for restaurants, why can't it have a screen to display menu, or let your preorder?
The JD Wetherspoon "order at table" app basically lets you do this.
But with a mute button for the person who ruins it all.
Creates potential for a location based content creator to capture the attention of a large group of people every day at 5pm.
"Gooooooood evening drivers stuck in traffic! This is Shelly broadcasting from the condos at the I95 and Sunset. Have I got some great things to share with you today..."
Spoken like someone who never lived in an apartment complex?
Sure, if you have a house and the garbage truck comes along, you might influence this, although I don't see what's there to manage. I don't see garbage pickup as highly inefficient.
I see this where I live, in the city you have paper and organics extra, cans and glass if you're a good citizen and very maybe plastic - whereas on the countryside your town might mandate you separate into 6 bins. But if you have a house you probably have the space for 6 separate bins, I surely don't.
Well, a lot of major cities in Asia have already solved this by either changing how they handle the public garbage pickup requirements (e.g., Korea has special bags for regular trash and organic trash you need to purchase, else the garbage collectors won't take it), and also doing more frequent/regular pickups and having you sort your trash in order for it to be accepted. In my short time in Korea, just knowing you have a direct cost on the trash by means of the bags changes how you shop and produce garbage.
I don't think this is something you need an app for. Maybe the city can use it to manage notifications, but they could do this just as easily through free SMS or through a unified public announcement system/site. It doesn't seem like something looking for disruption, except for those who want to needlessly introduce a middle-man into garbage collection.
I also hope they have severe penalties for dumping trash near the nearest river or bush. Because this is what I still see happening in my country, especially on the countryside.
People have screens in their pockets these days. Can't we use those?
You could order before you even arrive at the restaurant. The restaurant can track and spam you in return. A company building the app for the restaurants can collect heaps of sellable data. Why hasn't anybody done that yet?
> ad hoc voice-based social networks based on proximity
At the risk of being whooshed (the other points do seem sincere and "real"), do you mean... conversation? Like, you know, encountering another person in meat space and speaking to them?
Yes, but scope could be larger: If you like chatting with someone you can add them to your contacts.
Another take on this would be voice-based reddit, e.g. voice chat rooms organized around topics, similar to subreddits. Everybody takes turns to talk with voice activated microphone on their phone while commuting.
Maybe car commuters are different but I take the train everyday and the car is packed with people in very close proximity but none of them ever seem interested in talking to strangers.
I don't want to be a buzz kill, but how does this differ than HAM radio? Frequently it is people just talking on a specific frequency. They organize their own chat rooms and stuff. Some of these groups have members from all over the world. Or are you suggesting this be done without licensing? Because that's a legal problem, not a technical one.
Screens to order at restaurants is one of the shittiest ideas ever. Got handed an iPad with a menu on it recently at a restaurant in LA. Took me about 5x longer to get an overview of what they have than a normal paper menu.
Giving drivers the ability to actually talk to each other, instead of just making gestures (of mutual loneliness and longing, of course). What could go wrong?
Angel investors almost never provide the bulk of the capital for a startup. We provide initial money, advise, and introductions to help raise more. So, yes, I expect the bulk of the "heavy capital" to come from institutional investors in later rounds.
Also note that I invest in follow-on rounds, so my total investment in a startup might get much larger than $250k.
All of the above. Prove your team is credible and your idea is solid and the only thing holding you back is the money. Even if you don't have the capital to build the full-scale thing, you can still make a lot of progress on the cheap: conduct research, model your business, test components, do user testing, get LOIs from customers, line up your first few hires, and so on.
YC invested a small amount in a supersonic airplane company and a nuclear power company. Ostensibly, you can start proving that people want what you are building and developing technology before going to market.
They want to get in early, get a certain % of equity before the larger capital rounds are necessary to scale or build a technology to a useful scale - and not afraid of investing in that, though what equity they expect for that, is a missing part to the equation.
Waste management is a huge issue in the developing world. During my world trip, I observed that even a remote fisherman island in the middle of nowhere has a lot of plastic thrash dumped into the nature. It might be hard to believe for you, but here are some observations I had:
* Most people don't even know difference between plastic and compost thrash.
* Most governments in developing world are dysfunctional. They can't organize for collecting thrash.
I wonder; would it be possible to enable waste management entrepreneurs all around the world with an app? Could people get paid for cleaning up thrash ?
Until a society experiences negative consequences of environmental pollution (generally a long-term but sometimes a short-time issue) then there's no incentive or impetus to not just dump things anywhere. Part of the solution is only allowing goods to be supplied in certain packaging. Not creating waste is the best solution.
The most amazing thing to me when I got a kitchen garbage disposal was that once you take the organics out, almost all my trash is just plastic in one form another, and paper.
Ha. Package manager, I was thinking how we should have a single package manager that would just do it's think no matter the language, and you can just plug in new languages and it would know how to handle them (resolve dependecies etc).
If its a cross-platform CLI it would be fantastic. Combine brew, chocolatey, yum, apt-get, snap, docker, git... you name it. Surely there is someone on this already?
Once saw someone build a CLI tool and distribute on npmjs.
Their install went something like `npm install -g mycli`. So in a way, they already are cross-platform.
> A new developer-oriented touchscreen OS – The number of touchscreens in our daily lives is exploding. Android and iOS are optimized for consumer tablets and phones, but what if you’re a developer building a non-consumer product? What if you want to build a cash register, or a digital menu, or an in-flight entertainment solution, or a vending machine?
Does he mean an OS with these kinds of solutions in mind? Maybe I need to understand where Andrew feels the shortcomings in Android and iOS lie that prevent his what-ifs currently.
When I see the phrase "developer-oriented," I'm thinking about dev tools ON the touchscreen OS. And for that, I do indeed have some ideas...
I've worked for a few companies and startups trying this kind of thing. It's the wrong question.
The software side of a touchscreen is solved. You can run a number of operating systems and develop in whatever you want. Embedded Linux framebuffer, OpenGL, WinCE, Qt, WindRiver running a military GUI toolkit like VAPS, Ubuntu running GTK, hell - my Mazda's infotainment system is simply Opera running a bunch of Javascript code.
The problem is the hardware. There is no universal platform that can satisfy all of these ideas.
The cash register needs to be thin and stylish in a custom case. The menu board needs a weatherproof rugged box to hide behind a panel display. The in-flight system needs to be FAA-approved. The vending machine needs vandal-resistant glass that still works with a capsense system. The bulldozer needs industrial temperature ranges and IP67. Every customer is a special duck and it's going to be a custom build.
It's just one of those problems that looks easy on paper.
One thing wonders me - why angel investors bet on the fact they occasionally find the right team for an idea which already exists and proven in their heads? I can understand when you don't really know where to put your money and spend all day deleting emails with weird pitch decks pdfs, but if you _do_ know what's the problem which needs to be solved?
Is there a need for "outsourcing founders team" thing?
If you think about it, it kind of makes sense. OP is in a situation where he haas much more money than time, however due to his position in the world, he can see many opportunities--generally this is true for professional investors, too. For a normal person, pursuing one means there is an opportunity cost, but for an investor it makes sense to buy a slice of the action in an opportunity they believe in. Being a proper investor (mentoring, introductions) also takes time, so that's another disincentive from OP's perspective to being a founder vs a funder.
Also, investors have things thing about inventing the future by funding it. Generally, individually or as a group, they'll decide something is going to be the next big thing and start cultivating deals in that area. One you can see happening in real time is space: Randomly in the last couple of years, investors have put together huge funds around space ventures, even though serious commercialization still seems to be a ways off. Even OP referenced it in his blog post.
As for why a founder vs a compensated product owner? Because a founder presumably has spent a lot of time thinking about the problem and is intrinsically motivated to solve it--so much so that they've done all the legwork to assemble a team and gather enough data to be investment-worthy. If as an investor you're wrong about the opportunity in this space, it's a whole lot of risk and cost and time you don't have to take on yourself. By advertising a pot of money, instead of searching for the right person, the hope is that the right person and team will eventually come to your door.
The problem is that you need one guy in the company that pushes the vision forward. Constantly. For years. Somebody who is intrinsically motivated to bring that thing to life.
In my experience, you do not find such a person for hire.
To an outsider startup ideas usually look like barking up the wrong tree.
Good luck finding a talented, motivated CEO willing to enthusiastically bark up the wrong tree for years.
A motivated and experienced product owner with shares in company, won't this make a deal?
Again, isn't it easier to find an experienced person who likes your idea, than find a person who both has the same idea and experienced and motivated enough?
I love lists like this for getting the creative gears turning. Paul Graham's old blog post is another example, if a dated one: http://old.ycombinator.com/ideas.html
Waste pickup - someone posted recently a blog from Taiwan, where they have 4/5 garbage collections per day, people simply wait till they hear the truck outside and walk out with their bag and chuck it in the back
Now this really only work in a city that is compact, and quiet enough to hear the garbage truck music
Which leads me on to Strong Towns, where the argument is that the sub-urban sprawl model is unsustainable- and that might be another indicator, a code smell if you like, that it's hard to alter your suburban model compared to the city model.
I also read that, but I don't see them separating their trash, so what does it actually do? It solved the specific problem of trash piling up, and people have to pay for the garbage bags. But in towns where people don't just usually throw their garbage anywhere and the trash is collected in a timely manner... where is the benefit for this? I'd rather pay the garbage collectors via taxes than run out and chuck the garbage into a truck myself.
If I’ve learned one thing from the cleantech funding bust, it is that many of these would be more successfully funded as basic research than as startups. The iteration and development timelines and sales cycles don’t really fit the standard venture fundable startup model.
For example if you have solar/wind energy, you can transfer it very efficiently over existing power grid to provide energy for heating or lights. Transmission losses in power lines are 8-15% so the efficiency is 85%+ (https://blog.schneider-electric.com/energy-management-energy...)
Hydrogen is not an electricity source. It doesn't compete with solar or wind.
It's electricity storage. It competes with batteries and it's not winning there either because of much greater efficiency losses and the fact that you would have to build (expensive) infrastructure (think network of gas stations, except for hydrogen).
Great points, but don't lose the trees in the forest: This isn't about efficiency, it's about convenience. Fueling a car for 400miles in 2m is acceptable at 16% efficiency if the energy wasted is "free". That's not possible with battery technology.
I think that'd be cool! The problem is batteries are worth so much $ the accountants get a little uppity when we stay exchanging a warranty part that costs $8k
Super interesting to see space make the list. I've been involved with "capital intensive" aka hardware startups for the last seven years, through my involvement in HARDWARE.co. I see a lot of these companies that the author is looking for, and they struggle to find funding. Maybe we need a startup discovery platform?
> What if a social app was optimized for the creation experience rather than the consumption experience? What if the goal was to minimize time-in-app rather than maximize it? What social products would people pay for? (note: Google Photos is the closest I’ve seen to this so far)
Interesting. Facebook is like a camera that has an internal overlay over the lens, saying "Wait! Don't stop looking through the lens, stay, I promise -- there's more!". Maybe social sites really are just tools and not things to be spending time on, but more like recording devices for our lives and personal history. Then again -- what is HN? Is writing a comment a form of consumption or a form of creation? It would seem like the latter, but it's very easy to stay on HN for an hour.
I‘d love to see something that makes development and deployment on touchscreen devices practical. Node-red, Retool are going in the right direction, but aren‘t powerful enough to be complete solutions. I‘d favor a visual dataflow language/environment with easy sharing/extensibility like node-red that compiles to wasm, C, other languages and deploys to the cloud, to App stores etc. with one press of a button.
I disagree with the assertion that web pages are losing because of security or utility, and that any open app runtime is going to be better than the browsers already on every phone.
I think the majority of apps could be made as web pages, but I also think that many are not because having an app installed is an opportunity to grab more data, have more permissions and bait and switch your users at any time using updates.
Once upon a time I was working on a network of TOR routers. The idea was that I could go to a coffee shop and filter their wi-fi through my personal TOR router for enhanced security. Taken to the next level, you could link many of these together for a mesh network of sorts.
The problem I encountered was explaining the concept to laypeople. This can be an issue in the "capital-heavy" and "sleeper" markets.
Today, I need to connect my device directly to the wi-fi source, then I can use a TOR browser (same goes for VPN). I am still connected directly to a an unsecured wi-fi network.
In my scenario, you would use a mobile router to make the initial connection to the open wi-fi, then connect your personal device to the TOR router.
I really like the idea of an open app runtime. The only problem is that it would require a whole new phone and app eco-system, unless it's built on top of the existing Android platform.
The list got me thinking, why aren't there more biotech startups in Silicon Valley? Not to discount the importance of other things but I'd really love to see we put more resources into improving the human body. Maybe US regulation is the obstacle here?
I can’t speak for the Valley but there’s not been many real breakthroughs in this space to innovate on. Apple, a trillion dollar company, still can’t bring something more exciting than the Apple Watch to market.
My concept really wants to be a non-profit to avoid probable corruption in the name of making money. But it solves a significant real-world problem of global scale. Thoughts on something like that?
AI is already being used in waste management; specifically image recognition to help sort plastics. This is similar to techniques used in fruit/veg production to grade/bucket produce.
One of the biggest problems in waste management (from dimly remembered podcast) is that the contracts handed out are on hugely long timescales. A Norwegian company has great sorting capabilities - just have organic and non-organic sorted at house holder and they can take recycle anything.
It's great, eco friendly and cheap. But local governments are locked into 10-15 year contracts to take day cardboard and only cardboard to a specific factory, which factory has no incentive to upgrade facilities as they do fine
Yeah, anyone trying to disrupt waste pickup, construction, concrete, pretty much any local services had better be ready to fight well-entrenched incumbents.
Not that it can't be done but it's important to acknowledge local governments have many competing objectives beyond "providing the best service possible at the lowest cost", including promotion of diversity, creation of jobs, supporting local businesses, the perception of fairness, etc.
"federated databases" is not low hanging fruit, its CAP theorem decision time. If he means that he wants the interconnection logic to let him pick which two, and how to homegenise the glue between competing implementations, well yes, that would be nice, but it doesn't "remove" problems from CAP, it probably adds a useful layer of indirection which then incurrs its own asynchronous, transactional, complete, sequenced problem-set.
I feel that its jeremiah like, but it is probably time-machine and cure-for-cancer stuff. You get bits of it.
definitely lot of opportunities there, but a big factor is regulation. Most people who haven't been exposed to the healthcare market are understandably cautious about funding a start-up in a highly regulated field.
I’ve fantasized about the delivery to a person idea for a while. The next frontier after last mile - last foot. I figure drones will do it one day. Also sounds like something Amazon would do.
because the world faces problems with package managers, app runtimes, social calendars?
Real world problems are humanitarian crises, economic development, and political reform. How can you say "world’s biggest problems", yet exclude all the actual important problems?
"New insurance companies – renters insurance, title insurance, business insurance, etc have yet to enter the 21st century"
I feel like a more creative and productive question is, what can we do to eliminate the need for insurance? Can we have a network of doctors offices in major cities that we pay a monthly fee to access, where the billing and costs are transparent and sane? Can we approach home owners insurance the same way we have community credit unions and reduce the admin overhead and the profit cut of the middlemen?
"New staffing agencies"
How about eliminating the need for staffing agencies? Let's get platforms like Task Rabbit more ubiquitous and inside niche industries that haven't adapted. Labor on demand without as much of a middleman. There's obviously issues with the current iteration of ride-share apps etc, but it's something that can be improved and it obviously works better than the traditional industry (taxis in this example).
"What does the internet-native version of the WSJ or The Economist look like?"
Reddit, clearly.
Air conditioning: A problem easily solved by getting people to live in better climates. With more jobs becoming decreasingly location dependent, this makes sense.
Some of this list seems silly and easily dismissed as "because physics". Electric aircraft don't make sense and I doubt they ever will. Space launches will always be expensive due to fuel (I realize as of right now, fuel is a very low percentage of cost - but theoretically even if everything else was free, fuel still makes it too expensive for consumers). Alternative energy is an extremely expensive field. I could go on.
_______________
Problems that I think are worth fixing:
Make a small dent in societal progress to change how people interact and view strangers. Make a small step towards everyone not dehumanizing each other. Create a movement to bring people together and lessen the attitude of people living in big cities having to keep their eyes down and not interacting with others. Pokemon Go is a great example of this.
Make the government more accountable, make people more involved in elections. The amount of misguided or wasted taxpayer dollars is staggering. Even small improvements in our representatives could easily mean billions of dollars going towards things like schools, healthcare, and basic needs of citizens rather than buying missiles and $10,000 bolts.
Instead of focusing on new ISPs, focus on new methods of distributing traffic that prevents the erosion of privacy and the rise of censorship. Take Freenet and make it mainstream. It won't be the solution to everything but it can solve a lot. It will require a lot of changes and new tools/applications to make this happen but it's possible.
Help employers make the shift towards remote workers. Let people live where they want. Don't make them tied to a chair for 9 hours a day. Don't make them sit in traffic for an hour a day. The impact on the environment and mental health would be huge.
Help people disconnect from technology. Fund activity centers in big cities that provide attract options and attractive social groups. Board game meetups on meetup.com are super popular. So are the dancing ones. Bringing in more people and providing better spaces for this would help a lot of people much happier. It provides a lot more opportunities for socializing and finding meaningful connections, which I think most or many people lack.
It's so easy to be an armchair critic and be dismissive of other people's ideas. The only difference is, some people break down large problems step by step and overcome obstacles for over a decade to solve them.
>what can we do to eliminate the need for insurance? Can we have a network of doctors offices in major cities that we pay a monthly fee to access, where the billing and costs are transparent and sane?
We had something like that once, it was called Lodge Practice (also Club Practice and Contract Practice)[0]. Due to their low cost for medical services, physician cartels such as the AMA fought to kill them[1][2][3].
It's hard to get excited about these potential startups. Most of these ideas are not going to make my life any better in a major way and yet the author claims he's excited by "big, scary problems."
I'm not excited by them either, but it is his money, not mine, so I don't really see that my lack of interest is relevant. If those are the topics he loves, and he wants to fund them... more power to him.
Yes, no argument that it is his right to do what he wants with his money. I'm thinking about it in the context of Tyler Cowen giving smart people money for moonshots. In his book Complacent Class he touches on how there are less big ideas now and that is leading to stagnation.
I was interested when he mentioned infectious diseases (I'm an infectious disease epidemiologist, there there are lots of stories I can tell about what I find interesting, but I was curious from a funder's perspective), but the list was...somewhat less light-the-world-on-fire.
If your take here is that I'm interested in "rich-white-guy" problems, I'd encourage you to re-read the list from the perspective of emerging and frontier markets. Most of what I have listed there is actually more important in those places than it is in Silicon Valley. For example -- receiver-centric package delivery is a far bigger deal in places that don't have addresses than it is in the US (and billions of people around the world don't have addresses!). Ditto with energy, waste management, etc... even an open web platform is a bigger deal in India than it is here.
Personally, I spend more time these days focused on those markets (especially Haiti and Africa) than I do on the US.
Receiver-centric package delivery is a great idea for location privacy and for people who are constantly moving. It's funny to imagine a package chasing a person all over, never quite catching up with them.
You also listed title insurance. That is a government problem, not a start-up problem. It has been fixed for many properties in Australia. There, the government's idea of property ownership is correct. Our trouble in the USA is that for purposes of legal ownership, the government doesn't even have that info. All the government has is a list of property tax payers and a sales transaction log, neither of which is legal evidence of ownership. (sales transactions do not provide this because you can't legitimately sell something you don't own, but that doesn't stop you from making a sales transaction) The solution here is to make government records definitive.
You mentioned air conditioning. If you'd like an efficiency gain, the Sandia Cooler may be what you are looking for:
It should be Community-centric package delivery. A local place with people you know, that manages ordering, delivery, payments, returns and helps with selections. The local "store" should be a community asset where smaller, friendlier and closer are all better than discount big-box.
The key is having large scale services that the community store can manage. Deliver of large or expensive items as a service, like college movers. Instead of Amazon grocery delivery vs other grocery delivery, use the community store to manage the interaction -- they choose quality and price, or decide what combinations to offer. This is good for Amazon too: it lets them compete on the supply chain and outsource customer service.
Community stores wouldn't just have online prices, they could offer innovative things like local individual services (lawn mowing, computer repair) with local ratings and local trust. Clothing from online stores, where people try it on before buying, and the community store manages shipping and damage, etc.. in a relationship with the online retailer.
Creating open software that manages a market for the store/supplier B2B relationships would let the local stay-at-home person start small, a few neighbors, and grow into a larger service and eventually a community store.
It's a very practical list. Looking at the areas he's interested in, it struck me that all or nearly all of them can actually be solved with products, i.e. something you buy that solves your immediate problem.
I think that if you get into many of the BIG problems that sound really exciting, you'll find that they can't actually be solved. My first startup idea after striking out on my own was to fix unemployment, which was a big, impactful problem that disproportionately affects underprivileged people. As I researched the problem, though, I realized that it's not really something that can be fixed. Hiring is hard because it's fractally fucked up: it's a many-participant market where everybody rationally follows their incentives but the sum total of those incentives is a system that massively underutilizes human potential and makes everyone miserable. Now, you can fix individual problems within the space like finding job postings (Indeed), tracking applicants (Lever), giving coding tests (TripleByte), etc, but each of those just makes life better for the person giving you money, and arguably makes the system as a whole even more fucked up.
The same goes for many other hard problems. Political polarization in the U.S. is a huge problem, but there's no one solution that will fix it short of mind-controlling or eliminating everyone who disagrees with you. Alleviating poverty in the developing world is a huge problem, but countries that are poor today are usually poor for a constellation of different reasons, and unless you fix them all you're not going to make the country un-poor.
The author seems like he's deliberately avoiding any areas that are not product-fixable. That limits his list to fairly boring problems. It's likely hard-won experience as an entrepreneur, though: I know that I started the entrepreneurship journey thinking I was gonna solve everything and have a big positive impact on the world, and have since learned that unless you adjust your expectations, you are bound to be perpetually frustrated.
Such a conceited, inaccurate comment. It's quite obvious the various topics are open-ended and I fail to see how things like alternative energy generation or waste management are myopic "white guy" problems.
Did you just read the first few items and comment? How is building a global satellite network enabling internet access to everyone on earth boring or a "rich-white-guy problem"? Or A/C for the developing world?
If you fund someone who works on internet over satellites project you are working on the rich white guy problem -- the rest do not care if internet comes via satellites -- they just want internet. But digging trenches and laying fiber is not sexy enough for a rich white guy -- at least definitely not as sexy as say "I have a constellation of 800 satellites that deliver Internet!"
So you think digging tens of millions of miles of fiber trenches to bring gigabit internet to everyone is a more capex efficient solution than a few hundred nano-satellites in LEO blanketing the earth with connectivity? It will be low bandwidth but enough for farmers (what most people in the world do) to check weather, crop yield predictions, and market spot prices, or do remote banking from their village, or check medical information.
This is a pretty sick burn, and you may be being generous.
Nothing in this list is a new idea. People have been trying and failing at open app stores for years. Same with touch OS. If "What does the internet-native version of the WSJ or The Economist look like?" constitutes a sleeper market, he may need to get out more.
How would you categorize the following as a "rich white guy problem"?
"Air conditioning – As more people in hot climates enter the middle class, and as climate change accelerates, the demand for air conditioning will explode. What innovation is possible here?"
The worst possible outcome of using more air conditioning is more pollution. Pollution (on a global scale) and the associated potential climate change are considered pretty first-world (rich white dude) problems. Pollution on a local scale is definitely more legitimate, but that's overwhelmingly due to combustion engines (cars) and not power generation, which doesn't typically happen in city centers.
Hmmm, Air Conditioners are heat pumps as are fridges. Pumping heat rather than generating it comes in at roughly 1/4 the energy budget.
An innovative "Air Conditioner" that could store the usually dumped heat for later use (Say in preheating water for a hot tap to lower costs of heating) would probably be extremely popular if it was a decent product otherwise (Cheap, durable, easy to install).
Effectively what is needed is a set of technologies that allow heat to be moved around and stored as easily as electricity and for a lower cost than generation.
If we had those then you'd have the best of both worlds, technologies that reduce climate change as well as allowing the non-first world to make life more comfortable in a warming world.
I remember reading recently about heat sinks for AC units that expel waste heat in as specific infrared band that sees the atmosphere as entirely transparent. In effect, it allows you to 'beam' the waste heat directly to space.
Similar to an AC unit, I would love to see two-part refrigerators. It always seemed dumb to me to cool the interior of your refrigerator by dumping heat into your home, which your AC has to then extract and dump outside. A refrigerator that had an external heat exchanger that could be placed outside, or shared with the AC heat exchanger, would be pretty spectacular.
> It always seemed dumb to me to cool the interior of your refrigerator by dumping heat into your home, which your AC has to then extract and dump outside.
It seems dumb in California, but in my much of the country (and much of the inhabited world, though there's a lot where this isn't true, too), you need heating of living space more than cooling, so pumping heat out of a fridge into the living space is a double win most of the year, and added complexity to avoid it is pure waste.
> seemed dumb to me to cool the interior of your refrigerator by dumping heat into your home, which your AC has to then extract and dump outside.
This doesn't strike me as dumb at all, unless the refrigerator's heat pump is more efficient [1] than the AC. Although it may be, it's not a foregone conclusion, and it stands to reason that a refrigerator would be designed to function better when pumping [2] heat into room temperatures than outdoor temperatures (as opposed to an AC).
Regardless, all heat pumps have to work harder (use more energy and/or run longer) when the temperature differential on either side is worse. You wouldn't be getting something for nothing by moving a fridge's hot side to a hotter outdoor location.
[1] Overall, including maintenance/replacement cost due to longer run-time
[2] or dumping, though "dump" suggest something more passive than what I believe is going on
It's unclear from your comment if you were actually making this point or not, but climate change is certainly not primarily a "first-world" problem. The people that will be affected most by climate change are in developing countries.
No one is asking for a magic bullet. People are asking for something better than the expensive, marginally efficient, and failure-prone compressor-based AC units that dominate the market now. There are alternatives out there that have yet to reach market-ready status, but could have a big impact - things like magnetocaloric cooling (BASF has a prototype [1]) and thermoacoustic heat engines [2], both of which have higher energy efficiency and potentially longer service life than compressor-based units.
Solving boring problems that no one else wants to solve because they are too boring is where the market is.
I'm actually disappointed that it is "new kind of ISP" that made the list rather than just plain "ISP/NSP -- whatever way IP is delivered is fine". Making $10/mo profit in being a dumb pipe with 10 million subscribers in the US is a profit of $100 million in a month while being a a dumb pipe.
Right, except if you spend $1200/household to connect those users (laying fiber is expensive[1]), you're looking at a decade before your profits actually start coming in. That means a massive initial investment, which needs a corresponding big reward to convince investors. And your non-dumb-pipe competitor will have a greater reward to give them.
Do it in a boring way - via neighborhoods/groupings and not in a sexy way via point to point fiber everywhere. But even at $1200/household it is peanuts: birds being able to supply a large amount of bandwidth are expensive i.e. trench digging would be be far cheaper than launching and maintaining a pile of birds and earth stations to get even a fraction of that bandwidth magically beamed from above.
Edit: Been there - done that. Supplied IP over satellites. CapEx is a very solvable problem. OpEx would kill you.
It is a lazy list in ways, though I try to be generous in saying that because the author is reading these comments and my intention isn't to be mean or unkind. It also doesn't make total sense to write about potential startups and then list problems that require tens or hundreds of billions of dollars.
Andrew - I hope you see my other, longer comment and maybe consider that you could approach brainstorming differently. There's a lot of opportunity to do really good things for the world and still make money at the same time, it just requires more risk and creativity.
I haven't been able to find a lot of information on him, does anyone have any good links to background info?
This is going to sound both arch and snarky, and I apologize in advance for that, but I have a point to make and I think it's topical. I'll stay civil.
Has he purchased a beachfront property and then denied his neighbors their accustomed access?
Has he used any of my childhood heroes as a legal blind to secretly sue an obnoxious media company into oblivion?
What's his attitude towards the Republic of China (Taiwan)?
I started to read about his experience during the Haitian earthquake, but I had to set it aside, to read at a time when it would be more appropriate to bawl my eyes out. (No one wants to see a grown man cry. I somehow didn't understand what had happened and learning about it now is just devastating. My God! Poor Haiti!) He stuck around and helped out, so I'm thinking he's an incredibly good guy. Can anyone help me with that?
I lived with Andrew in a shared apartment for several years. He is one of the kindest people I've ever known, as well as a little quirky in an old-school Silicon Valley sort of way. He grew up in Minnesota, is really into gymnastics, and is one of the hardest-working people I've known.
Having spent the last two years building a climate action platform I have lots of climate change problems with startup worthy solutions, but the item that really struck me was the online zoo. As an animal lover, the very idea of zoos - even the most enlightened ones - is problematic. Instead, why not let the mountain go to Mohammed?
Who wouldn't want to be a blue whale for a day. Or an eagle? Or a tiger? What might it be like to be an Octopus?
These are questions I have researched as a scientist, but in order to truly revolutionize the science, we need data. Lots of data and the best way to collect that data would be to create interfaces that allow people to see/smell/hear the world from the animal's perspective. It's like anthropology but with other species.
That's where the digital is actually better than the physical - while I can go to a regular zoo to see a tiger pace up and down, I can't actually be the tiger.
I bet people would be willing to pay money to be a tiger for a day. And you don't want that tiger to be in a zoo when you're the tiger. Much better if it was out there in the jungle where it was meant to be.
We need an unzoo.
Seems outrageous, but it's the one project I can see in this list advancing the frontiers of knowledge, saving other species and creating a business.