"Why does anyone need this? Like all advice, this sounds deceptively simple. But make sure you get a very compelling answer here." Right now I'm at the Web Sum

"Why does anyone need this? Like all advice, this sounds deceptively simple. But make sure you get a very compelling answer here." Right now I'm at the Web Summit, in Lisbon. I saw a few ML/AI startups here, but I was surprised there weren't a lot more. There was some imbalance. There were many startups trying to create new online social networks for niche groups -- business professionals, women, entrepreneurs, sales professionals, etc. I do think there is some innovation that can happen in social networks, but generally I regard it as an over-crowded space. For the most part, the benefits offered by the Internet seemed to have been mostly absorbed by the 1994-2008 cycle, and what's left is fairly minor compared to what happened previously. One of the few areas where I still see the possibility of significant traction (the creation of large companies) is with information gathering and a combination of ML and NLP. We've already seen a wave of startups which were no more than pretty GUIs over existing technology. At the risk of being unfair, BigML.com is just a nice interface over existing ML tools, and API.ai is just a nice interface over some NLP tools. AmenityAnalytics goes a bit further combining their web scraping and NLP scripts with a nice interface that customers can use to filter the incoming data. But there is still a wide space for companies to go much further in this field. All the same, I agree this is a good question: "Why does anyone need this?" You should really ask it whenever you are joining any startup.