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Startups I Want to Fund
- desireco42 8y agoHa. 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). I think it would be worthwhile project.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- amdelamar 8y agoIf 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?
- amdelamar 8y agoOnce 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.
- desireco42 8y agoNope. But it is really low hanging fruit. I really would hate to learn another set of commands.
- mkobit 8y agoI think of this article (https://medium.com/@sdboyer/so-you-want-to-write-a-package-manager-4ae9c17d9527 https://medium.com/@sdboyer/so-you-want-to-write-a-package-m...) when it comes to package management.
- thomasjudge 8y agoI think of this: https://xkcd.com/927/ https://xkcd.com/927/
- mihaifm 8y agoI would like to see a good open source package manager, built on the following principles: - every package is a source code archive signed by the developer - package manager takes care of compiling it for you - package manager does not allow build scripts to download extra code or libraries - dependencies are built from source by the manager, not downloaded as binaries - there is a rating system to allow packages with obfuscated code to be dismissed
- phlowbieuq 8y agoHow do you see these two sentences resolving into a single company that you would fund? > A normal first check from me ranges from $50k to $250k. > I’m very bullish on a capital-heavy, asset-full future for startups.
- smacktoward 8y agoHe's very bullish on a capital-heavy future for startups, as long as it's someone else providing the capital? :-D
- MentallyRetired 8y agoI think his goal is to get in, help prove viability and then help secure said capital.
- philip1209 8y agoYC 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.
- mayop100 8y ago(author here) 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.
- atomical 8y agoIt'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."
- codingdave 8y agoI'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.
- atomical 8y agoYes, 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.
- Fomite 8y agoI 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.
- jarsin 8y ago> An open app runtime - Proprietary app stores are winning too – and in the process, they are distorting markets and censoring apps. > Could a browser be built that provides an actually better app experience and performance than native apps? And how exactly do you get that browser past apples review process?
- desireco42 8y agoThis should not prevent you from thinking and building it. Browser that captured my imagination recently is this guy: https://beakerbrowser.com https://beakerbrowser.com It supports genuine distributed apps.
- palakchokshi 8y agoNot technically a new browser but check out Get@ https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/get/id960699421?mt=8 https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/get/id960699421?mt=8 It is a curated web experience.
- fuddle 8y agoI 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.
- Jun8 8y agoSome ideas: 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-transmitter/ 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?
- tomjakubowski 8y ago> 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?
- Jun8 8y agoYes, 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.
- atomical 8y agoI don't believe one can build lasting relationships like that. A lot of communication is non-verbal.
- somebodythere 8y agoCharm Industrial seems interesting. How can I learn more about this company?
- uptown 8y agohttps://www.charmindustrial.com/contact/ https://www.charmindustrial.com/contact/
- jamest 8y agoYou can sign up for our climate newsletter + company updates + occasional asks for help! https://charmindustrial.us18.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=aafd4c7577e4bc2bfc20baa47&id=3e4a6db592 https://charmindustrial.us18.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=aaf...
- zackmorris 8y agoI 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.
- lifeisstillgood 8y agoStart 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.
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- radicalbyte 8y agoAI 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.
- lifeisstillgood 8y agoOne 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 So waste management change is likely to be slow
- eldavido 8y agoYeah, 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.
- mikeyouse 8y agoReminds me of this story about a better construction crane that was killed by the existing industry: https://www.crainsnewyork.com/article/20160515/REAL_ESTATE/160519910/dan-mooney-s-skypicker-crane-could-save-millions-in-construction-costs-here-s-why-it-s-gathering-dust-in-a-war https://www.crainsnewyork.com/article/20160515/REAL_ESTATE/1...
- MentallyRetired 8y agoNot to mention machine learning helping to plan routes nowadays.
- exabrial 8y agoStartups I'd want to fund if I had the $: * Flow batteries * Hydrogen research (production, distribution, home & automotive fuel cells) * Stronger permanent magnets * Cost effective superconductors (rather than room temperature semi-conductors)
- exabrial 8y agoI think hydrogen should get a huge push because it completes a zero impact ecosystem. If the hydrogen is powered from solar/wind, then fuel cells process that into heat for homes, electricity for lights, and purified water for drinking.
- cjbenedikt 8y agoWorking on it already - from seawater & renewables
- kjksf 8y agoHydrogen is not economical for most use cases. 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-efficiency/2013/03/25/how-big-are-power-line-losses/ https://blog.schneider-electric.com/energy-management-energy...) If you do the same via hydrogen, you have to convert solar energy into hydrogen. That conversion is only 16% efficient i.e. you loose 84% of solar energy (https://www.nrel.gov/news/press/2017/1117-nrel-establishes-world-record-for-solar-hydrogen-production.html https://www.nrel.gov/news/press/2017/1117-nrel-establishes-w...). Then you have to transport the hydrogen from where it's made to where it's used. That's additional expense and efficiency loss. Then you have to convert hydrogen back into energy. Additional loss of efficiency. It just doesn't make sense economically (https://phys.org/news/2006-12-hydrogen-economy-doesnt.html https://phys.org/news/2006-12-hydrogen-economy-doesnt.html). 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).
- moorhosj 8y agoOnce 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.
- icebraining 8y agoWhat's the difference from how Tor already operates?
- moorhosj 8y agoToday, 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. Open wi-fi -> my device versus Open wi-fi -> TOR router -> my device
- lifeisstillgood 8y agoWaste 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.
- wink 8y agoI 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.
- jaequery 8y agointeresting that i've just started working on one of his ideas (social calendar)
- colinwilyb 8y agoHow's that working out so far?
- jaequery 8y agoit's going well. the ambition is large but i'm trying to keep it as simple as possible.
- carapace 8y agoI 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?
- eldavido 8y agoI 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.
- carapace 8y agoThanks!
- gwbas1c 8y ago> An open app runtime The .Net / Mono / Xamarain toolchain try to do this. WebAssembly also tries to do this, but it's so premature it's almost impossible to do anything with it.
- roadbeats 8y agoWaste 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 ?
- loceng 8y agoUntil 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.
- XorNot 8y agoTo my mind waste is all about finding a way to make this: https://www.wired.com/2012/01/ff_trashblaster/ https://www.wired.com/2012/01/ff_trashblaster/ profitable enough that people are fighting over garbage pickup. 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.
- jaxn 8y agoThis strikes me as an incredibly boring and typical list. And the core of why is summed up nicely by the author himself, "My favorite pitches solve a problem I'm already concerned about." We have already solved most of the rich-white-guy problems. I am sure he is well-intentioned and strives to understand as much of the world as possible, but if you want to invest in capital-intensive, asset-rich startups with problems you already understand, you should probably just buy real estate.
- madrox 8y agoThis 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.
- ghostbrainalpha 8y agoAre you guys reading the same list as me? 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?"
- whamlastxmas 8y agoTo be devil's advocate: 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.
- NoIWont 8y agoHmmm, 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.
- whamlastxmas 8y ago"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.
- dgudkov 8y agoIt's interesting that his list is rather long but it doesn't mention enterprise at all.
- nsx147 8y agoI’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.
- ggm 8y ago"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.
- phkahler 8y agoMy 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?
- narak 8y agoShare it here!
- Beefin 8y agoI'm surprised there is no mention of healthcare...
- neumann 8y agodefinitely 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.
- Beefin 8y agoBut he mentions insurance which has just as much regulation.
- rajekas 8y agoI 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.
- malux85 8y agoI know that hacker news is a place for serious discussion and memes are not appropriate, but there really isn’t a sentiment more fitting than: Shut up, and take my money
- DevX101 8y agoFor federated databases, one of my favorite project I've come across recently is: https://datproject.org/ https://datproject.org/ It's a distributed database that uses similar algorithms from git and BitTorrent to support syncing across multiple nodes.
- robax 8y agoI 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 http://old.ycombinator.com/ideas.html
- anonytrary 8y ago> 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.
- viach 8y agoOne 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?
- TekMol 8y agoThe 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.
- viach 8y agoA 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?
- spyhi 8y agoIf 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.
- casegold 8y agoFor “air conditioning” there are still opportunities for truly intuitive and intelligent HVAC controls systems that integrate with legacy hardware.
- yc-kraln 8y agoSuper 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?
- lazyjones 8y agoI‘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.
- delinka 8y agoSomeone help me understand this one: > 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...
- joezydeco 8y agoI'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.
- CyberDildonics 8y ago> An open app runtime 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.
- heedlessly3 8y ago>it’s a chance to be a part of the solution to some of the world’s biggest problems. This statement is completely out of touch with reality.
- lgregg 8y agoWhat do you mean? How is being apart of (creating) a solution to a problem the world faces is out of touch with reality?
- heedlessly3 8y agobecause 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?
- lgregg 8y agoSounds like you skipped half of the article.
- vagab0nd 8y agoThe 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?
- beokop 8y agoI 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.