ideas/problems of varying degrees of quality.
vc is kind of gatekept and it feels like there's this secret game that you have to play. step 1 of getting into startups is knowing the rules of the game, or even knowing that there's this game going on. feels really reclusive and elitist. vc likely should be elitist given the amount of money you're working with, but i get a feeling that not everyone in the game deserves to be in the game, more so just that they know the rules and thus were able to start playing. a platform to fix this dynamic would be great, like a way for vcs, entry-level scouts, and startups to get to know each other in a more transparent way. kindling.so kind of helped with this, but we didn't see this problem quite as clearly back then.
true autoapply. simplify and superday on steroids basically. it doesn't seem incredibly intensive from a programming perspective. monetization is likely difficult, because you're selling something that has variable value to broke college students. still a big question mark for me around recruiting. also something like a true autoapply is arguably morally corrupt, since you're only making the recruiting landscape more toxic.
there is a limit to what can be solved with software. there comes a point where it makes more sense to innovate in hardware than it is to push for another software solution and bank on marketing/framing/whatever.
the process to find a trusted manufacturer seems convoluted and expensive. more trial and error than is necessary probably. you have to order samples from foreign organizations, and who do you send after them if some policy is broken? i don't think there's an accessible way to persecute those types of things. there should be a better way to find manufacturers. - credits to lev and omar for this idea.
ar/vr for med students. again another field where i don't have experience in, but ar/vr for surgical training sounds intuitively useful. experience is the best teacher, but who wants to be the first person a new-grad performs heart surgery on?
helping businesses migrate accounts. what happens when a business is acquired and they have to migrate all their old clientele over to another account?
helping businesses adopt new software. same thing, there seems to be a market for this. a c-suite exec and the board make a call to buy some new software. cool, it's kind of weird to use though, since b2b saas for internal users are generally really clunky. i wouldn't doubt if sometimes these adoptions are slow, inefficient, or even just don't happen across the org the way it should.
monetization/rewards for open source or communities. not really a great idea, a friend later informed me that i had just reinvented web3.
shared economy stuff. everyone wants to start a podcast instead of going to therapy, myself included. cool, but podcasting equipment is expensive. however, i'm probably not using it for 6 hours a day, so why not rent it out to other broken, sad podcasters? kind of like a recording studio with mics, but allowing people to rent anything basically. is there enough demand for other "things" to do shared economy with? kind of doubt it, everything that can be rented probably has a way to rent already, like i just go to home depot if i need to rent a pressure washer, why would i want to rent it from some other person?
what actually improves your health? brian johnson can afford to do blueprint and measure which compounds impact him in xyz way, but most people can't. i don't actually know if the l-arginine i take is helping me in any way, i could just be tossing money to "havasu nutrition," idk. a portable, personal tester or diagnostics machine would be cool, although this likely exists, it's just really expensive.
people are fat and lazy.
being "rich" no longer gets you the same things that it used to. this isn't referring to inflation or the like. previously, if you were rich, you could afford things average people couldn't, and that was that. people really couldn't do the things that you did, regardless of how much they saved. however, nowadays, i can go to nobu as an average college student. if i'm smart about it, i can buy a fancy sports car, being simply "rich" monetarily no longer buys you the same experiences, at least outwardly speaking. but i'm guessing that for a not-so-small percentage of people, that external validation is a big reason that they work so hard to be rich. so people crave something exclusive to make them feel special. myria kind of does this already, but it may make sense to service the strata of people directly under what myria services. this is probably why we're seeing so many soho house knockoffs nowadays, members-only clubs like maxwell social.
whenever you host an event, an app with a database of people that recommends people to invite.
clubs may find use in software that helps them manage celebs, promoters, girls all in one spot.
i hate having to remove my smartwatches/rings to charge them. when's an appropriate time? i should wear it throughout the day to monitor my heart rates and get a feel for my daily habits, i should wear them at the gym to monitor heart rate, and i should wear them at night to monitor sleep quality. so when am i supposed to charge them?
lives have been ruined over impulsive emails. there is probably something here, but every solution seems really flimsy.
loneliness is a big problem. i haven't seen any startup tackle this really well. in the words of a good friend, "we're beginning to realize that social and mental health are worth just as much as physical health."
streamline testing for deeptech. it's harder than you'd expect to get test subjects.
we do a really good job of making cars smart, but what about systems? we have access to quite literally gigabytes of footage from existing traffic cams every day, at least in nyc. imagine if not only cars were smart, but also the road itself. this seems to be more of a governmental problem than anything though.
as my parents get older, they find themselves forgetting to turn off things or to take things out of the microwave. not sure how to solve the microwave problem, but maybe sensors that automatically turn off the light or faucet when you leave the room.
drone charging stations may be commonplace within the next two decades. i'm particularly long on drones/air transport, and if they ever proliferate, it would make sense to have places where the drones can automatically dock and charge before continuing their path. cybersecurity people will likely have a lot of work here, seems like a big security problem.
as col goes up, more and more people will find themselves having roommates that aren't their spouses. individual wakeup devices may be necessary. apple watch buzzing just isn't enough to wake me up, although that may be a problem unique to me. it's something i'd buy for my roommate, not even for myself.
we spend a lot on our pets, surprised there haven't been serious strides in consumer pet-tech yet. seems like a pretty big market.
saw an interesting idea a long time ago to convert soundwaves to electricity and place them around cities. unfortunately, this would really only be viable to any degree if the city were built on top of a volcano that also had a metal crushing factory in it that also hosted hardcore rock concerts every night. and at that point, why would you live in that city if the noise was all absorbed by these energy converters?
there should be a better way to diagnose cavities than twice a year at the dentist's.
citizen, the crime tracking app seems only marginally useful. if something is dangerous and close enough to me such that it is life-threatening, i likely know about it. so why download this app? also, the paywalls are kind of weird. it seems to be only useful for west coast transplants and doomers.
still very long on robotics, drones, prosthetics. a lot of hardware stuff.
letting students invest in startups. seems like there's a lot of inherency problems here. students generally don't have money, and probably a nightmare to give shares to that many people.
virtual tombstone, or immortalizing yourself in an ai bot. or just anything to do with dying. again, a lot of implementation problems. we've been dying the same way for the past however long it's been since cremation was invented. the newest things in death are startups that convert your ashes to rocks, and something that schedule sends your loved ones messages on certain days you pick. the former seems kind of icky for whatever reason, likely because you're touching grandpa's ashes, and the latter is just solved by using gmail schedule send. the boomer generation might not be able to work schedule send, but this generation certainly will be able to by the time they're ready to kick the bucket.
surge pricing but for customer service reps.
people love stalking each other. evidence, snap stories, snap map, oura sleep sharing. just directly enable this by building software that tracks when any two accounts have interacted with each other, such as when 2 people have commented on each other's posts, liked, etc.
may be useful for classrooms to have live feedback software from students. at the end of the lesson, the professor can go back and see where questions spike, which are likely where students are confused. can be made live or like a lecture footage type of thing.
proximity chat is always a really cool thing, but suffers from cold start really heavily. if i open the app three times and each time there's no one there to chat with me, i'm just going to never open it ever again.
eegs are really cool, but each one has to be custom calibrated to each person i'm pretty sure.
chatgpt is atrocious at upper-level math; if it was good, i'd have gotten a better linalg grade. and i'm pretty sure nyu tandon upper-level math doesn't count as "upper-level" relative to other things, so imagine how poorly it performs when it gets to some really intensive math.
llm that learns your company conventions and does code reviews for you.
llm that has access to certain local files, such that when one thing updates, it automatically updates linked things for you.
packages update/depreciate too quickly.
documentation is not always robust for certain use cases.
procrastination is perhaps an unsolvable problem.
deepfaking ads. we are more likely to use something if it's a referral from our friends, so would deepfaking your friends using something have the same effect?
networks don't really do anything. i have over 2000 connections in my network, i doubt there's more than 20 people that i can not only count on to go to bat for me, but also have enough influence to have an impact.
application security is convoluted. hard to know which protocols are necessary, and difficult for regular devs to test for vulnerabilities.
abandoned rent-stabilized apartments in nyc.
difficult to recover from mistakes at t1 and t2 distributors, smaller shops lower brand value.
a real cause of phone addiction wasn't the phones themselves; it was network speed. before, to load up a video on youtube you had to sit there and watch it load and buffer. now those rates are essentially non-existent.
i find myself consistently coming back to the pear ring. (4/18/2024) update to this, i have just purchased a pear ring.
when me and sean started looking into ideas we had, we found that a majority of them had been built yet, we just had never heard of them. is this a fault of implementation, marketing, or that there was no problem there in reality?
capybaras with hats.
i find myself consistently wowed by r/internetisbeautiful
there's an incredible amount of talent in research. when it comes down to it, true researchers are probably better suited to being founders than most founders are, since you have to be producing new things (generally) to be published. you can't submit a literature review and expect it to be featured in a top journal. both founders and researchers are trying to build new things, just in different ways. there should be a better way to monetize or commercialize research breakthroughs outside of big conglomerates or the nsf i-corps.
i wrestle back and forth with location-based things. as of right now (4/12/2024), i don't think they're really that great, past being able to generate some hype. we've seen stuff like happn and loopt rise and fall years ago, i wonder if these more intense location-based apps are just doomed to fail? not sure why though. note here that i don't consider tinder a really location-based app, it's too broad to be considered as such; it's a dating app with location features, not the other way around.
naval just came out with this product called "airchat." super interesting. really like the way he's trying to make social media more human again, but he also understands the rules of the game so it doesn't look super dumb. however, still have a lot of doubt on it; i'm assuming it'll be like an insta threads situation. just off of personal experience, people don't like to listen to audio messages because they take too long, and text is easier to read. however, audio doesn't have the same amount of engagement that videos do, so you don't beat out tiktok there. evidence, literally people putting subway surfers under videos to keep people entertained. dating (4/13/2024) this thought so i can come back and be proved either right or wrong.
sean gave me an interesting idea about putting my thoughts online. right now, nobody knows about this really; this is mainly for me to have a website i can look at. he suggests i make these things more public by basically making tiktoks that are like "rating this yc company" and the premise is that if i critique enough yc companies, someone will notice it and they'll pick me up to be a dev or something. cbtm.
gambling software is so fun. i would love to see a venmo-knockoff such that whenever you venmo/zelle someone through the app, there is a chance that it doubles or halves the money you actually send. it also locks regular zelle/venmo for x amount of hours, so that you can't just immediately make up the difference.
i find myself coming back to sean and i's idea a while back for helping companies filter out candidates more effectively. you really should not be testing a frontend engineer on whether they can make a red-black tree.
allowing people to make ais of themselves. like character.ai but for people; you upload a bunch of notes you've taken or old conversations you've had, tag them with certain labels, and see how it goes from there.
a product like 7dos would be cool. you input a linkedin handle, and it outputs certain things about your connections, like the most influential connection within x degrees of separation. and the product is just connected with everyone i guess? seems super expensive computationally, although there are some approaches i can think of right now that would make it less expensive. also, it may just be an uninteresting thesis.
solving last-mile delivery problem with drones.
having engineers waste their time doing early-round technical interviews seems like a bad call. but companies probably do this because the non-technical recruiters can't make good calls on what code makes sense and what doesn't.
4/19/2024