
Ask PG: Will you post an update to "Startup Ideas We'd Like to Fund"? - awwstn
Here&#x27;s a link to the original one from 2008: 
http:&#x2F;&#x2F;ycombinator.com&#x2F;ideas.html<p>Much of it still seems relevant and proved over the ensuing 5 years to be quite prescient. I&#x27;d love to hear what new ideas&#x2F;themes have emerged in the time since this was written.
======
dvt
I think some people tend to take pg's startup ideas too seriously. I mean,
I've heard talks by him in which he explicitly says _not_ to take these too
seriously. They are examples and _only_ examples. So right now, for example,
it's pretty obvious security is a big thing. It doesn't (shouldn't?) take pg
to tell you that. All you have to do is read the news.

Find a big problem (it just happens that dating is one) and fix it. Don't plan
on getting in YC (or any other incubator) or being successful simply because
you picked something off one of pg's lists. I'd say the most important
qualities of an entrepreneur is to be in tune with these problems _without_
getting any sort of external guidance. It's not a good thing when someone
comes on HN and posts a post-mortem about their YC experience beginning by
citing an RFS or one of pg's "idea" essays. Personally, I think that some RFSs
from 2009 ([http://ycombinator.com/rfs.html](http://ycombinator.com/rfs.html))
are downright silly -- 5 and 3 in particular. Moral of the story: find
something you're passionate about -- a problem, a niche, etc. -- and build
something to fix it. If it happens to fit into one of the RFSs or pg's ideas,
oh well, good for you I guess.

~~~
awwstn
I totally agree with most of this. I'm actually not really looking to start a
company or apply to YC in the near future, so I mostly posted this because I
found it interesting how spot on he was 5 years ago and I'm curious what his
more recent thoughts are on this. Also, I'd like to know if my own predictions
and thoughts are aligned with those of the guy who's gotten it right so many
times before.

Trust me, I wasn't planning to request a list of startup ideas from him so
that I could pick one of them out of a hat and apply to YC with it. :-)

------
mindcrime
In light of a couple of recent stories on HN, including the one on the passing
of Doug Engelbart, I'll offer this up as a source of ideas for startups:

Everthing old is new again... and some ideas that seem old haven't actually
been completed yet. Other ideas seem to fail, but only because they are
"before their time".

With that in mind, I'd suggest going back and reading the writings of people
like Doug Enbelbart, Ted Nelson and other computing pioneers (and not just
_computing_ pioneers, really, but any great thinkers. How about Nicola Tesla,
for example?) and look for places where they proposed amazing things years or
decades ago, that still don't exist, or don't exist as fully as they could. On
that same basic note, go back in time and re-read some old issues of
Infoworld, Computer World, Information Week, Business 2.0, Red Herring, Fast
Company or Wired from the late 90's or early 2000's and mine for "before their
time" ideas that might be ripe for a second shot.

Hanging around hackerspaces is also a great way to gain exposure to a constant
stream of interesting ideas and approaches.

~~~
obviouslygreen
Excellent points, particularly with respect to looking outside of hackerdom.

------
pg
Yeah, I should do that.

------
TaylorAlexander
I thought I had read in one of those that PG really wants to replace banks and
credit cards. Or maybe it was someone else. Either way, that's one of the
things I'd love to get into as far as "big picture" stuff (along with a cloud-
based "space station" on venus, but the bank thing might be slightly less
difficult). I'd completely revamp the entire purchase process, as much as
legally possible (and realistically doing that would also require lobbying to
change any outdated laws we can that aren't being protected by the other
banks. You'd have to go after all the peripheral laws first I feel like, or
else the banks would crush you with their influence). The entire transfer of
funds and the documentation of the purchase would be re-done based on what we
can actually do with this kind of data. It's insane that my bank only tells me
things like "AMAZON MKTPLACE PMTS AMZN.COM/BILL WA 06/26" for an amazon
purchase. Mint tries to parse that and just has no idea how to classify it.
The truth is, the bank should only get sufficient information for facilitating
the transfer, and there needs to be a simple system of reporting detailed
purchase info directly from the store to the user. Getting this to work with
many vendors would be a pain, but it doesn't help that currently I don't know
anything about those systems. I have some ideas on how to kind of abstract
that out...

~~~
stephengillie
Maybe Mint should scrape Amazon and other retailers in addition to bank
websites? Would you trust Mint to keep your Amazon password in addition to
your bank's? (Maybe Mint should pivot slightly to include password database
management? :p )

Right now, our system is pretty much how you describe it, where the financial
institution only gets the basic information of who and how much. And if you
want more detail, the retailer provides it.

So I guess you're looking for a service that centralizes that info into the
same place as your other financial details?

(paragraphs, please)

~~~
canvia
What if retailers/banks gave you a separate account login that can only be
used to read data? There wouldn't be nearly as much risk in giving this out to
third parties.

~~~
stephengillie
What if retailers/banks gave you an API (with authentication of course) that
can only be used to read data?

------
codegeek
Did you see this one from 2012 ?

[http://www.paulgraham.com/ambitious.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/ambitious.html)

------
TheMakeA
From personal experience, it seems like YC may no longer have an interest in
funding RFS #5. Our entire interview was spent trying to explain why someone
would possibly want to code on a handheld.

Full disclosure: Our demo and Altair BASIC was a way to develop native iPhone
apps in the cloud, from a tablet or other device. We wanted to expand to
Android apps, and eventually be a general cloud compile/debug/run service.

~~~
lquist
Not sure that your example proves that YC is no longer interested in RFS #5. I
think RFS# 5 covers companies that could be huge, but I'm not convinced that I
would ever want to code on a tablet.

~~~
dvt
RFS #5 has nothing to do with the essay linked. See
[http://ycombinator.com/rfs.html](http://ycombinator.com/rfs.html) for all the
"Request for Startups" bullet points.

Personally, I think it's a dumb RFS to begin with. From a professional
standpoint, I couldn't handle developing on anything else but two 24+ inch
monitors (if not three) and a mechanical keyboard.

Not that I couldn't do it on a laptop or tablet, it just makes me about 300x
more productive -- and that's what matters.

~~~
lifeisstillgood
I don't think thats the point.

It _should_ be possible to code on a tablet because thats the device most kids
will have access to as their first computer.

My first (and most people on HN) computer I turned it on and the OS simply
waited for me to give it an instruction.

That is important in lots of ways, not just in the IPO in two years ways.

------
larrys
I haven't read the 2008 list but just went there based on some of the comments
here. This #29 stood out:

"What's the best way to make a web site if you're a real estate agent, or a
restaurant, or a lawyer? There still don't seem to be canonical answers. "

There is a huge opportunity here not for a site builder so much as a way for
those types of businesses (and other businesses) to keep their site current
and fresh once it is built. None of the existing options work that well with
this demographic. Either to juvenile or to many features and options and a
learning curve. Fix that and the world _will_ beat a path to your door.

Start small with this. Solve the issue of how I know what the specials are
from the local sushi takeout restaurant that I visit a several times per
month. Then move to other restaurants. Make it dead simple for the busy owner
to get me that info. Even if it means simply shooting a picture of the special
board and getting it to a single page site that you host in the cloud.

~~~
chrsstrm
The thing with these types of people (realtors, restaurant mangers, etc.) is
that you can make something extremely easy to use but there will always be
effort in producing new content; effort they are not willing to expend. Time
and time again I've worked with people who couldn't be bothered to enter the
data for their new listing or upload photos. They always feel like it is busy
work and better farmed out to an assistant or done by myself at a
unsustainable cost. Maybe the problem is that most of these people are
technically inept and/or can't type more than 10wpm, I don't know. I've
completely given up on anything real estate related and refuse to take any
projects in that space because the failure to produce new content and maintain
a web property always gets reflected back on me, as if I made something too
hard for them to do. Plenty of dead-simple options exist to create and
maintain a site, I find the issue is lack of cooperation with the site's owner
to produce new content.

Now in the food service space, you could easily auto-generate an update based
on the POS inventory. The problem there is many restaurants use a system like
Micros, which has data access, but refuses to open it up to third-party
vendors. If Micros ever wised up and opened an app store where customers could
install approved and signed apps, the person who bridges inventory to web will
cash in and retire early.

~~~
larrys
"Maybe the problem is that most of these people are technically inept "

First let me say that your comments are dead on from my experience (and I'm
even talking outside and before the internet dealing with small business in
general as well as the people you mention.)

I don't think it's inept I think small business people are "shiny ball" driven
and they react to things (deadlines, fines, customers, tax filings, supplies
running out) they are used to going at their own pace and as a result have a
hard time having the discipline to do things like this on any type of regular
basis.

Perhaps the way to handle this is more or less some kind of mechanical turk.

If you tell the realtor "guy from India will be calling every 10am Tuesday"
that creates the shiny ball that forces him (like taxes that are due) to get
his house in order. Just a thought. I know when I was in a different business
we did something similar and had decent results. We also did everything we
could to make it easy for someone.

Obv. your time is worth more. But perhaps there is someone who could do the
"teeth pulling" at a lower rate.

After all with video chat and all of that it's not a non-starter.

------
taylorbuley
_News will morph significantly in the more competitive environment of the web.
So called "blogs" (because the old media call everything published online a
"blog") like PerezHilton and TechCrunch are one sign of the future. News sites
like Reddit and Digg are another. But these are just the beginning._

I'll make the bold claim that we haven't yet seen this "morph" in media. The
blog concept is now staid yet Buzzfeed is the most innovative publisher we
have. And they are just re-branding the advertorial as "native advertising."

The only changes I've seen lately are larger and more diverse media to
accompany text. Not a substantially new product as far as I can tell.

~~~
Charos
This is something I've been thinking about recently. If you boil down the
'news problem,' the dominant solutions are traditional news channels (TV
networks, newspapers) and sites like Reddit and Digg. I would categorize
bloggers as very small-scale traditional news sources, and RSS feeds as a way
to combine these traditional and nontraditional sources.

The strength of traditional news is partly cultural, but also due to the
nature of its content as being curated and vetted by some (hopefully) informed
party prior to publication. Whatever is there, can very generally be expected
to be of a higher quality than any random given 'social news' post on the same
subject. The drawback, of course, is that the only news available is that
which the source determines is 'newsworthy,' which is a very subjective and
questionable standard.

Conversely, the strength of 'social news' sources such as Reddit is in their
inherent chaos. The crowd decides what floats to the top, with no real vetting
process or curation except within the most strictly moderated subcommunities.
This ensures that the most socially relevant topics get 'published' to the
front page and into the public eye, but those stories have little to no
quality control. For those of you unfamiliar with the concept of the "Eternal
September," there has been an established trend wherein as the size of a
loosely controlled network grows, the quality and content increasingly caters
to the lowest common denominator, driving the more invested (and usually the
more intellectual) users out, and eroding the value of the network. This has
been seen over and over on Reddit, as the mainstream subreddits get overrun
with a colossal stream of new users, and any niche interests get sidelined and
marginalized.

I would propose a hybrid approach. Why not create a news source - whatever
category you decide to label it - that publishes content that is vetted for
quality (bias, sensationalism, thoroughness, etc.) but not subject area; in
other words, where the articles are all good, and any subject is fair game?
Layered on this could be some categorized and 'social' voting algorithm, much
like Reddit with subreddits, and users could subscribe to those channels which
they cared most strongly for, thereby creating their own high quality news
source.

This is just a thought I had today. It's obviously not fully baked yet. What
do you think?

~~~
mgirdley
Is this what medium.com is doing?

~~~
Charos
I'm not sure. Sounds like I'll have to check it out, though, because I'd love
to use a news service like that.

------
stephengillie
I'm guessing that online dating will still be on the list.

~~~
kamakazizuru
it probably always will be - so long as the man / woman imbalance with dating
doesnt even out!

~~~
scott_s
I'm not sure what imbalance, exactly, that you mean, but I don't see anything
of the sort as the reason that online dating isn't going anywhere. The
fundamental problem I see is that meeting new people is hard. Particularly
after school, with a full-time job, if you recently moved to where you live,
and if you don't live in a city (being close helps, but it's not the same).

~~~
kamakazizuru
Im referring to the fact that on most dating sites you'll find "n" male
profiles - and something like 0.5n to 0.7n female profiles. Dating for LGBT
works brilliantly - and the only location based dating/hookup apps that I know
of that actually took off are targetted at LGBTs. The heterosexual space on
the other hand still suffers from the same old - problem as high school.

~~~
scott_s
How do you know this is true? Your own experience, or data? I live in a big
area, so perhaps I can't see the effect even if its there.

~~~
kamakazizuru
I run a consultancy that helps companies do stuff in big data.. one of our
recent clients was one of the largest dating portals in europe :)

------
dylandrop
Perhaps some hardware ideas will be on there. It seems like all those savvy
Kickstarter trinkets are the next big thing (Lockitron comes to mind).

------
t0
Have any of these even been solved yet?

------
carlosn

      Does the email replacement sound like a support ticket system to anyone else?

------
h4pless
Not to be snarky or anything but in short: we're currently working on the new
ideas. Please give us a little bit of time before you ask Mr. Graham to give
us a synopsis of the most logical projects to address. Trust me, whatever he
wants done: there are people working on it. "What do you want to contribute?"
is the more relevant question. What are your ideas for "Startup Ideas We'd
Like to Fund"? and start working on those.

~~~
h4pless
An even better question to help is: Who is working on the new greatest
technology, and how can I help?

Paul Graham and Steve Jobs weren't magical people... they are/were people who
addressed the needs of the masses. Start looking at things that annoy you and
figure out a way to fix them. That is way to better society.

------
philfreo
A little more recent:

[http://ycombinator.com/rfs.html](http://ycombinator.com/rfs.html)

~~~
Kiro
I like RFS #7.

~~~
ntaylor
[http://ycombinator.com/rfs7.html](http://ycombinator.com/rfs7.html) (in case
you'd like to know)

