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Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

• aptwebapps 15y ago
  I don't get the Augustus reference.
  • funthree 15y ago
    He was Julius Caesar's nephew and successor, who ultimately did all of the things that Caesar wanted to do but never had a chance to to see done (the month of August is even named after him). In the lines that Paul mentioned his legacy, I think he means that someone similar to Steve Jobs (his would-be successor in our pop culture) could continue a similar path as Jobs. It's now clear that being a visionary in that position is possible, and he showed us all what just one person can do there.
    • aptwebapps 15y ago
      That may be it. However, it's not completely clear. >Steve Jobs has shown us what's possible. That helps would-be successors both directly, as Roger Bannister did, by showing how much better you can do than people did before, and indirectly, as Augustus did, by lodging the idea in users' minds that a single person could unroll the future for them. We've got Banister, who lead, and Augustus who followed (I mean in succession - he was still a leader), and ... well, it's a little confused but I guess you're right.
      • spnx 15y ago
        At the death of Julius, Rome being controlled by one man was unconscionable. By the time Augustus died the opposite was true.
• chanux 15y ago
  Now if I accidentally put the cursor in the wrong place, anything might happen. This has been my experience with Google search and Gmail (the Google products I use most). It's really frustrating that sometimes I'm handling them the way I'd handle a Samurai sword. That's not how it should be.
• ajju 15y ago
  If you want to take on a problem as big as the ones I've discussed, don't make a direct frontal attack on it. Don't say, for example, that you're going to replace email. If you do that you raise too many expectations. Your employees and investors will constantly be asking "are we there yet?" This is critical. I have tried it the other way, and struggled for these very reasons. I think the way to use these big ideas is not to try to identify a precise point in the future and then ask yourself how to get from here to there, like the popular image of a visionary. You'll be better off if you operate like Columbus and just head in a general westerly direction. Don't try to construct the future like a building, because your current blueprint is almost certainly mistaken. Start with something you know works, and when you expand, expand westward. Eat small morsels, chew well!
  • SkyMarshal 15y ago
    >This is critical. I have tried it the other way, and struggled for these very reasons. It's also the Lisp philosophy of building up from small functional pieces, rather than starting with an overdesigned top-down blueprint.
    • ajju 15y ago
      As a programmer, I intuitively understand the value of building up from small pieces. I think what Paul is saying in the first part I quoted is different though. He is saying don't even say you are going to build the "grand vision" because it sets unreasonable expectations and defocuses you from making incremental progress. The second part I quoted is about avoiding top-down design / blueprints and you are right on the money there.
  • miguelos 15y ago
    Let me disagree. Unless you plan to discover new ideas by mistake, you absolutely need a vision, and then find the way to get there. If you start from the bottom (bottom-up), you'll constantly compromise technically, as lots of things are not yet possible to do. If you start from the top (top-down), you'll "know" that it's possible to accomplish, and you'll only have to find out how to do it. You have far more chance to solve an enigma if you know there is an answer than if you don't. Visionary ideas make you believe the answer exists, which makes it much more easier to accomplish.
• rainboiboi 15y ago
  Change all the "Replace" with "Displace" and you are on your way to IPO.
• repos 15y ago
  Preventative Diagnostics as Paul describes in #7 will really be the future - it's barbaric that we can only make a diagnosis when the disease has already manifested (in most cases). There are a few players in this space (Scanadu comes to mind), but it's seems like nano biosensors and the like are still very new technologies. Correct me if I'm wrong.
  • AznHisoka 15y ago
    There are a lot of players in this space, but you're right - it's still in the research space with not very many viable products yet.
  • tomfakes 15y ago
    I look at medical diagnostics as though I'm looking at my production servers (a poor analogy in many ways, but lets go with it) Watching charts on a production server, you see patterns over time - e.g you can see a weekend, or holiday quite easily. Keeping an eye on these, you can see when things start hitting bottlenecks and you need to do something to improve the situation. When I get my bloodwork checked, its once a year - can you imagine checking in on your production servers just once a year? I live in the Seattle area - Vitamin D deficiency is a huge (but not well known) problem in this area. I would pay real money to see a chart of my Vitamin D levels on a daily basis (without needing to draw blood!). I can then adjust my supplement dosage as needed. I have a food allergy that is slow to flare up and slower to go away again - being able to check various levels of things in my system to track against food intake will help me find out exactly what foods cause what issues. The US food industry would pay a fortune to have this ability not be available!
  • Gatsky 15y ago
    I'm not optimistic. I think pg's discussion of automatic diagnosis is a bit ill-informed. For example, the recent trial that showed screening CT scans reduce mortality in lung cancer cost 250 million dollars to run. Even then, nobody is sure if it is even a cost effective measure. It is difficult and costly to produce a screening test. It also takes many years to validate. Then there is the problem of what to do with the results - for example, if you are diagnosed with possible pancreatic cancer, the treatment is a massive operation to replumb your upper abdomen. 5% of people die because of the surgery alone, and the surgery costs a fortune. Unfortunately a simple relationship like "find cancer early = good outcome" does not exist. There are incredibly high barriers for a startup developing diagnostic tests for screening. There is a good reason why the only people doing cancer screening studies are large government funded research consortia that can afford to wait 10 years or more to prove a result. The example of Bill Clinton is misapplied - cardiovascular disease is really common, maybe 30% or more of people will get heart disease in western countries. We don't need to have a cool machine to screen for it, we need to risk stratify people with a few simple tests (ie ask them if they have a family history, check their cholesterol and blood pressure) and improve their risk factors (eat better, quite smoking, exercise, lower cholesterol etc). But then you are talking about modifying human behavior...
• Alex3917 15y ago
  The problem with search is that not only is Google getting worse, but I've also mostly outgrown it, in that it isn't sophisticated to answer pretty much any scientific question I would want to ask. - No way to search for a scientific question and get a summary of the current scientific consensus or viewpoints on specific issues - It's really hard to access academic journal articles online. - Even when you can access journal articles, it's hard to know which ones to look in to answer your question. Sometimes it's hard to even know which field(s) your question falls under. - Even if you vaguely know which field your question falls under, you don't necessarily know any of the vocabulary used by that field. - No way to search by dependent and independent variables, confounding variables, etc. - No way to sort articles by the quality of their methodology, the quality of the journal they were published in, the quality of the researchers, etc. I know this isn't a product that more than 1% of the population would use, but if someone built it then maybe there are other things it could be used for.
  • tobiasSoftware 15y ago
    I use it more as a way to shortcut sites. For example, if I want to Wikipedia "pi" instead of typing www.wikipedia.org, in the address bar, then typing in "pi" in the site's search bar, I enter it in Google and find the link. Firefox's awesome bar is gradually taking over as I can favorite things and "search" for them using that just by typing in a couple letters, but I still use Google for anything I haven't favorited.
    • cpeterso 15y ago
      I like Firefox's Keyword Search bookmarks. The Awesome Bar becomes a "web command line". Some example search bookmarks I've configured: * "w pi" to search Wikipedia articles * "d pi" to search Dictionary.com definitions * "am pi" to search Amazon products * "map pie" to search Google Maps locations * "g pi" to search Google and many others. :)
      • dsrguru 15y ago
        I'm honestly surprised not every hacker does this. The vast majority of popular browsers supports keyword searching either out of the box or via a plugin.
• tomwalsham 15y ago
  There are very few successful futurists in the literal sense. The long bets are not on the current startup ideas which will still mould the world 5 years from now. YC's view of investing in those with the wherewithal to effect change - not those who necessarily have the answers to hand - bleeds through the ambiguous edges of this essay. pg's reticence to put his full belief behind a specific idea due to the evanescent nature of the current concept-du-jour is good guidance - tackle the extant problems and retain half an eye on the bigger picture.
• rmassie 15y ago
  The thing about replacing e-mail is that is isn't just a todo list, for many people it's just a receipt box - the thing I keep all my notifications that I bought stuff from amazon. For others, it's still the primary means of business communication. My work e-mail is largely about communications, with a todo element to it and unfortunately some file storage too. My "home" e-mail is completely different. It's where I get my monthly statements for banks and investments and where my notifications go. When replacing e-mail you would need to service all these components of what e-mail is. The thing that originally made e-mail so important was it's identity factor. That seems to have withered away as other services have replaced some components of what e-mail was for. I would argue that e-mail needs to not be replaced, just reclaimed. My e-mail client (web or otherwise) should know that an e-mail in this case is actually just a twitter DM notification and be smart about how it presents that to me. It should know that something from Bank of America is probably something I want to keep, but something else from Bank of America is just marketing junk. I haven't seen anything that is smart enough to do that on it's own. I don't want to have to deal with creating filters - it should just know. I would totally switch from gmail if this were out there.
  • harryh 15y ago
    > for many people it's just a receipt box There's a good startup idea right there! Sign up on receiptbox.com and give it my email username/password (or maybe some sort of oauth token). It periodically scans my email and looks for receipt emails from well known e-commerce sites. It knows how to parse them and pull out the relavent details (like TripIt does for travel stuff) and it builds a builds a nice searchable catalog of all my receipts. I would sign up for this tomorrow if someone on here goes and builds it. :)
    • adriand 15y ago
      > I would sign up for this tomorrow if someone on here goes and builds it. :) But would you pay for it? If so, there is a way to generate almost infinite revenue with this service, which is to charge a small fee for each receipt stored. Naturally, when receiptbox.com charges this fee, it issues a receipt, which it emails to you...
• deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
• erichocean 15y ago
  In my experience, Sand Hill Road does not want "frighteningly ambitious" startup ideas if substantial capital expenditure is involved. (In fairness, they are willing to hear those pitches – I guess that's something.) > Now Steve is gone there's a vacuum we can all feel. Pixar got funded only because Steve Jobs (Steve Jobs!) paid for it of pocket to the tune of $50 million total. It's Pixar that made him a billionaire (not Apple, as most people assume). How often does Steve Jobs invest in companies? Virtually never. But he knew (correctly) that Pixar was on to something. I'm dealing with the Pixar bootstrap-problem at my own company, Fohr. Fohr is the live-action version of Pixar (photography, not animation, is what gets computerized), and requires $32 million in capital to do the process today on a feature film (well over half of that is for hardware - $2 million alone for electricity!). Fohr is only constrained by capital – the R&D has already been done (it took nearly 13 years to develop the tech) – so you'd think Fohr would be ripe for funding. And you'd be dead wrong. There are no Steve Jobs left to pay for it. The startup world today seems to only want tech innovation on the cheap, and that includes Paul Graham and all the rest.
  • patio11 15y ago
    So if I wanted to do PixActing like I wanted to breathe, my five year plan would be a) get VC funded for anything, b) achieve a modestly successful exit, and then c) recruit one similarly situated person and just shake the money tree. Without making disparaging comments about identifiable businesses, it is not a controversial observation that proven entrepreneurs with existing networks have vastly superior access to capital compared to first-time entrepreneurs with no network, independent of idea quality, target market, or execution ability. $40 million is not a number that is unachievable in 2012. The password is just a bit different than for $200k, $700k, or $5 million.
    • erichocean 15y ago
      I'm basically doing that, actually. Fohr has ridiculous technology, and I'm parting it out (feels like chopping a car) as you describe. I can do Fohr without the capital, it'll just takes me longer as hardware gets cheaper and my own net worth goes up. 18 month ago, it would have cost over $100 million to operate Fohr, so time is on my side.
• zackattack 15y ago
  Not at all surprised that aapl has taken a dip in after hours trading. Wouldn't be surprised to see it fall monday either. The last time PG publicly endorsed amzn we saw it briefly spike before returning to ~183. Almost reminds me of what 50cent did with hnhi. Not sure whether it's a clearly causal thing or that PG simply has his finger on the tip of investor consciousness.
• sawyer 15y ago
  If Microsoft : Google :: Google : Facebook, I'm not sure that the frightening startup idea here is to replace Google. Don't get me wrong, I've also started to see some cracks in the G edifice; and Facebook has definitely begun to set their agenda, but doesn't that mean search in general is already waning and that the next big thing will be whatever replaces Facebook? Great essay though, lots to think about. I really like the anecdote about bolting an iMac to the wall as well. I still have a TV, but it's only purpose is to act as a large dumb monitor for my laptop, and I've been seeing a lot of this type of thing happening even among my non-hacker friends and family. I'd like to see an 'app-store' translation for drama as well, but it seems like tv / movies are not as amateur friendly to create as games. One person can develop a fun indie game, but it's nigh on impossible to create drama with a similarly small budget. What aspiring drama writers / directors need are tools equivalent to game level editors to create their scenes without actors, cameras or studios. Packaged believable human CG characters may not be possible, but cartoon, animal, alien, etc. characters might be able to bridge the gap the way they do in video games and still tell a compelling story.
  • jmduke 15y ago
    > What aspiring drama writers / directors need are tools equivalent to game level editors to create their scenes without actors, cameras or studios. I'm not trying to be intentionally dense, but that's just literature. If you get rid of things like actors or cameras, you're no longer operating within the medium of television/cinema. And that's not specifically bad, but that's not specifically good, either.
    • eurleif 15y ago
      So Pixar makes literature?
      • jmduke 15y ago
        Pixar has actors and studios.
  • jeffool 15y ago
• aptwebapps 15y ago
  The last graph of #6 is great. I hate to stray into politics but my scary ideas revolve around public policy and the various actions people undertake in the public sphere that affect it. More specifically: Is it possible, by providing better tools for publishing and accessing information, to substantially improve public policy debates? Can we reduce the very large rewards for dishonesty and the use of disinformation? This is the crux of the problem with our current political system, I think. It's not campaign finance, it's not religion, it's not disagreements about economics, foreign policy, security vs liberty (a lovely false dichotomy) or what have you. It is simply the fact that lies win and truth loses. Or, if that statement is not necessarily true, it is true in the current practice. So, if you buy my premise, how can technology help? Isn't it a problem of human nature? You can't force people to be honest. You also can't force people to learn how to recognize dishonesty in spheres where they have not much competence. You can't impose good sense or decency. But human nature is varied, and so maybe the seeming ascendancy of its more unfortunate aspects is situational. Maybe by improving the context and presentation of information they can be mitigated. Maybe technology can be used to recognize and reward honesty and to point out and discourage dishonesty. It hurts to think about, doesn't it? It does for me, because it is so hard, and that's what I took from pg essay. Granted, I may not be talking about problems to solve which would make you the next Google. As an aside, I think that the utility of greater transparency of public actions (governmental or corporate) is already well-understood by many and much work is already being done in this direction so I am leaving out. But that doesn't mean there isn't room for new solutions there, as well.
  • SkyMarshal 15y ago
    Interesting idea. I think the most intractable part is that many people believe what they want to believe. They gravitate to a world view for various reasons, backfit it to the data, rationalize the cherrypicking of supporting data and discarding of refuting data, integrate it into their id or ego, fight tooth and nail to protect it, and happily accept the political dis/misinformation you're referring to. I'd imagine you'd have to identify why people do that, why others don't, and whether it's formalizeable and transferable. Pretty sure psychology has done some work in that area, but brain-fried atm and drawing a blank...
• diego 15y ago
  "GMail is slow because Google can't afford to spend a lot on it. But people will pay for this. I'd have no problem paying $50 a month." Ok. Number of Paul Grahams in the world times $600/year = ? Most people on the web are ridiculously stingy. "I would pay for this" is a terrible way to think for an entrepreneur. Believing that what we think represents the masses is a rookie mistake.
  • duck 15y ago
    I think email needs to be changed from top to bottom, but offering speed alone would be a hard sell to launch with. You can get the Microsoft offering (Exchange Online or packaged with Office 365) starting at $5 a user. Microsoft can afford to spend money on it. I've used it and it is a lot faster than GMail (although it wasn't enough for me to switch).
    • diego 15y ago
      One thing I noticed is that email is a problem for "important" people who receive tons of messages per day. They must read/answer that one vital email right away. Kevin Rose talked about this a few years ago, and I've heard many high-profile investors complaining about this. For the vast majority of the people on the planet, GMail is just good enough. Yahoo Mail and Hotmail are still doing well. Perhaps email is perceived as a problem just because it gets tons of "face time" with us every day. I'd leave it alone and focus on one of the countless unsolved problems in the world.
      • politician 15y ago
        Perhaps, but as Bentley and Gulfstream discovered, there is a tidy profit to be made servicing the niche needs of high-profile individuals.
        • dminor 15y ago
          Undoubtedly, but tidy profit and frighteningly ambitious are two different things.
• sayrer 15y ago
  I wonder if it bothered pg that two consecutive paragraphs in the Tactics section started with "Empirically,". I wouldn't let that slide, because it triggers pattern matching not relevant to the subject at hand.
  • pg 15y ago
    That was intentional. That was anaphora.
• Donald 15y ago
  "Google used to give me a page of the right answers, fast, with no clutter. ... And the pages don't have the clean, sparse feel they used to." If you disable Javascript and cookies for *.google.(tld), you'll be greeted with Google circa a few years ago: http://imgur.com/LDBLk http://imgur.com/LDBLk .
  • kamaal 15y ago
    I think the percentage of users who even know what Javascript is, are negligible to an extent that they don't even matter. And people who don't know look for a new search engine rather than learning how do disable Javascript.
  • pm90 15y ago
    This is great..Thank You!
  • rquantz 15y ago
    Will it stop replacing my technical terms with non technical synonyms, and randomly leaving out my search terms? Cause whatever they've done to the UI, it pales is comparison to those two things.
    • angryasian 15y ago
      maybe its because of my search history, but I find google gives the best technical results.. and actually its when I do a search for something that has non technical meaning the technical results come to the top.
    • pbhjpbhj 15y ago
      This, absolutely. It's fiddly to get Google to perform well now. Quotes everywhere and inablity to copy addresses from results ... bleurgh.
    • bambax 15y ago
      Use "verbatim" under "Search tools".
• rblion 15y ago
  "The popular image of the visionary is someone with a clear view of the future, but empirically it may be better to have a blurry one." The future is uncertain, because each person is a variable and chaos is inherent in nature. However, with the sun as my witness and the earth as my ally, there is nothing that will stop my effort to liberate all beings from suffering through my startup. It's all I got left in the world, there is nothing else that matters to me. I am 22 and there is no job I want in the world, so I will create one through my ideals of universal compassion and scientific method. I will post on HN soon, I hope people understand my vision of leading Homo sapiens to become Homo universalis, that may be the only way we can actually have a type 1 or 2 civilization.
• deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
• ubasu 15y ago
  Small nitpick: what does it mean to say "...search queries to be Turing complete"? I didn't think that the SERP defined a set of rules. ;-)
  • philwelch 15y ago
    You type something in, you get something back. Why can't the search engine be a REPL for some program environment, with the entire web as its data?
• shingen 15y ago
  I'm working on #2, but the solution I've found is not exactly what Paul suggests. I ran into a need while working on my latest startup. I'm in bed with a large tech investor for my current company, and I'm working on this tech on the side. My term sheet is such that my company owns whatever I create right now, so I'm hoping said large investor isn't too annoyed with me allocating some time on the side; my plan is to ask forgiveness instead of permission. Aiming to kick it out to the public in a month optimistically.
• tobiasSoftware 15y ago
  I have my own to add which I'll tackle if I ever get smart enough. Code is horrible right now. The problem is that code is written linearly, when in our minds it is a graph. It's usually a bad sign when our minds see things differently than our computers do. I think if we could properly abstract the concepts, and change both our linear list of functions and our unsorted list of files to a single graph structure, we could understand our software so much better. I guess I'm thinking of UML diagrams with code, but in a way that feels natural to code in the first place, even for a beginner, not as a commented afterthought.
  • ilaksh 15y ago
    I just read an article today or yesterday about the reason that VIM's cursor keys are h,j,k,l or whatever. I think the reason that code is ASCII text is pretty much the same reason VIM's cursor keys are h,j,k,l. All they had was a terminal so it had to be ASCII. If you think about it, all information is structured and multidimensional. But people can only make one sound at a time, so information must be serialized to be communicated. There are some easy starting points for understanding why we should get away from pure ASCII source code. One of them is to try first coding a complex UI with pure text and then build the same UI using a graphical editor with widgets. Another one is this: just answer this question -- why can't I represent division in my source code using a numerator over a divisor the way that we are taught to write mathematics? Should we continue to pretend that we are required to edit our code on terminals from 1979?
    • dgallagher 15y ago
      As you suggest, this is definately a legacy issue of being tied to the teat of a 1980's terminal. People still like to edit in simple editors. I've viewed it as a Model-View-Controller problem, where everyone is attempting to merge the Model and View into one. Technically your editor should be worrying about the View. It can draw division however you configure it to. But when saving to a Model source file, that should be portable, without any (or very little) formatting embedded in it (e.g. MultiMarkdown). You should be able to customize your editor, much like swapping out a CSS file on a website, and skin it to your desires.
• pbj 15y ago
  I saw a neat Kickstarter a while back that seems like it was trying to tackle redesigning email from the ground up. Looks like they hit their goal too! http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1380180715/mail-pilot-email-reimagined http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1380180715/mail-pilot-em...
• lunarscape 15y ago
  "2. Replace Email" Google tried this with Wave and they failed. I wish they had succeeded. I think they should have spun it was "Email 2.0" and made the transition easier.
  • pg 15y ago
    I think we'll see it again, though not necessarily from Google. What failed about Wave was the way the project was organized and pitched to users, not the idea.
    • akrymski 15y ago
      Personally, I don't see what Wave has to do with email, it's a completely new protocol that wasn't integrated with email in any way and that's why it failed. They should have done this from the start: http://code.google.com/p/wave-email/wiki/Outline http://code.google.com/p/wave-email/wiki/Outline Google wave was also horribly complex. Email needs to be simplified, not just added to, which Google keeps doing with Circles and other stuff that they keep bolting on to Gmail. Reminds me of how MS used to do stuff.
  • angryasian 15y ago
    I actually loved wave, I think they would of succeeded had it been tied in to your email account. I had to remind people to send me messages @wave.google.com or whatever it is. If all my gmail messages automatically went to wave and vice versa, I think it would of succeeded.
• ilaksh 15y ago
  I think that the hard part of tackling these ambitious projects is (often) not the actual engineering but rather making the ideas popular and fighting against the status quo. Another hard part is how difficult is the transition from how we do things now to the new way. So most of these things he mentions, people are working on them, or something similar, or even have functional software. That software just isn't popular. Not because it isn't useful, but because it didn't catch on. And a lot of these ideas aren't really useful until they reach a critical mass of users, which makes it even harder. The big ambitious thing I wanted to mention was DONA (data-oriented networking or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content-centric_networking http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content-centric_networking). You might be able to combine that with some type of semantic knowledge storage and engineering along with a type of e-democracy. People have working examples of these things, its just hard for people to pick them up and start actually using them and then mention them to others for them to become trends. Before (or instead of) human-controlled knowledge engineering we may see Google (http://mashable.com/2012/02/13/google-knowledge-graph-change-search/ http://mashable.com/2012/02/13/google-knowledge-graph-change...) (or possibly some start up) come out with a Watsonish system that builds huge knowledge graphs by actually comprehending the semantics of web pages it spiders and then lets you query them more naturally. (Which I guess that type of system does exist, just didn't catch on, maybe because it wasn't quite up to human level comprehension or didn't become popular for whatever reason.)
  • disgruntledphd2 15y ago
    The KDD cup had some entries in 2006 on this idea. I found one of the papers by accident yesterday. It looks quite interesting, might be worth checking out. www.daimi.au.dk/~ifrim/publications/kdd2006.pdf
  • waterlesscloud 15y ago
    One of the benefits of something like Y Combinator is that if you have one of these ideas, and you can actually make it work, YC and its associated network of people can be massively helpful in spreading the word. In fact, that may be the major benefit of YC.
• mishkovski 15y ago
  "The most ambitious is to try to do it automatically: to write a compiler that will parallelize our code for us." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_Extensions http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_Extensions
• nchuhoai 15y ago
  Takeaway for me: Great ideas will change the world, but you never start with them in the first place
  • gonein60 15y ago
    I always think back to Linus Torvalds's first email about starting linux. "I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones."
• mmphosis 15y ago
  0. free internet - as in beer and as in liberty 1. a new search engine http://duckduckgo.com/ 2. replace email - with a todo list? - as I look at that old Palm IIIxe sitting in the cradle on my desk, my mind swims in the ideas of all the databases on all of the devices everywhere all being in sync 3. replace universities - yup, and recreate the free university of olde 4. internet drama - indie drama titles (movies/shows/etc) on netflix / apple - or just read the comments ;) 5. the next steve jobs - but I am still impressed by the iPad3 rollout and it's screen - raspberry pi 6. bring back moore's law - easy parallelism in software - it's a compiler -- that's the hard part - a compiler on the web as a web "service" - an optimization marketplace: people in the machine doling out smart answers 7. ongoing diagnosis - how about ongoing prevention? because cancer is a symptom too - why limit yourself to 1000 years of ?barbaric? western medicine? - why not look at all of humanity's history of medicine from all cultures? 8. tactics - remember that columbus was a tyrant, and he didn't "discover" anything. - start small yup, the best plan is not to have one, and never make one, when it's a fait accompli then you announce the plan
  • chc 15y ago
    Huh? Free Internet is ipso facto not a business idea.
    • aptwebapps 15y ago
      What about free email? Or free search engines? I'm not really suggesting that ad-supported Internet is a great idea, but it's at least a possibility.
    • Mizza 15y ago
      No, it's better than that.
  • nikcub 15y ago
    DDG isn't the answer - not yet, anyway I find that ~50% of my results I re-attempt with a !g, !w or !wo before it I know the guy behind the site reads threads here, so i'd ask him to check his logs for the number of instances a user has re-run a search query but with Google or Bing and then work out why his results for those queries are not working. I think the 'new google' will be built around a PageRank that takes into account online social networks rather than links
• js2 15y ago
  [3] Roger Bannister is famous as the first person to run a mile in under 4 minutes. But his world record only lasted 46 days. Once he showed it could be done, lots of others followed. Ten years later Jim Ryun ran a 3:59 mile as a high school junior. One of the great stories of the last 100 years. There are many recountings of it, but "The Perfect Mile" is as good as any. Supposedly it was claimed to be impossible, and that any person to break the 4 minute mile would likely die from the effort. Bannister also wrote his own book about it.
• nikcub 15y ago
  Replace email and replace search are two signs that Google is failing at its core strengths, and I agree with this. They have made many mistakes in the past few years and there is a definite opportunity in taking them head on in both of these markets. with number 6, if you are going to break it up for cores you may as well break it up for computers and put it on the network. Hence MapReduce, etc. with #7, our bodies are very good at telling us when something is wrong with warning signs. we can't afford health care as it is today, let alone with the system being clogged up with healthy people paranoid about possibly being ill.
  • icebraining 15y ago
    our bodies are very good at telling us when something is wrong with warning signs No, not really. It does warn you, but in many cases way too late, and then you lose the opportunity of fixing the problem with a fast, cheap and safe procedure. If you want to save money, early diagnosing is key.
• einhverfr 15y ago
  As an amateur historian, I found the Colombus bit a bit interesting, and probably more on-point than Graham might have even known. Columbus, his backers, and his detractors all accepted that the world was round. What they disagreed about was how big it was, and how far it would be to Asia by sailing West. Everybody, pretty much, by that point knew that the world was literally round (and flat only in stories). This was especially true in monastic and church circles which had known this for longer. In other words they all agreed it was a great idea and an ambitious project that might succeed. They disagreed about what it would take to get there, and whether there might be obstacles in the way. Seems like a very fitting metaphor for an ambitious startup. Edit: For sources, you can start with "Heaven and Earth in the Middle Ages: The Physical World Before Columbus" by Rudolf Simek, which is a book uncommon in its level of insight. His description of Marco Polo's purported encounter with a unicorn had me laughing in both humor and amazement. Simek's basic thesis was that Columbus's expedition was important historically because it blew away an important piece of medieval ethnographic thought--- once it became clear that the areas he had reached were not India, but were inhabited anyway, it doomed the Augustinian argument against the existence of inhabited continents beyond Africa, Asia, and Europe. This then paved the way for questioning the religious and classical basis for some aspects of the physical world, and lead in many ways to the Renaissance (though I think the failure of the Crusades and the translation of Arabic writings into Latin had a strong hand there too). The importance of Columbus's voyage about changing the way we think about our place on the world was still important. Another good point about ambitious startups?
  • keithpeter 15y ago
    Thanks for the reference. Of course, every sailor knew the Earth was round. Just take a morning off and watch the boats going out of a fishing harbour should your location allow this... I found that pg quote useful as well, in a 'look for local advantage' way. Plan the next step based on how the weather and sea look today. Tomorrow it might be different.
    • einhverfr 15y ago
      The Simek book is quite interesting. Of course it wasn't just the sailors. By the 13th century, pretty much everyone knew the world was round as it was a common description in popular literature. Their ideas of antipodes were rather funny and something the church struggled against for some time until the discovery of the New World but an end to the question.... And until Vasco de Gama proved them wrong, they might not have believed you could sail across the equator.... but they knew it was round. But the Simek work is interesting beyond that. It's largely on the basis of his work and the understanding that Europeans often knew more about Asia than Europe that it's fairly clear what a unicorn was: it's what you get when you describe an Asian rhino using a horse as a reference point. (Pliny's description of a monoceros is also frighteningly like a rhino, although some things are exaggerated.)
• lukev 15y ago
  The example of email as an "irresistible force vs an immovable object" really resonates with me. There are many things in that class: - The way we communicate (pg gave a good example of this one) - The way we write software (text files? really?) - The Operating Systems we use (All the major design decisions were made in the 80's.) - Computer input systems (are keyboards really a global maxima for efficient control?) Eventually, these will definitely be replaced. Why not make "eventually" now? We won't be running Windows or Linux in 2050. Why not be the person who invents what we ARE using?
• mahyarm 15y ago
  I think all of those things are being worked on right now. Khan Academy and co on replacing universities. The whole 'quantified self' set of gadgets, like the basis band, the zeo sleep tracker, the withing's scale, etc. DuckDuckGo for a search engine startup, etc.
• jballanc 15y ago
  Man finds a black kind of rock that burns; discovers that you can get a lot of this rock if you dig deeper, but deep mines have water. In order to successfully mine this rock, man devises a steam powered engine (neatly enough powered by this same rock) to pump out the water. No, not the steam engines you're familiar with. This is the Newcomen Steam Engine: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newcomen_engine http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newcomen_engine The Newcomen Engine has a fatal flaw: it cools the steam for the return stroke, losing energy to the latent heat of evaporation each time. James Watt discovers the latent heat of evaporation, and realizes that separating the condenser from the piston would improve efficiency. So let's go build some railroads, right? Not so fast. It would still be another 30 years (100 years from the invention of the Newcomen Engine) before railroads and ferry boats would be regularly powered by reciprocating steam engines. What's the moral? For 100 years, vast leaps in technology came one after the other. In the process, the Laws of Thermodynamics were discovered and described. Many learned men stood around patting each other on the back at how successful, how inventive they were...at digging a black rock called "coal" from the ground. But most people don't dig rock from the ground. Most people do travel from point A to point B on a fairly regular basis. The world changed when 100 years of technology left the mine shaft and the factory, and got people where they were going just a bit faster. I'm convinced that computers are still at the Newcomen/Watt transition. We have a ways to go before the world truly changes.
  • rblion 15y ago
    Yes. The conscious revolution is just beginning, our species is very young, and the stars are still far away.
    • dsrguru 15y ago
      Yeah but until we invest as much time, money, and effort into defense against weapons and customized microorganisms as we do into their creation, we're running the risk of this young species (and maybe a lot of the other ones) disappearing very, very soon.
      • tomjen3 15y ago
• OneBytePerGreen 15y ago
  Many startup ideas are about extracting a few more dollars from the end user - what kind of annoyance can we solve today? - but I think it's important to think beyond the scope of consumer products to get to the real game changers. A lot of the value being created in the digital sphere right now revolves around collecting information about people and providing it to third parties, who in turn use it to solve problems (and collect even more data). I believe these services will change our lives the most. For example, major innovations in the near future might revolve around creating 100% safe neighborhoods through smart surveillance. People are rapidly becoming accustomed to being tracked all the time, anyway. Technological progress and major societal changes go hand-in-hand. I think whoever can best envision what those changes will be - and how to profit from them - will become the next Steve Jobs.
  • SMrF 15y ago
    "...creating 100% safe neighborhoods through smart surveillance. People are rapidly becoming accustomed to being tracked all the time, anyway." This comment shocks me. I'm not sure what to say. Are you being sarcastic? An apt metaphor for people becoming accustomed to surveillance is slowly boiling frogs to death. And what is your definition of safe? If it were up to me, nobody could wear the color black at night -- too dangerous! Also, drinking too much at the club is not acceptable in my society! I'm being silly, but where do you draw the line? It's a slippery slope...
• hkarthik 15y ago
  There's a definite opportunity to build a competitor to Apple and reach the hackers first: building a better PC for hackers to create new software built on Open Source and Web technologies. The cracks are starting to show with using Mac OSX as a primary machine for hacking. It's got unix under the hood, but every successive release has become more consumer focused and less hacker friendly. The proprietary nature of developing native apps also turns off a lot of the great OSS hackers. If you could get an all star team together with someone like Rahul Sood to design the hardware and someone like Miguel De Icaza to design the OS and developer APIs, you'd be well on your way to tackling this problem and building the next Apple. And this time, it could be a lot more open source friendly.
  • clavalle 15y ago
    I don't see the difference between what you just described and what Canonical is doing with Ubuntu.
    • unimpressive 15y ago
      Canonical != Hardware manufacturer. The problem with the hardware business is that good hardware takes money to make. It's not the sort of thing that you can fund on the kind of margins that most startup rounds deal with. (Disclosure: I have never attempted a startup or tried to obtain funding for one.)
    • pi18n 15y ago
      I will not be upgrading to Lion or later -- I prefer Finder to have ~/Library, I don't want to see all the thousands of tiny UI images on my computer, I don't want the mouse to scroll backwards, or a stray finger on the mouse to go back a page in webkit when I wanted to scroll left. Don't get me started on the latest Xcodes, which I have to use at work. So, speaking as the target market, Ubuntu has created a horrible user experience with Unity, and have made it not worth the effort it takes to remove it. I will never run Ubuntu (desktop) again. My Linux laptop now runs Mint, which is fine but cannot connect to a network without the Gnome graphical configuration tool for whatever reason. probably layer 8 or ID10T in this case.
  • 15y ago
• run4yourlives 15y ago
  Does it bother anyone that "frightenly ambitious" begins with search and email? Seriously? This is the pinnacle of our contribution to mankind - building search engines and to-do lists? Where's the lunar base? The flying car? The personal robot? The cyborg? Meh, maybe I'm just getting old and grumpy. (To be fair I did like the other ones).
  • nl 15y ago
    Seriously? Search is another word for artificial intelligence. Email means a universal way for people to communicate. Lunar bases & flying cars aren't ambitious, they are just expensive. Personal robots are here now in vertical spaces[1] and there are at least 200,000 cyborgs walking around now[2]. I think both these areas are worth working in, but I think you underestimate the ambition of a word like search. [1] http://www.irobot.com/ http://www.irobot.com/ [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cochlear_implant http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cochlear_implant
    • TheCowboy 15y ago
      They're expensive because they're inefficient. To accomplish them efficiently is ambitious and elegant without a doubt. A startup that can chip away at what makes these things so inefficient is going in the right direction. Looking for inefficiencies, such as with present day email, is a good way to find a direction. Economics is still at its heart the study of the problem of scarcity. Economies, and all economic activity, attempt to alleviate or manage that problem.
      • nl 15y ago
        Yes, I agree with that. SpaceX etc are doing well at the "chip away" strategy. I also agree that a cheap lunar base would be a wonderfully ambitious project!
      • telent 15y ago
        This is a nit pick, but much economic activity these days is nothing to do with alleviating scarcity and everything to do with introducing artificial scarcity where it didn't previously exist. See e.g. Intellectual property.
• jamesrcole 15y ago
  Great post, but minor quibble: The CEO of that company, the "next Steve Jobs," might not measure up to Steve Jobs. But he wouldn't have to. He'd just have to do a better job than Samsung and HP and Nokia, and that seems pretty doable. That really should be: The CEO of that company, the "next Steve Jobs," might not measure up to Steve Jobs. But they wouldn't have to. They'd just have to do a better job than Samsung and HP and Nokia, and that seems pretty doable.
  • gbog 15y ago
    Hell, thanks, you just pointed out that pg is not PC. Hope he will never start writing in this silly new grammar.
    • jamesrcole 15y ago
      I don't find 'they' any less readable than using 'he' or using 'she'.
    • hythloday 15y ago
      Whether you find "they" as a third person singular pronoun objectionable, it's not "new"--it goes back to at least Shakespeare (through Austen).
      • gbog 15y ago
        I object to: - the idea that changing grammar is a way to fix moral problems. - any barrier, taboo, or artificial distance between what one think and what one write.
        • jarek 15y ago
          I agree - we should get more people to think in singular they, rather than just write.
          • gbog 15y ago
            I don't like this kind of thinking police, sound too 1984ish to me.
• allenbrunson 15y ago
  Oh man! Replacing email is my personal Holy Grail. The ongoing escalation between spammers and spam fighters is proof enough that it is a system that has lived beyond its time. I first became aware of PG when he was working on Bayesian spam-fighting techniques, circa 2002. Email already seemed absurd to me. I was thinking of writing my own email client, but I would have preferred to get on whatever email-killing bandwagon there might be on the horizon, so I sent him an email asking if he knew of such a successor. He wrote back and said no, he was not aware of such a thing. That we are still using SMTP in this day and age just boggles my mind.
• codex 15y ago
  It's not ideas which make billionaires, and it's not a lack of ambition which keeps these ideas from being reality. It's that it takes killer execution with a huge amount of luck. People think that they can predict the future, but they can't. Capitalism triumphs because it lets a million monkeys do a million zany things, and when a few become mega hits those particular monkeys are hailed as visionaries.
• 6ren 15y ago
  6. Bring Back Moore's Law hmmm, maybe developer cycles are more valuable than machine cycles really is getting out of sync with current conditions? I didn't connect stalled clock-speeds to the web being slow til reading this. One reason is that web-serving is usually embarrassingly parallel, as each client is independent. Some other causes are increased client-side JS; assembling many services (eg. amazon); increased usage with resources not keeping pace. But pg's point is surely a factor too. Bloated frameworks, and software with many layers (some quite unnecessary) were facilitated by increasing clock-speeds - but at least it's possible to get rid of them. Also, work has been done on JS JIT compilation. Server languages are getting faster too. This may seem like a tangent, but bear with me: Clayton Christensen (who coined disruption) makes an interesting point about "integrated" (closely-coupled, interdependent) vs. "modular" (clean interfaces enabling mix-and-match) architecture. The advantage of integration is you can make it perform fast - you can optimize "performance" according to a variety of definitions (e.g. smaller, lighter, more memory, less battery power etc). This wins when customers value increased performance - Christensen describes this willing to pay more for performance as it "not being good enough" because once it's good enough, they won't pay for more of it. The economic advantage of modularity is you can develop fast, you can create and customize more quickly. Part of this is reusing components (e.g. buy off-the-shelf or open source, or reuse internally) - this wins when customers value that over performance. This usually doesn't happen until performance is "good enough": if it's too slow to use, who cares how configurable it is? An example is iPhone/iPad (integrated) vs. Android (modular). The iPhone/iPad is fast, light, slim, long battery-life, better resolution, smoother animation etc. In contrast, there are many different Android devices, with different prices, displays, shapes etc, and many have customized UIs. Christensen's fascinating point is not that one approach is better than the other, but that they change over time, cycling back and forth. It depends on what the market wants at the moment: what will customers pay for more of? Following the example, once smart-phones become "good enough" in performance, customers will start to buy on other factors, such as price. This seems to be starting to happen for smart-phones; but not yet for tablets. In relation to pg's observation of server slowness, it seems that formerly, performance was good enough, and so the developers that were most successful favoured mix-and-match layers, because they were faster to develop and easier to customize. But now, performance is a problem... which may mean that developers who favour integration will be most successful. It's not black and white, but an interesting perspective.
• dwerew45234sdf 15y ago
  I think Paul Graham and Ycombinator have done some great things for the world. However I do disagree with some of the things that Paul Graham says, and this article is one of points that I disagree with him on. 5. The next Steve Jobs Why does PG seem to think that there has to be the "next" Steve Jobs? Is there some sort of pattern to be recognized from the Apple story, that a startup can emulate and be successful. Wasn't Apple a large company already, even before Steve Jobs came back to it. Though Apple at that time was in a dire conditions, it wasn't exactly a start up. How come some hardware startup during the 90's, 00's, and this decade, do what Apple has done. I know people think Apple is constantly inventing something "new" and always needs something "new" for it to survive, but I don't think that is the case. I bet the iPhone wasn't really created in just 2 years, I am sure Apple had been working on it for a long time. A feet that is much more difficult for a start up, to do R&D for a long sustained period and pay the bills with some other product. PG had the following quote. PG: "well, and I asked him if the people now running the company would be able to keep creating new things the way Apple had under Steve Jobs." I think Steve Jobs had a particular vision for his products for a long long time. He might have thought about functions of the current iPhone and iPad during the Newton days. Steve might have had 3-4 products that he wanted to create, and thats it. We don't have enough data to interpret, that Steve would of kept pumping out "new" products if he was alive, like the iCar. Allot of Apples success have been through luck and timing and making the right gamble. Jobs couldn't have put Apple back, without the help of numerous people, and the above mentioned. I think if PG seriously wants to find the Apple formula in a start up; he may as well start playing the lottery. Eventually with enough time he will find one. But the odds don't look so good. I am a fan of his writing, but I found this article to be disingenuous at best. Allot the things we use today aren't just formed by start ups, they formed by sole inventors, governments, large corporations, and random hobbyist. You can change the view of your world to include more items than startups.
• jacoblyles 15y ago
  It would be great to have a todo list with a similar interface to today's email-integrated calendar apps. Someone could send me a todo item, and I could accept or reject it. If I accept it, it gets synced across both of our todo lists. That would be a huge step up over putting todo items in email.
  • akrymski 15y ago
    Task management apps like Asana probably let you do stuff like this. Email is just for messaging. Nothing is stopping people attaching a to-do item as a file that gets opened in some to-do app, just like attaching vcards or calendar items. Its just that very low percentage of emails actually map to some associated to-do item. And in most cases you really just want to set up a reminder.
  • csallen 15y ago
    www.taskforceapp.com (Disclaimer: I'm the developer for Taskforce)
• HSO 15y ago
  "A New Search Engine": You don't need to compete head-on with the biggie(s) even if you want better search. You can vastly improve search by specializing, i.e. getting data that the biggie(s) don't yet have. Find something that is "universal" but where the necessary data is hard to obtain. Then innovate on how to obtain that data, rather than focus on how to search or match etc. Find a business model where you provide value for both those who generate/grant access to the data as well as those who use/search it. When you have that data, either build on it or sell it to one of the biggies. "The Next Steve Jobs": Watching the TED talk by Cynthia Breazeal (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eAnHjuTQF3M&t=09m25s http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eAnHjuTQF3M&t=09m25s), it recently struck me that the next Apple will come from the robotics side. The engagement level and seamlessness you can achieve with the physical medium is on a completely different level from "devices". Even smartphones/apps require (at best) minimal cognitive facilities for interaction. Being able to I/O on a "reptilian brain" basis with body language, tone of voice, etc. could literally "change everything" by weaving intelligence into even the dumbest activity. People will not be able to do without such robots if they are well done.
• EGreg 15y ago
  I started off reading this essay a bit carelessly -- it seemed that pg was saying that these ideas are too nuts, and YCombinator would never back something like that. I was about to write a post completely disagreeing. Our company for example is building a new type of social search engine, will in many cases replace email for messaging, AND long term have a third party platform that will enable websites to take advantage of our single sign-on and be instantly social, while safeguarding privacy. We have a patent application on this (yeah, I know...) Is it too much to bite off? Maybe. But look at our usage already, after a year. http://qbix.com http://qbix.com And lastly, I am very much hoping to build value, and not just sell quickly. I haven't read Steve Jobs' biography yet, but I have heard he refers to such ambitious people as "real entrepreneurs". I don't know... all I know is, I am driven to accomplish this. And so far we've got some positive results.
• stcredzero 15y ago
  The CEO of that company, the "next Steve Jobs," might not measure up to Steve Jobs. But he wouldn't have to. He'd just have to do a better job than Samsung and HP and Nokia, and that seems pretty doable. Some might say that Amazon is already doing better than Samsung, HP, and Nokia.
• dojomouse 15y ago
  Also frighteningly ambitious is the prospect of any meaningful startup driven disruption in the energy industry. Which is a worry considering how desperately disruption is needed.
  • johncarpinelli 15y ago
    Electric aviation and space launch. See our web-site, http://electrictakeoff.com http://electrictakeoff.com, for details. We are looking for collaborators, co-founders, volunteers, etc. I agree with PG that ambitious startups are better. However, I think engineers should focus on sectors where the customers are dissatisfied. Aviation seems like a good candidate. Most people dislike oil dependence also. Tactically, we are aiming to fly advertising banners as a short-term path to revenue. The next market would be air freight with prices lower than diesel trucking. Passengers would come last after the technology is proven.
• ra 15y ago
  I love this: "There's a scene in Being John Malkovich where the nerdy hero encounters a very attractive, sophisticated woman. She says to him: Here's the thing: If you ever got me, you wouldn't have a clue what to do with me. That's what these ideas say to us..."
• nazgulnarsil 15y ago
  why can't I configure a bayesian filter on my inbox to do more than just filter crap I don't want? Can't I have another filter that builds a model of the things I click on first given any set of new emails and generate a likely list of things I will want to see first? Is anyone doing this?
  • _frog 15y ago
    I'm not a Gmail user so I'm not sure how well it works, but I thought Gmail's Priority Inbox was built to solve precisely this problem. How intelligent it is at determining what gets the priority label I don't know but at least someone's pursuing it.
    • olalonde 15y ago
      I can say the priority inbox works extremely well for me.
• deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
• ericd 15y ago
  I think personal health monitoring is probably the most important thing on that list. The thing that excited me the most when smartphones started becoming popular was the prospect that they could coordinate data collection from a number of sensors always collecting data - basic ones like Nike+, but perhaps also sensors measuring sleep, taking periodic bloodwork, etc. At the same time, perhaps you could automatically monitor personal behavior such as foods eaten. Personal diagnostics would be an important use of that, but I think more importantly, with a very large public dataset of basic biometric data correlated with behavior data and medical results across a significant portion of the population, we could stop treating human health studies as bespoke one-offs put on at great expense and start treating them as data mining problems. You could begin to spot correlations between behaviors and results that are unintuitive given conventional wisdom. I think that the resulting burst of discoveries would be on par with any of history's great scientific revolutions.
  • rdl 15y ago
    Scott Adams (Dilbert guy) proposed this a few years ago as a way to win the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Being able to "tivo rewind real life" would be pretty amazing -- watch a bunch of things passively, record data, notice a spike in mortality, then find the common factors and stop the new plague (or the kids who found a Cobalt-60 source, or the pump infected with Cholera).
    • ericd 15y ago
      I think it would bring about enough breakthroughs for a lot more than one Nobel :-) But yeah, I'm definitely not the first one to fantasize about being able to correlate behaviors or even just basic bio signs across a big chunk of the population with the medical results. I even think it'd be feasible to pull it together as a company, since there are lots of immediate potential benefits to using the things that would collect this data. A much better replacement for Life Alert, which works even if you're unconscious and can't press the button. Dieting aids, sleep aids, exercise aids, passive diabetes monitoring. It's a lot to bite off, especially as a startup, but I think a team that knew how to execute on this kind of product could roll out products serially and pull together that dataset. That dataset would enhance each other product in the way that each of Google's views on the internet (DNS traffic, browser feedback, analytics) help its core product. A hell of a defensible advantage. Not sure how one could convince that company to give up its crown jewels for the sake of medical research, though :-)
• rdl 15y ago
  There's a clear search engine improvement which I'd love, and my friends would love, but I think it's not yet technically possible. (the tech to do it exists, but it's a big engineering challenge to actually build it in an economically viable way). A way to search (public, private) documents without leaking ANY information (beyond possibly "I did a search") to the operator. DDG's "trust us" security policy doesn't really go far enough. A mix-net anonymizing your query is the best option now, but it's insufficient. Just knowing someone in the world is searching for a specific piece of information is itself highly actionable in some contexts. USG and other highly security conscious entities accomplish this by having the full search corpus onsite and running the searches on their own hardware. There's Google Enterprise (which was the most red-headed stepchild product I've ever seen from Google) too, and there are commercial ways to buy the crawl and run an engine on top of it, but this isn't really something even Fortune 500 companies do. Basically, either a permanent "personal google appliance", potentially hosted in the cloud using some tricks, or a way to spontaneously instantiate a google each time you want to do a search. Probably the way to do this is to write some interesting sci fi novel featuring the dangers of public search leaking, and also wait for some interesting prosecutions which use search data as evidence. You could actually still do advertising this way, too; just requires some tricks.
  • olalonde 15y ago
    While there may be a niche for your idea, it is common knowledge that the average Joe simply doesn't care enough about privacy.
  • edwardw 15y ago
    The tech exists, which is called fully homomorphic encryption scheme. But I concur in what olalonde says, average people simply don't care that much about privacy.
    • jscn 15y ago
      Hence why OP mentioned the need for a scifi novel and some court cases to create a market. I'm not sure that would work, it doesn't seem to have done so in other domains.
• RachelF 15y ago
  The medicine comments are spot-on, right now we only fix our bodies when we feel pain, when it is often too late!
• chmike 15y ago
  This is now my favorite essay of Paul Graham because it shares my thoughts. The only thing I feel less comfortable with is that it emphasis financial value over a useful contribution to mankind. In my view the later is more relevant than a goal to become the richest person of the cemetery. I guess this is a kind of perception distortion one gets when the main variables considered on a day to day basis are ROI, wealth, influence power, etc. I'm aware that wealth provides a significant leverage to contribute to mankind's good, but it is easy to forget about this relevant next step by solely focusing on increasing one's wealth. Open source is one example showing the difference and it also proves that we don't need to be a billionaire to significantly contribute to mankind's good.
• wolframarnold 15y ago
  This all assumes conditions as usual. Which I think is a painfully mistaken notion. In an era of depleting fossil fuels, inferior ore quality of iron, copper and all the rare earth metals required to make modern electronics, water shortages and overpopulation, I doubt people will be worried about email overload in even 20 years. What's missing from this list are the real big issues of our time, such as quitting our reliance on fossil fuels, building a sustainable economy for the planet's resources, and creating a currency not solely based on debt expansion. In an economy with less energy surplus our problems will be more primitive than worrying about heart disease or faster computation or better search. Solving the shrinking energy surplus..., now that would be a really scary big startup of planet-wide implication.
• brianmac 15y ago
  In regards to email, google wave took a stab at attempting to change the dynamic of communications but that project has now been shelved. The difficulty in a new "email" replacement is overcoming the hurdles of engrained habits - see http://zenhabits.net/ http://zenhabits.net/ for more on that psychology or even www.iwillteachyoutoberich.com (people see the inbox as a to do, that they grind through in mechanical fashion). Think to tackle the problem of email is to put a new UI layer that wraps messaging into context while piggybacking off the traditional email protocol. For example, with my own work email we tag are subjects with TASK, FYI, MEETING, FOLLOWUP, FEEDBACK, etc. indicating what action we need done, helps with searching and labels now in gmail, however take that "context" element and combine with say www.trello.com UI concept of boards/cards in a visual dashboard type of style would be stellar. I just imagine something like this on an ipad i am just swipping/slidding through my different buckets of communication (sort of like flipboard). KILL THE INBOX :)
• yurylifshits 15y ago
  Let's add one more 8. Replace prisons Prisons do not make criminals back into normal people. Prisons are expensive. Prisons are a big market. Prisons stay the same for the last few centuries. What is a better way to punish and a better way to bring criminals back to civil life?
  • olalonde 15y ago
    Don't all governments have a monopoly over their country's prisons?
    • kolinko 15y ago
      I think in U.S. prisons are private enterprises.
      • thejteam 15y ago
        This is highly dependent on the locale. Some places have outsourced prisons, usually with poor results. Most have not.
    • jodrellblank 15y ago
      http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=szNLMtgI7hU http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=szNLMtgI7hU Serco appear to run privatised prisons in the UK and Australia, so I guess not.
    • Agathos 15y ago
      Monopsony might be the better word here.
• Mjux 15y ago
  pg, reports like these http://pewinternet.org/Reports/2012/Search-Engine-Use-2012/Main-findings.aspx?view=all http://pewinternet.org/Reports/2012/Search-Engine-Use-2012/M... gains the confidence over ambitious. Relevance dictates the shift.
• momoro 15y ago
  Re: "5. The Next Steve Jobs" / "None of the existing players. None of them are run by product visionaries, and empirically you can't seem to get those by hiring them." Jack Dorsey.
  • ksec 15y ago
    JD is very good, but sorry to say he is not even close to being next SJ.
  • simondlr 15y ago
    Agreed. When I was reading it, I was thinking of him as well. Square is a shining example of simplistic design and value.
• akrymski 15y ago
  We're a YC company (www.post.fm) working on one of those ideas - email. We've encountered lots of headwinds as PG mentions, and we've managed to stay strong to our beliefs by keeping the team small and focused, and using our product ourselves to constantly remind us that what we're working on is better than Gmail. It's not been easy admittedly, we didn't come up with some small idea that could grow into an email replacement over time, or some add-on to gmail to give us early traction, etc. We focused on replacing Gmail from day one. And that's no small feat, cause who wants to use a minimum viable email service? We also realize it's a huge bet, and we may be wrong. But at least we're building something for ourselves, so we can't be too wrong, and that thought keeps us going. Can't say I agree with "Email was not designed to be used the way we use it now. Email is not a messaging protocol. It's a todo list." Email was designed to be the electronic version of a letter - an async messaging channel. Not some to-do list protocol. But with increased volumes managing all that mail became difficult (I'm sure celebrities still struggle to catch up with physical mail). That's the problem we want to solve, by letting algorithms and better user interfaces help you manage your mail. A to-do list is something different in my view, but naturally closely related (and should be part of the same application). A piece of mail often prompts you to create an associated to-do item, but today this functionality isn't integrated so we rarely bother. Sure IM, Twitter, and To-Do list apps chip away at some of email's use cases, just like instagram is doing with facebook, but we're confident that email can be just as good if done right. Now I just have to finish it and avoid thinking about my idea for the google-search-killer that would be oh-so-easy to try out ;)
  • chmike 15y ago
    I'm also working on the email problem but on a different aspect. If, as PG suggest, you consider a new protocol, is there a way to share this work so others may build on it and contribute to push this big snow ball or do you plan to make it a proprietary technology ? I fully agree that SMTP is broken. It is so obvious when examining DKIM.
    • akrymski 15y ago
      We're not creating a new protocol. Sure SMTP and MIME are quite awful, but the network effects if these standards are so vast that even Google couldn't make a dent with Wave. IMO a new protocol is something that can come later, we've explored that, but only an email service in a leadership position can make those sorts of changes to the standard thus forcing others to implement them. At the end of the day there can always be a more efficient protocol, but I don't think that's the biggest problem in email.
• robot 15y ago
  So if Apple's not going to make the next iPad, who is? None of the existing players. None of them are run by product visionaries, and empirically you can't seem to get those by hiring them. Empirically the way you get a product visionary as CEO is for him to found the company and not get fired. So the company that creates the next wave of hardware is probably going to have to be a startup. I realize it sounds preposterously ambitious for a startup to try to become as big as Apple. But no more ambitious than it was for Apple to become as big as Apple, and they did it. I thought about this before, and I think building a hardware startup like Apple, or a systems software company like Microsoft is an order of magnitude harder than when they were founded. Let us take Apple. When Apple was founded, there was an ocean of people that did not have a PC in their homes. Big, uncharted market. When you hear Don Valentine (Apple's investor from Seqoia) talk about it, you can see how they did not care about anything but the market. Do we have that kind of market today? Maybe. At the moment everyone is occupied with their ipads, phones, and PCs. Technology. Today the hardware is so complex, that it can be only competed with by largest companies in the world. It is not a coincidence that it is only Samsung that can compete with Apple in mobile devices. Take a Texas Instruments or Qualcomm chipset, you will face a complexity barrier at every corner. We won't hear you saying things like, my co-founder designed a chip so efficient, it will be a game changer. Anyone remember the JoJo Pad before the ipad was released? So what could be done? I think it comes down to playing on the above two variables. For a new hardware/systems startup, it must target uncharted territory, i.e. introduce (mobile) computers to an area of use where it has never been tried before, and make sure everyone in the world needs it. (Like that thermometer startup, except find a wider use case) Use existing cutting edge technology, and build your new technology upon them (e.g. I would probably start with a top notch chipset + android + add new, hard-to-replicate technology.)
  • dwerew45234sdf 15y ago
    100% agree with you.
• mmaunder 15y ago
  The conclusion on Tactics and starting small and achievable is pure gold and something I took a decade to learn. I'd simply emphasize that it's important to fulfill a real need on a small scale. e.g. Harvard students really wanted to stalk each other, a basic interpreter really was needed, Columbus sailed west to find faster trade routes.
• hastur 15y ago
  PG is back. :)
• zerostar07 15y ago
  We don't need to replace email. Just add an NLP engine and the ability for 3rd party apps on it.
• Stwerner 15y ago
  A recent blog post that didn't get enough love here: (http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2012/03/08/halls-law-the-nineteenth-century-prequel-to-moores-law/ http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2012/03/08/halls-law-the-nineteent...) seems to suggest that we are probably at a point where the new "Moore's Law" (or new new Hall's Law) is soon to be discovered.
• ktizo 15y ago
  Is all about primary dependencies when it comes to large disruptions, so any ideas that target the primary technologies, hierarchies or costs associated with the agriculture, energy, manufacturing, telecoms, trading and transport sectors. And the really ambitious ideas are the ones that simultaneously target as many of them as possible.
• jonnathanson 15y ago
  In re #4, I'd suggest that your biggest hurdle isn't movie studios (as we often like to suggest here). It's Comcast. It's Time Warner Cable. It's AT&T. These companies exercise an oligopoly on most people's internet connectivity, TV UI and UX, DVR experience, etc. They also set the terms, with the networks and studios, for what you actually get to watch on demand. They pushed their crappy DVR onto the masses, effectively killing off the far more innovative and superior TiVo, because they offered their boxes at point-of-cable-hookup to consumers. They control so many strategic channels in the TV business, on both the B2B and B2C ends, that they're basically running the industry. (They were also the prime movers in the PIPA/SOPA legislation, and they'll be back with another attempt as surely as the sun rises in the East.) Netflix, Apple, and Amazon look like compelling alternatives to the cable oligopoly. Unfortunately, studios are deathly afraid of handing over monopolistic control of their distribution to a single player like Netflix, so they're fighting with Netflix and trying to push their own alternative onto consumers (Ultraviolet). Meanwhile, they remain relatively oblivious to the real snakes in the grass (Comcast, et al.) -- an obliviousness that's going to get even worse, now that Comcast owns a major player in the production system. To beat Hollywood isn't to beat the studios. To beat Hollywood is to beat cable. This isn't a war over content; this is a war over distribution. Technology vs. technology. Content producers will go wherever there's distribution to be found, and money to be made.
  • majani 15y ago
    Here's another tip: I'm African, and I don't understand what you are talking about here. Maybe the next entertainment innovation should force global scale...
  • baruch 15y ago
    It's an interesting analysis but still the problem for any upstart distribution technology is to get content, it's a chicken-and-egg problem. I've worked in the past for content distribution technology company and the main issue was to get content, there were also specific issues to the technology chosen that made it sort-of-dead-end but I didn't see how it could get the content at relevant terms. The technology to distribute the content is out there already, bittorrent showed the way and it is working at a fairly large scale. Any problem down the road technology-wise can be solved by some (non-trivial) amount of money and creativeness. It's not a technological problem. The main trick is to get good content on a trivial distribution method. I've been thinking about this but I'm a technology guy and couldn't figure how to get the content.
• revorad 15y ago
  I wonder if PG would create more value by doing one of these ambitious startups than he is by running Ycombinator.
  • jonnathanson 15y ago
    Probably not. Y Combinator is an entire startup ecosystem. It is a convening source, and inspiring source, for a multitude of startups. Any single company -- no matter how grand its ambition or its achievements -- offers less scale and less total value than an entire ecosystem of potentially big companies.
• cstefanovici 15y ago
  For big ideas that others clearly understand to be problems and of which investors are afraid to get in on there always is... crowdfunding! I wrote about the pros and cons of raising money through crowdfunding to pay for your startup here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3687835 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3687835
• dgregd 15y ago
  Guys, please do something which will replace Word and Excel. These tools were good in the '80 and '90. One of the main reasons I do not like to work for corporations is Word doc attachments hell.
  • jarek 15y ago
    On the other hand, I'm sure you'll love the Word Replacement attachment hell. It's not the tools that need replacing here, it's the process.
• krosaen 15y ago
  I like this article, but am I the only one for whom gmail is still seemingly as fast as ever? I don't doubt that it is painfully slow for PG, would be interesting to see the distribution of performance and what impacts it.
• un1xl0ser 15y ago
  E-mail isn't perfect, however as a transport system is is not meant to solve the problem you described in "Replace e-mail". If someone wants to have a meeting with me, they might send me an .ics attachment[1] that will work with almost ANY software that I have my computer. Since most meetings are in fact in-person and something that we have been doing as a civilization for some time, the semantics are well defined and easy to model. A task list will always be harder to model, but not impossible and there is certainly a lot of ideas on the topic. As long as it is an open standard this sounds great, but I wouldn't like to see my tasks locked into either a proprietary format or the cloud[2]. If you are going to replace something that is standards based, it should be with a new standard of some sort. Not code, that's an implementation detail, but standard. 1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICalendar http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICalendar 2. I'm too old for this shit, and not everyone lives in the cloud.
• charlieok 15y ago
  “GMail has become painfully slow. [2]” “[2] This sentence originally read "GMail is painfully slow." Thanks to Paul Buchheit for the correction.” heh :)
• waterside81 15y ago
  These ideas, and the idea that they are frighteningly ambitious, clearly come from the personal experience of living in northern California and dealing with tech startups most of your time. These are largely first world problems. Here are some ambitious ideas: - distributed power generation that's cheap enough and renewable enough so people in rural parts of sub-Saharan Africa don't have brown outs anymore. - synthetic food generation a la star trek - desalination that is cheap enough for a farmer in Mozambique to do himself There are more, lots more. People outside the valley bubble have real problems.
  • wmeredith 15y ago
    Solving first world problems gets you first world ROI. Y-Combinator is an investment firm. I'm not judging, I don't have a dog in the fight. But I'm pretty sure that's why you don't see stuff like stopping brown outs in rural sub-Saharan Africa on this list. There's no first-world money in it.
    • sciolizer 15y ago
      It's a trade off. There's a lot more money in the first-world. But there's a lot more users in the third-world. That's why the third-world is called the majority-world.
  • DennisP 15y ago
    Check out the Google Solve for X videos. One presentation is about a clever new idea for cheap desalination: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=R63zYZZuRvQ# http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=R...! Another is about synthetic food...the presenter said his company could feed the entire world from an area the size of Rhode Island: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=ri5dssUsYyA# http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=r...!
  • Nervetattoo 15y ago
    I think the best ideas improves first world issues while fixing third world problems. Energy generation for example, if you managed to figure out how to generate power/propulsion using a cheap and small physical object and a renewable resource you both solves first world issues and third world problems. Education needs to catch up with the world in the first world, but if you do that in an async manner online then you can at the same time solve the problem with education in africa.
• underwater 15y ago
  I've found myself nostalgic for the old days, when Google was true to its own slightly aspy self. Can we please stop using that word? It trivializes the disorder and encourages the stereotype that engineers should be socially awkward.
• antidaily 15y ago
  I want a pause button. For my life.
• asnyder 15y ago
  Intel has pretty good automatic parallelization (https://www.google.com/search?client=opera&rls=en&q=intell+compiler+automatic+parallization&sourceid=opera&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&channel=suggest https://www.google.com/search?client=opera&rls=en&q=...) in their latest C++ compiler, but it's $1000+. I remember at a php conference they simply compiled php with their compiler versus gcc, and everything ran significantly faster in various benchmarks. For a while I was working on automatic parallelization, and wrote plans, white papers, etc. but at some point was introduced to the current methods of automatic parallelization and saw that there are some pretty good solutions out there right now such as Intel's C++ compiler. Ideally, everything would be compiled with something along those lines at which point the baseline for everything else would take advantage of multiple cores, at least in the simple to advanced cases without additional direction from the programmer. After all, so long as you're not eval'ing you know the entire scope of the program and you can link things up as parallel independent queues. It requires more storage during compilation, and likely longer compilation times, but the performance result can be dramatic. It's disconcerting that something like Intel's apparently wonderful automatic parallelization C++ compiler isn't more popular, even though it's demonstrably better performance-wise than anything else I've seen.
• r7000 15y ago
  For a peak into a future with 'ongoing diagnosis' see the very cool Greg Egan short story Yeyuka: http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/yeyuka.htm http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/yeyuka.htm "So why did you go into medicine?" "Family expectations. It was either that or the law. Medicine seemed less arbitrary; nothing in the body can be overturned by an appeal to the High Court. What about you?" I said, "I wanted to be in on the revolution. The one that was going to banish all disease." "Ah, that one." "I picked the wrong job, of course. I should have been a molecular biologist." "Or a software engineer."
• xavi 15y ago
  I enjoyed this essay very much, but I think that presenting Apple as a hardware company ("the company that creates the next wave of hardware...", "If a new company led boldly into the future of hardware...") won't help to find the next Steve Jobs. Apple products success is based on the perfect combination of well-designed hardware and software. I think the next Steve Jobs will need the same holistic approach to product design.
• vacri 15y ago
  the 'Automatic medical diagnosis' suffers from a common misconception - that people want to 'go to the doctor'. It's pretty rare that people do, and in most cases they avoid doing anything medical unless they absolutely have to. How would you gather the information to make the 'ongoing diagnosis' if the people aren't going to come to you to do it? And that's just getting the symptoms - what do you do for tests for more info, which people like doing even less? I also think there are some seriously fundamental technical issues, but I'll leave those off due to 'ambitious'.
• jseims 15y ago
  I'd add micropayments to this list. If someone built a system (and -- the hard part -- it got widespread adoption) to charge a few cents with low friction, it could disrupt advertising.
• meta-coder 15y ago
  7. Ongoing Diagnosis I always thought of creating a wearable device that can report the body's condition in real time. A device that can test the blood to find out amount of haemoglobin, essential minerals, sugar, cholesterol, urea, water etc. The device could be made safe enough to be inserted just below the skin, it could be made to transmit the information via radio waves to a receiver outside the body where you can read the information. We could write a program for the receiver which will process all the information and compare it to healthy values and based on it provide real time advice to the person. Eg. When you are dehydrating the receiver will say "Hey dude, drink some water quickly, or else you'll faint in 30 minutes!" "Hey dude, you should get some Vitamin B/C/D/E/K." If the circulation of blood slows down it could say "Hey you've not exercised in ages. It is time to exercise." It will redefine how we take care of ourselves. Caring in real time!
• sidwyn 15y ago
  Is there a reason why Paul Graham's essay titles are images?
• oob 15y ago
  Of the 7, only Replace Universities (already happening) and Ongoing Diagnosis is frightening and ambitious, imo. I would have included: 1. Alternative Energy 2. Fix the Government
• netcan 15y ago
  Maybe how frightening these ideas seem is a measure of your ambition. I have no fear at all of these because they're all so much bigger than what I can tackle that they become fun theoretical "how will the future be" ideas.
• opining 15y ago
  See also comments here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3690106 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3690106
• aaronf 15y ago
  How do you "just say you're building todo-list software" and not get laughed out of the room? Investors say the space is too crowded, and engineers joke about it being one of their first classroom assignments. And even if you're making traction on the vision to replace the inbox, Y-Combinator's partners will turn you down.
  • jarek 15y ago
    Good reason not to depend on VC funding
    • aaronf 15y ago
      Actually, we bootstrapped for 2 years. We had launch coverage in lifehacker, mashable, the atlantic and entrepreneur magazine. We had over 10,000 users the first month. We got to the point where we needed some funding to go all-in, but everyone we spoke to was really burned on the task management space. Based on this experience, I'm really interested in how someone can take on the task management space in a way that gets noticed.
• chj 15y ago
  is there anything like cloud funding? the most ambitious start up should kill the jobs of VCs for good.
• tcarnell 15y ago
  An obvious but scarey startup idea to me a a Skype competitor!
• elizabethiorns 15y ago
  I totally agree regarding the decline of universities. In particular I think the research side will be the first to shift away from universities; at least with education you are essentially paying for a brand name which has inherent value. With research, the principle investigator writes the grant to pay their own salary, the salaries of their graduate students and postdocs, and their equipment. The university then takes almost all the scientists IP and charges "indirect costs" equivalent to more than 50% of the grant to supply "Facilities and Administration" - which is what exactly? Lights, building space, and a whole lot of bureaucracy. Already, some really innovative initiatives are getting around this problem. The Pasadena Bioscience Collaborative offers lab space and equipment for ~$1,000 per month (no contract required!) and the EMBARK program administers scientists grants and encourages them to outsource experiments to core facility specialists (while providing access to a basic shared lab for those experiments that can't be easily outsourced). Both initiatives offer ways for scientists to avoid high indirect costs and burdensome admin - and importantly the scientists retain 100% of their IP! These initiatives are the way of the future - it's hard to see how big, inefficient universities will be able to attract the top talent for much longer.