Startups I Want to Fund
startupandrew.com
startupandrew.com
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.
Shut up, and take my money
Isn't this already fulfilled by nature documentaries?
> That's where the digital is actually better than the physical
I really disagree. While it would be neat actually be a tiger for a day, seeing and hearing what a tiger hears through your digital display is not the same.
I would wager that digitally experiencing nature from our comfortable cities does not raise that same connection to nature that one gets from actually being out there and experiencing it with _all_ of their senses.
Seeing a forest is one thing. Hearing, smelling and feeling a forest as your walk through is a completely different experience. Without that more complete experience I doubt people will form meaningful bonds with the natural environment to the point that they want to change their behaviours to protect it.
Yes, a David Attenborough or Jacques Cousteau can make the natural world come alive. But an interactive digital platform will enable very different forms of storytelling.
> seeing and hearing what a tiger hears through your digital display is not the same
Of course not, just as being a Masai tribesman for a day or even living with them for three years as a peace corps volunteer is not the same as herding cows in Kenya. While stories never transport you into the real world, we all love the idea of platform 9-3/4. They serve different cognitive functions.
>I would wager that digitally experiencing nature from our comfortable cities does not raise that same connection to nature that one gets from actually being out there and experiencing it with _all_ of their senses.
Too broad a brush in my view. For example, there are things that you can do digitally that you can't do in person. However deep you go into a forest, you will never see it with a tiger's eyes because your bodies are different and your brain is different. Forget tigers and forests, you experience your home differently from a dog or cat that you have as a pet. Seeing your home through their eyes - however crudely - will be an act of interspecies empathy that you will never get through other means. It's possible some creatures are so different that their world will be incomprehensible to us even if we stream their senses 24/7. We won't know until we try. It remains an empirical question as to how much of that gap is bridgeable.
> to the point that they want to change their behaviours to protect it
I don't think we are at a point in human history when changing individual behaviors will save the planet, either from climate change or from ecological collapse. We need large scale political action with laws that have teeth and means of enforcing them at a planetary scale. The problem I am trying to solve here (or rather, claim as one needing solving) is a different one: how to transport ourselves into the bodies of other creatures? It's the animal equivalent of reading Dostoevsky to understand Russia - a problem very different from pouring billions into strengthening your computer systems because Russians are hacking your elections.
I 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.
- 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.
Its why cacheing is all ISPs really care about. Its why Akamai makes ISPs happy by adding a edge router in their network. Presumably netflix too.
Even Microsoft is giving away most of their dev tools these days.
It’s a crappy business from an investor perspective, and legions of nerds have washed up on this particular beachhead.
> thousands of times faster than what we have now
The last link is always the slowest. Moreover, much of the most interesting internet stuff really is global communications and dynamic websites, rather than easily replicated static content.
1. Social Silo-busters: Couple the evils of the garden walled social network approach with posts on how hard is it to make friends later in life, add a pinch of all that useless time spent in the car commuting (scraping the bottom of Spotify or Audible) and you arrive at: ad hoc voice-based social networks based on proximity, e.g. through limited range (100m) FM transmitters (one cheap way would be to use a rPi: https://www.raspberrypi.org/magpi/raspberry-pi-fm-transmitte...)
2. "Why can’t I manage waste pickup from an app? What might a re-invented garbage truck look like?" These are spot on! You see news of these everyday but they are very slow to appear. Make a DARPA like challenge to sort waste.
3. Sleeper Markets. Again, he's right in that there are vast markets relatively untouched by technology. Examples: The buzzer for restaurants, why can't it have a screen to display menu, or let your preorder? At a restaurant, why can't I see the most ordered 5 items and have to go through pages of menu? Similar idea for supermarkets: why not have a giant screen at the entrance showing most bought products, interesting product pairings and other data that may be useful?
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?
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.
There are restaurants where the whole menu is one page.
> Similar idea for supermarkets: why not have a giant screen at the entrance showing most bought products
If you want that just enter a small shop, it will have the most popular items (typically in a choice of one) :)
those things are dropped, lost, chewed on by children for 8 hours a day, etc. they've got to be as cheap as possible. also who'd stare at the shitty little screen that's nothing but ads, when they could stare at ads on their expensive slightly larger screen that they carry around all day?
if you want really a menu, the host will be thrilled to hand you one. there's a box of them under their station.
> At a restaurant, why can't I see the most ordered 5 items and have to go through pages of menu?
because then they'll have fewer opportunities to upsell you on more expensive dishes, and alcohol.
> Similar idea for supermarkets: why not have a giant screen at the entrance showing most bought products, interesting product pairings and other data that may be useful?
who cares what's most bought at the grocery store? knowing that my store sells ramen by a truckload doesn't get me buying anything the store wants to actually sell.
Spoken like someone who never lived in an apartment complex?
Sure, if you have a house and the garbage truck comes along, you might influence this, although I don't see what's there to manage. I don't see garbage pickup as highly inefficient. I see this where I live, in the city you have paper and organics extra, cans and glass if you're a good citizen and very maybe plastic - whereas on the countryside your town might mandate you separate into 6 bins. But if you have a house you probably have the space for 6 separate bins, I surely don't.
I don't think this is something you need an app for. Maybe the city can use it to manage notifications, but they could do this just as easily through free SMS or through a unified public announcement system/site. It doesn't seem like something looking for disruption, except for those who want to needlessly introduce a middle-man into garbage collection.
Burguerlich in Hamburg has screens embedded in the tables (which come up and down) from which you can order, seems close enough: https://www.tripadvisor.com/Restaurant_Review-g187331-d73509...
You could order before you even arrive at the restaurant. The restaurant can track and spam you in return. A company building the app for the restaurants can collect heaps of sellable data. Why hasn't anybody done that yet?
Sometimes, paper > screen.
Congratulations on reinventing the CB radio.
> "Why can’t I manage waste pickup from an app? What might a re-invented garbage truck look like?"
Taiwan does this the other way round: https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/01/09/taiwan-garbage-tru...
In this case, it's a municipal service that people don't fundamentally want to pay for and it's hard to make "premium". So you'd have to sell to municipalities on cost.
> The buzzer for restaurants, why can't it have a screen to display menu, or let your preorder?
The JD Wetherspoon "order at table" app basically lets you do this.
But with a mute button for the person who ruins it all.
Creates potential for a location based content creator to capture the attention of a large group of people every day at 5pm.
"Gooooooood evening drivers stuck in traffic! This is Shelly broadcasting from the condos at the I95 and Sunset. Have I got some great things to share with you today..."
> A normal first check from me ranges from $50k to $250k.
> I’m very bullish on a capital-heavy, asset-full future for startups.
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.
Team? Progress so far? Clear road map? PoC & tech feasibility?
You might have an opportunity to get funded by him. Don't rely on this comment on HN to hope he asks for details; go get him :)
* 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 ?
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.
It's a distributed database that uses similar algorithms from git and BitTorrent to support syncing across multiple nodes.
I think it would be worthwhile project.
- 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
> 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...
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.
Is there a need for "outsourcing founders team" thing?
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.
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?
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.
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.
* Flow batteries
* Hydrogen research (production, distribution, home & automotive fuel cells)
* Stronger permanent magnets
* Cost effective superconductors (rather than room temperature semi-conductors)
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.
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...)
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-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).
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).
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.
https://charmindustrial.us18.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=aaf...
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.
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.
The problem I encountered was explaining the concept to laypeople. This can be an issue in the "capital-heavy" and "sleeper" markets.
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
> 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?
Browser that captured my imagination recently is this guy:
It supports genuine distributed apps.
It is a curated web experience.
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
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.
https://www.crainsnewyork.com/article/20160515/REAL_ESTATE/1...
I feel that its jeremiah like, but it is probably time-machine and cure-for-cancer stuff. You get bits of it.
This statement is completely out of touch with reality.
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?
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.
> what can we do to eliminate the need for insurance?
> Air conditioning: A problem easily solved by getting people to live in better climates.
> Some of this list seems silly and easily dismissed as "because physics". Electric aircraft don't make sense and I doubt they ever will.
It's so easy to be an armchair critic and be dismissive of other people's ideas. The only difference is, some people break down large problems step by step and overcome obstacles for over a decade to solve them.
We had something like that once, it was called Lodge Practice (also Club Practice and Contract Practice)[0]. Due to their low cost for medical services, physician cartels such as the AMA fought to kill them[1][2][3].
[0] http://www.freenation.org/a/f12l3.html
[1] https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article-abstract/45648...
[2] https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article-abstract/45599...
[3] https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article-abstract/47651...
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?