
Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas (2012) - tosh
http://www.paulgraham.com/ambitious.html
======
Animats
I'm surprised that someone hasn't taken on Google in search. Cuil tried, and
they had a huge spike in traffic at launch. Then people discovered the product
was broken. Also, they didn't have a revenue model. They were able to build a
full search engine with about 50 people and $50M, which indicates the price of
entry isn't that high.

Over time, hardware gets cheaper, and the cost of building a search engine
declines. This has not been matched with a reduction in ad density. The cost
improvement is going into Google's profit margin. That indicates a
vulnerability.

Google has some striking weaknesses. The two I focus on are provenance and
business background. I've done work on business background (see
"sitetruth.com"). That tries to find the real-world business behind a web site
that's selling something, and then uses the data available about real-world
businesses to check it out. That can then be fed into search result ordering.
SiteTruth is a demo; it's running off free data sources. Paying for higher
quality data from Dun and Bradstreet and other non-cheap sources would make
the business background check much better.

Google's other big weakness is provenance. Search engines should find the
original source of information. Much of the Internet is sites scraping other
sites, linking to other sites, and commenting on other sites. We see this on
HN all the time, where someone links to an article, but the actual source is
two blogs deep. The original source should be the primary search result,
perhaps annotated with notes about the more heavily promoted sites mentioning
it. This means more attention to when something appeared and better matching
of content. Google already does this for news. For ranking purposes, attention
metrics for scraper sites need to be credited to the original source, not the
scraper site.

One possible customer for such a system is Bloomberg. The people who get those
expensive terminals could use both of those features. Then offer it to the
better universities, so that students grow up using something less consumer-
oriented with Google. That strategy worked for Facebook.

~~~
gboudrias
The quality of Google's search results has already gone down, thanks to
results being personalized based on previous searches and other data, a
feature it seems _no one_ asked for. And they continue to cannibalize
themselves by making ads more and more indistinguishable from normal search
results. I'm sure that's made them a lot of money in the short-term, but
everyone now knows they can't be trusted, as quality is no longer sacred
(which was its main appeal back in the early days!). They are now in the same
category of pedestrian ad peddlers as Facebook and Twitter.

Therefore a competing product doesn't need to be as good as current Google,
only as good as it used to be. Still hard, but far from impossible for someone
with money.

What may be harder is Cuil's second problem as mentioned: Finding a revenue
model. You can't compromise your data by manipulating searches (lessens
quality) and you can't compromise your integrity by prioritizing ads (lessens
trust). I'm sure a lot of people would pay big money for the answer, which no
one seems to have (as demonstrated by Twitter's descent into ad trickery such
as camouflaging the ad disclaimers).

~~~
CM30
Not just that. I think one of the biggest issues Google has had recently is
that they're trying too hard to guess what their users 'might' want instead of
what they actually want.

Try and search anything even remotely technical or specific. Google brings
back a few thousand irrelevant results, often with stuff like 'not found: word
you were actually after' underneath in grey. Sometimes even when you do add
quotes or speech marks around the term.

A better Google would be one that doesn't assume people want 'any old possible
answer' and tries to answer specific queries as easily as general ones.

~~~
fapjacks
Advertising has given Google tunnel vision with respect to search, I think.

------
ljw1001
To my mind, these are the most important, unsolved problems:

\- environmental degradation is based on two exponential growth trends: human
population and per-capita consumption (driven by economic growth). Solving
either could be, literally, a save the world scenario. The first is easiest
technically, (healthcare, non-coercive birth control, education, economic
opportunity for women) but a political minefield. (yes, population is still
growing exponentially)

\- dealing with climate change. At a minimum, this means figuring out how to
handle a significant rise in sea level in the next 100 years. Walls?
Relocation? We need to think about response now, more so than avoidance.

\- actually doing geo-engineering to prevent/reverse the greenhouse effect

\- preventing a nuclear war

\- preventing a large asteroid collision

\- dealing with large-scale disruption of employment (for example retail
continues to be hammered by online stores, self-driving trucks, etc.) Build a
better Mechanical Turk might be a useful strategy.

Obviously some of these are low-probability short-term events, but they have
very high costs. In a sense, you would be taking advantage of people's
tendency to systematically under-invest in problems of that kind.

~~~
atemerev
Fun fact: not only population is no longer growing exponentially, it doesn't
even grow linearly. The growth is now _sublinear_, and it looks like we'll
have peak population around 2070. Problem solved. Let's do something more
interesting.

~~~
ljw1001
Frome wikipedia: "Global human population growth amounts to around 75 million
annually, or 1.1% per year." 1.1% is exponential growth when the base is
growing, just like 1.1% compound interest displays exponential growth. It is
still growing exponentially, although the rate is declining.

~~~
atemerev
If the rate is declining, the growth is no longer exponential :)

~~~
ljw1001
picture two exponential growth curves, one steeper than the other, over time
the a trend moves from the steeper curve to the less steep curve. The
"population" whatever it is, is still growing exponentially at the less steep
curve.

~~~
maxerickson
The idea is that an exponential curve is no longer the correct model for
forecasting growth past 2070.

Arguing about how to express that is sort of pointless.

~~~
candiodari
Population growth in non-human species is quite well documented and is in fact
not exponential, although the early stages look exponential.

It is in fact a logistic sigmoid function. It is amazing, in that it is not
what you'd expect : clearly the vast majority of species have the ability to
correctly estimate the carrying capacity of a habitat and only overshoot by a
little bit.

So the Malthusian argument is incorrect, probably, if humans are like other
animals (and since population growth curves in many localities do indeed look
like S-curves I would say that this ought to be the default claim). Human
population size will by itself stop just shy of the carrying capacity of the
planet. Which is exactly what you'd want to happen.

In all likelihood, this will happen without active measures from governments
(which won't work anyway due to the global nature of the required policies),
with or without popularizing contraceptives, with or without female labor
participation, ... (not saying those aren't desirable, just that they aren't
necessary)

The alternative requires an assumption that humans are hugely different from
the species that we evolved from, and since this certainly isn't true in the
biological sense, why would our population growth be so very different ?
Humans are not the first large animal to "conquer the planet", and reach
population numbers in the billions, with some fish well on the way to
trillions even today, and we aren't the biggest species in terms of total
biomass by a very long way (amongst non-plants that honour likely goes to
ants, but even pathetic species of bacteria dwarf their numbers). Will we be
the last one ? Perhaps, but it seems unlikely.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logistic_function#In_ecology:_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logistic_function#In_ecology:_modeling_population_growth)

~~~
ljw1001
I refer you to the 12,000-year human population growth chart on Our World In
Data, in a post by Max Roser.

[https://ourworldindata.org/world-population-
growth/](https://ourworldindata.org/world-population-growth/)

Growth is clearly exponential. Your theories don't fit the data.

~~~
candiodari
I'm looking at that graph. I see a spike in the growth rate, after the spike
it goes to zero. I'm not an expert (I have a masters in statistics actually)
but that doesn't look very exponential to me.

Can you explain what I'm missing ?

------
d_burfoot
One of my beliefs about startups is that the jump from side project to
business shouldn't even seem that hard. It definitely shouldn't seem
"frighteningly ambitious". Look at the origin stories of the big 5:

GOOG: we've got a search engine that we did as an academic project. Lots of
people are using it. Let's turn it into a business.

FACE: we've got a social network that lots of college kids are using. Let's
turn it into a business.

AMAZ: let's sell books over the internet.

AAPL: Hmmm, my crazy genius friend Woz built an awesome "personal computer" in
his spare time. Let's scale up production and sell it.

MSFT: Let's scale up our software development business and go after much
bigger targets.

~~~
hasenj
Survival bias. Look it up.

Also worth looking up: wishful thinking.

~~~
max_
Life is not a lottery.

EDIT: Statements like "survival bias" are used by people that often subscribe
to Narrative Fallacies.

Companies like GOOG, FACE, APPL, MSFT are not successful because they won some
big lottery.

They are successful because the identified "objectives" and made the _right_
calculations to those objectives.

And if they stop making the _right_ calculations to their ojectives they WILL
end up like Kodak, Nokia & HP

~~~
tyingq
You don't think some amount of luck is involved? I believe most of your
example successes had moments where they avoided failure only via outside
factors they didn't predict, control, etc.

~~~
max_
"Luck" strikes _every-one_ once in a while.

What matters is whether you are ready or not. To make use of your "Luck"

~~~
tyingq
I don't feel like that's the case every time. Sometimes you make the right
decision for the wrong reasons. Or your bad decisions, by way of luck, end up
not hurting you.

Bill Gates, for example, initially declined IBM's approaches to build DOS for
them. He declined, and referred them to Gary Kildall. IBM only came back to
Gates because the deal with Kildall fell apart. There was no vision, skill,
etc, in that sequence of events. Just luck. I imagine other highly successful
people could point out similar stories in their past.

Gates likely would have been successful either way, but perhaps not to the
same degree.

------
kristianc
The 'frightening ambition' on display here seems to be to beat out incumbents.

Not that there's anything wrong with that, and PG is right to point out that
the rewards for doing so are huge (this reads a lot like Zero to One).

But in terms of social impact I look at these ideas, with the possible
exception of Moore's Law (albeit they are from five years ago) and think, meh?

How much does an incrementally better Google, a slightly faster GMail (exists,
if you're willing to give up spam filtering), a replacement to Oxford/Harvard,
a slightly better Netflix really get us? Certainly it doesn't seem to solve
any of the major challenges that we face today.

~~~
petra
To replace something you have to offer something better, and often, there's a
ton of value there:

\- Google: Actually there's a lot to improve on Google, and a ton of value
there. Just think that instead of what Google gives on medical info, you'll be
refereed to an AI that will ask you questions, and give you top quality
information like a medical expert would(or better - more time, better quality
content, etc...). Or the million ways better search could help
engineers/scientists/lawyers/etc...

Actually i would like to see something like a subscription marketplace for
quality search engines(where your query is refered to the most suitable search
engine and profits are shared fairly). Would be interesting.

\- Replace universities: Just solve the affordability problem. That would be
huge enough.

\- Ongoing diagnosis - If it works well, and affordable enough, could create
plenty of value. But that's a big if.

But the rest, sure they seem mostly about money.

~~~
fny
Google already aims to provide better medical results. They recently hired
former FDA head Rob Califf to help lead that effort.

I'm also fairly convinced big tech companies will eat up any emerging market
that's within it's competency unless there's some core violation of
principles. Take Duck Duck Go, for example. They've definitely managed to
steal market share away from Google because they clash with Google's lack of
concern for pure privacy. Snapchat managed to do the same to Facebook because
of their disappearing images, but now that Facebook has incorporated those
features into Instagram, that point of difference is dead.

For as long as big tech maintains the startup mindset, challengers will
invevitably be swallowed either through competition or acquisition. In my
opinion, the most ambitious startups are those pursuing underserved markets
encumbered by bureaucratic or corporate incompetency.

------
cocktailpeanuts
I can't believe how naive people are sounding regarding Google on this thread.
Almost like you guys were living under a rock for the last decade.

Many have tried to fight Google based on the (incorrect) idea that having "a
better search engine" will win. I guess this is why people still keep building
these things.

You can't win Google by "building a better search engine". Many smart people
before you have tried and didn't succeed, and it wasn't because they were not
smart enough, or because the product was inferior. It's because search engine
has become a stable category, just like you eat the same cereal every morning.

People won't suddenly ditch all cereals from general meals just because some
newcomer cereal company makes a "better cereal". You have to build something
completely different, or at least position it that way so people perceive it
as a different category.

While all these people were "trying to beat google", it was actually Facebook
that came close to "beating" google at its own game. Don't just build a better
something. Build something different.

~~~
voidmain
I'm not saying you're wrong. But I literally tried a new breakfast cereal this
morning. And it was crap :-)

~~~
contingencies
Try soybean powder in hot water with salt, Sichuan pepper oil ( _huajiao you_
), fresh diced coriander, crushed garlic, crushed ginger and dry chilli
flakes. Popular in parts of China, high in protein and goes well with breads
for dipping. Damn tasty! How's that for a search result?

------
barry-cotter
Eliezer 1710 days ago | parent | favorite | on: Ask PG: What Is The Most
Frighteningly Ambitious I...

Can you say where the scariest and most ambitious convincing pitch was on the
following scale? 1) We're going to build the next Facebook! 2) We're going to
found the next Apple! 3) Our product will create sweeping political change!
This will produce a major economic revolution in at least one country!
(Seasteading would be change on this level if it worked; creating a new
country successfully is around the same level of change as this.) 4) Our
product is the next nuclear weapon. You wouldn't want that in the wrong hands,
would you? 5) This is going to be the equivalent of the invention of
electricity if it works out. 6) We're going to make an IQ-enhancing drug and
produce basic change in the human condition. 7) We're going to build serious
Drexler-class molecular nanotechnology. 8) We're going to upload a human brain
into a computer. 9) We're going to build a recursively self-improving
Artificial Intelligence. 10) We think we've figured out how to hack into the
computer our universe is running on.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4510702](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4510702)

------
alaskamiller
1\. A New Search Engine

Turns out it's not about new search engines but rather how to capture search
intent. Amazon did that to beat Google.

2\. Replace Email

This will be done by notifications and direct messaging. Kids these days don't
bother with email.

3\. Replace Universities

Turns out this is just upscaling. Most of the job training stuff is dropping
out of the lower orbit of a university and being swallowed up by the new in
faux DeVry tech boot camps. But want to be an AI expert? Want to be a doctor?
You still need to put in time in academia.

4\. Internet drama

They all mostly caught up. Still can't beat Netflix though.

5\. The Next Steve Jobs

Conan O'Brien, a fellow Harvard alum, said it much better. In the pursuit of
being someone else you end up being yourself. Just be yourself.

6\. Bring Back Moore's Law

This is happening in GPUs.

7\. Ongoing Diagnosis

This is happening.

3-5 years is about a cycle that turns high tech to low tech. Most of the stuff
talked about in 2012 are now low tech. Things like mobile app development or
tablets or 4k TVs. Twas a good feeling back then, now it's all AI and MR and
rapid fabrication.

~~~
Alex3917
> Kids these days don't bother with email.

This seems to be a life phase, not a long term trend.

~~~
tchaffee
Not from what I'm seeing. Companies running on WeChat, WhatsApp, and the ever
popular Slack. My immigration attorney asked to connect on WhatsApp to avoid
email. All anecdotal, but I'm old enough to remember things before we had
email and the people mentioned above aren't young either.

~~~
XorNot
I think you have to be in some fairly specific companies to think this is
normal.

Everywhere else you have a company email account and it's your principle way
to have a paper trail.

"Not using email" is definitely a kids phase. Then you go work for a non-
startup company and email is everything.

An ambitious startup idea would be oust Microsoft Outlook from this role -
find a way to globally distribute the meeting room asset tracking stuff
securely and seamlessly.

~~~
tchaffee
> "Not using email" is definitely a kids phase. Then you go work for a non-
> startup company and email is everything.

One of the companies I am talking about has revenue in the billions and
operations across the globe and is publicly traded. The employees, young and
old, want to communicate in real time, to get things done quickly. Many
employees even have chat access to the highest levels of the company,
including the CEO.

~~~
ryanwaggoner
No one is disputing that they don't use chat. Everyone uses chat. But they
also still use email. This company in question gives every employee an email
address, right?

------
atemerev
These are not frighteningly ambitious. How about:

— A platform for CRISPR-assisted human genome editing. I, for one, welcome
improving our inefficient, disease-ridden, short-lived bodies.

— A morality API. Various human societies have different moral concerns and
taboos. Can we expose some tweaks and tools to navigate this as continuous
spectra?

— Post-government transitional structures. Hierarchical power arrangements and
traditional governments are doomed anyway; let's use network science to
simulate and explore how things might work in the future.

And I still want my thermonuclear power generation. If electricity is to
finally totally replace combustion, we need it cheaper. MUCH cheaper.

~~~
erikpukinskis
This is actually a really good list.

The "big problems" being solved in tech right now are mostly just people
fiddling around with tooling and business models. I wish more of us would dig
into these kinds of opportunities... things with a profound possibility to
change civilization for the better.

I think there's a lot of skepticism about that kind of endeavor, because there
are so many 20 year olds who think they are going to "change the world"
without either understanding the world, or really having the deep seated
motivation required to see such a project through hell.

But the fact that the area is blanketed in charlatans doesn't mean the
underlying concept—looking deep into our future and try to accelerate big
difficult changes—is flawed.

It's just the people best suited to do it—with the skepticism, experience, and
skin in the game—tend to write it off as a silly idea. Maybe they need to do
more drugs.

I'm actively working on #2 and #3, which I think are probably the same problem
in different forms, but I think my efforts in the area would be well
characterized as "hampered by mental illness". Not to say I won't get there,
but maybe you have to be a little crazy to try.

------
hal9000xp
To me the one single biggest challenge with startup ideas is that I always
feel I'm too late on the market while it's not actually too late.

I asked HN how to deal with this but my question was too difficult to read
since I've tried to make thought experiment of imagining you are back in 90s.

Here is my post:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14336513](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14336513)

May be somebody can give thoughtful answer to this deep question.

~~~
erikpukinskis
My advice: be dumber. Stop thinking about your place in an abstract historical
era, just think about your next sale.

You can think about your place in abstract historical eras on your next
mushroom trip in Mexico.

------
nebula
_The point when it became clear to me that Microsoft had lost their way was
when they decided to get into the search business._ [This was PG's view in the
article]

In retrospect, this seems to be a wrong conclusion. I know Bing is far far
away from Google; But I think that Bing investment was well worth it for
Microsoft. If you have followed Build 2017 conference, it is obvious how
Microsoft is leveraging AI/ML in several of their products; and of course,
they have a good offering of cognitive service cloud APIs. Without their heavy
investment in Bing, Microsoft perhaps would have found it hard to make such
quick jump onto the AI/ML bandwagon.

As a side note, is Microsoft still considered a company on its way to
oblivion? I personally think they reinvented themselves in the new era. Am I
mistaken in my view?

~~~
sah2ed
> As a side note, is Microsoft still considered a company on its way to
> oblivion? I personally think they reinvented themselves in the new era. Am I
> mistaken in my view?

You are not mistaken but back in 2012 when the article was written it was
pretty common to bash Microsoft.

In fact, PG had written an older essay with a click-bait title of "Microsoft
is Dead" [1] in 2007. Naturally, many people didn't realize he meant that
metaphorically so he wrote a rejoinder titled "Microsoft is Dead: The Cliffs
Notes" [2].

[1]
[http://www.paulgraham.com/microsoft.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/microsoft.html)

[2]
[http://www.paulgraham.com/cliffsnotes.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/cliffsnotes.html)

~~~
erikpukinskis
Notably Ballmer left in 2014.

------
sjtmbed
Long time lurker here and 1st time participant.

>The most ambitious is to try to do it automatically: to write a compiler that
will parallelize our code for us.

Does anyone know if this has been accomplished in any form or fashion by
anyone/startup?

or is there anyone doing the below part atleast?

>An optimization marketplace would be a way to generate the sufficiently smart
compiler piecemeal

I am very interested in finding a solution to these problems.

~~~
zeptomu
Welcome to HN! :)

> Does anyone know if this has been accomplished in any form or fashion by
> anyone/startup?

There are compilers that are able to auto-parallelize specific kinds of
software fragments, but most of them are not able to optimize general-purpose
programs in a reasonable way.

There were and still are research projects in many computer science
departments that try to find ways to auto-parallelize C or Fortran code, but
many believe that these low-level languages provide a too unconstrained memory
and type system, which makes auto-parallelization efforts really hard, because
a "sufficiently smart compiler" has to prove certain properties about the code
to guarantee correctness of the optimization (parallelization).

There are also people who think there's not much room for parallelization in
general-purpose software development (business applications) that mostly wrap
specific libraries. The libraries itself may exploit parallelization, but this
is usually hand-crafted by their developers and not done using tools.

I am not saying, it's not possible, but it has been tried _many_ times, and
building a new language (or improving one) may be less effort, than trying to
auto-parallelize classic, old code (C, Fortran, etc.).

------
chiefalchemist
re: "Email was not designed to be used the way we use it now. Email is not a
messaging protocol. It's a todo list."

But I think it is an event protocol of sorts, with TODO being a subset.
Subject, msg body, etc. are universal to a lot of things. For example, the
difference between say email and SMS is more UI than the actual structure of
the messages. The text transcript of a phone call could fit into the same
bucket.

To point is, the "email" UI / UX is awful. It hasn't evolved. It might as well
be a fax machine. (Goggle) Wave might have been a step in the right direction.
The idea was right and solid, but Google (being Google) fucked up the launch /
rollout. And now we're still stuck with the same shite email experience. And
thus Graham's article is still relevant.

Note: We're all but stuck with the email protocol. The world isn't going to
change en masse. That is my client experience can be improved without having
to abandon the protocol. Come on. That's not risky, nor is it rocket science.

~~~
andrepd
It's a protocol to send messages between two addresses, an electronic analog
of mail. I really don't see why it is supposed to be "actually a todo list".

~~~
em3rgent0rdr
The great thing is email is easily extensible. Think of all the things that
can be done on email!

~~~
0x445442
Exactly. And I've grown so weary of all the disjointed UI/UX of the web that
I've been shoe horning more and more of my daily workflow and information
retrieval into email.

~~~
chiefalchemist
Understood. But it doesn't have to be this way. All that money and brainpower,
and no one in SV can fix an obvious and known problem??

------
srameshc
_It seems reasonable to assume Bill Clinton has the best medical care
available. And yet even he had to wait till his arteries were over 90% blocked
to learn that the number was over 90%._ Wonder if some startup is working on
this area of non intrusive diagnosis of arteries blockage ?

~~~
observation
I want to see a startup which invented a fridge/cupboard and a toilet that
worked together.

You have the inputs, you have the outputs, now you can perform analysis to
improve lifestyle health.

People are not calorie counters, they're intrinsically lazy, they'll mostly
accept the defaults their fridge and cupboard tell them to do.

I think you could save millions of lives this way.

It's one of the elements in 1999 AD, the Ford corporation video made in the
60s, but it's never been implemented.

------
jfoster
Objectively, is there any reason why a "search engine whose users consisted of
the top 10,000 hackers and no one else would be in a very powerful position
despite its small size?"

Is the hypothesis that hackers are more likely to spread the search engine to
other users, or is it something else?

~~~
asadlionpk
I think PG has something about this but ideas is hackers are early-adopters
and usually a sign of future trend.

~~~
jfoster
My gut feeling agrees with that, but I would love to hear a more objective or
well-reasoned explanation of it.

------
Entangled
What would Steve Jobs do?

A Mac Nano for $99 to compete with the Raspberry Pi.

A Mac Mini for $199 to spread the love of OSX.

An iPhone mini for $199 to spread the love of iOS.

A 60" Apple TV (yes, with screen) with an iPod like remote.

Siri.com as a text search engine.

Apple Pay as money transfer between individuals.

If Apple wants to keep their high quality mark untouched, they should spin a
second company codenamed "Orange" and deliver lower quality devices in order
to spread their platforms.

It is time for Apple to leave the constrained niche they've cornered
themselves into. 10% of the top market is a good position to hold forever,
just like Rolex, but in the era of social virality market penetration is a
must for survival, you must be everywhere and in every device.

~~~
erikpukinskis
Apple's weakness will always be that they strive towards perfection, which
biases them towards creating monolithic mass market product lines.

Things an end user might constitute a critical modification for some market,
like a bottle opener super glued to the back of a phone, is a blemish in the
eye of Jony Ive. Apple employees are grossed out by hacks, so they can't
operate in the long tail. They can only go after the big glorious spike toward
the perfect unified One True Way and therefore are destined to hold only 20%
market share.

They serve that 20% damn well though. People who want designers to think
things out for them.

There's another kind of designer, who designs for chaos, for modification, for
play. But those people don't work at Apple.

~~~
Entangled
Which is a very valid point, I applaud them for their vision for excellence.
But in today's world, where market share is crucial for the adoption of new
technologies, they can hardly survive with a 20% share of the marketplace in
the near future.

For payment networks total penetration is crucial, for open markets, social
platforms, productive software, for search engines. Again, a Rolex can survive
as a timeless jewel in your wrist since it does not need interaction with the
rest of the world, but good luck competing with Whatsapp, Facebook, Amazon,
Google, Paypal, even Uber or MS Office if only 10% of your userbase can afford
your exclusive products.

That's why I propose they create a sister business in charge of expanding
their market penetration with cheaper products or face extinction by
isolation. Apple for the elites, Orange for the plebes, both using their
platform which in turn will allow them to capture a greater market share for
their future technologies.

I can't do Facetime with my mother or brother because they don't have Apple
products. We could if they had an Orange product for $99 running OSX or iOS.

~~~
erikpukinskis
You just explained exactly why FaceTime will lose to
snapchat/Facebook/WebRTC/etc in the long run. Facebook profits from every
platform. Apple profits from there being a hierarchy of incompatible
platforms.

------
nebabyte
These are the kind of "ideas" that get people to waste a lot of time and VC
money, so I invite the author to either put his money where his mouth is or
accept the existing solutions in spite of his minor look-and-feel/nostalgia
gripes.

I'm sure even in 2012 some of his "$50 ideas" (or no, he said he'd spend $1000
potentially!) could be solved _with the existing solutions_ and a little
tweaking. I know for a fact gmail has a reduced loading mode that is snappier
and lighter weight.

> Is there no configuration of the bits in memory of a present day computer
> that is this compiler? If you really think so, you should try to prove it,
> because that would be an interesting result.

I'd again invite the author to "try" and recreate a human mind in computer
memory - surely "some combination of bits exist" for it, and attempting to do
so "would be an interesting result!" etc etc

What this basically reads as is a bunch of "here are some simple things that
can be reinvented by oneself, but I'm lazy so someone make new services here
so I can come in and comment about how I was just thinking I needed one and
that I'll 'check it out' and..." For the time that's passed between this
article's writing and now surely he could have just hired a hacker with that
"$/month" he'd otherwise spend to set up a configuration that better suits his
whim (likely from existing tools, userscript tweaks, settings/labs/etc) and
pocket the difference.

~~~
mythrwy
I believe the authors main gig is precisely "putting his money where his mouth
is".

------
theprop
I would still recommend going after a brand new product category. While it may
not sound "ambitious", but more like you're building a toy (say a drone or an
AI machine), it's most likely that the next gigantic company is not a new
search engine or new operating system.

It's _extremely_ difficult to get into an existing product category such as
operating systems, search engines, email, etc.

------
tarikjn
I think there is a clear distinction to make, sure, you should be
frighteningly ambitious if you want to have an impact. But the initial idea
should not be frighteningly ambitious, in fact it should be the exact
opposite, and should be something simple to execute with the minimum amount of
capital to be able to test it in the wild.

------
Entangled
The Next TV.

I firmly believe the next wave of technology will hit our TVs. The final nut
has been cracked and that is the remote. Typing on a TV is the worse and voice
won't help, so a dual touch/keyboard piece of glass is all needed to make the
TV the next entertaining device after the mobile phone. But they need to
converge all devices needed right now into one. I don't need a pc, a mobile
working as a remote, a tv device and a tv screen in order to enjoy the future.
I need ONE TV with a glass remote. That's it. Google and Apple are missing the
elephant in the room.

What would Steve Jobs do? A 60" Apple TV with an iPod like remote for $3995 in
dark aluminum and a 40" version for $1995 and still sell the attachable box
for $150 for those who already have a shitty TV. Allow Safari and all apps
without restrictions, even Popcorn Time. Can't fight what the consumers want.

~~~
ryanwaggoner
I really don't think consumers want this. We're moving away from our TVs, not
towards them. I think that's why Apple never released this product and
probably never will.

~~~
erikpukinskis
Plus AR turns TVs into just another app.

------
jmstfv
Out of curiosity, how viable is a search engine for hackers (in terms of a
business model)? What are some "weaknesses" of Google that this search engine
might take advantage of? One thing I noticed is the amount of "low-quality"
pages that appear on the page#1 for popular keywords.

~~~
wayn3
google provides qualitative answers. what would be really neat was a search
engine that provides quantitative answers or raw data.

i'd like to be able to search google for "all the pages that contain a
particular javascript snippet", for example. obviously, google has that data.
obviously, they dont want to make it available.

there are services that offer such things but they suck because their datasets
are way too small.

on google specifically: the results pages dont matter anymore. nobody clicks
anything but the "#1 results" if they click even that. for questions, google
very often responds with something like a quora question or some widget of its
own, or something else that is really useful - and if its not useful, you try
another query instead of clicking through the results pages.

results pages are mostly kept for nostalgia it seems.

~~~
ljw1001
This sounds a lot like Wolfram Alpha, although google does now provide some
quantitative results. It works as a calculator and as a units translator for
example.

that's a good point about only the first few results mattering.

~~~
wayn3
this does not sound like wolframalpha at all.

wolframalpha is computer algebra software turned into a web service which
allows for searching some papers, pre-written articles and a bunch of
interesting, curated numbers.

wolframalpha provides qualitative answers to "questions about math".

answering the physics problem "whats the speed of light" with "er its fast" is
qualitative. saying its 2.99+/\- epsilon _10^6 km /s is a quantitative result
based on data gathered from some experiment.

answering the search engine problem "whats the speed of light" with "2.99+/\-
epsilon _10^6 km/s" is not a quantitative result. in a search engine contexts,
thats just the most likely correct result . qualitative. just a guess. some
computer looked at a bunch of data and decided that one of them was probably
right based on some popularity heuristic. its like asking an expert who makes
an educated guess and claims its right because seniority.

a quantitative search engine would be capable of answering questions like "how
many sites do X".

wolframalpha doesnt do that. its just maple in a browser.

------
smithd98
Graham predicted Slack (email replacement) would be big before Slack existed
(launched Aug 2013
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slack_(software)#History](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slack_\(software\)#History))

~~~
pxlpshr
Perhaps retroactively that conclusion can be made based on Slack's marketing
material, but Slack hasn't replaced email for most people. Definitely not for
me.

After our acquisition, we transitioned from small startup where it was super
useful to a large enterprise (5500 employees) and I've found that Slack is
pretty difficult to scale here beyond engineering/product management.

Slack is strong with helping small scrum teams collaborate, or fielding
employee questions in town hall meetings. But, then there's #channel overload
which compounds the distraction problem and feels just as bad as email with
hundreds of unread messages. And, we have a lot of teams in completely
different time zones (India), so the synchronous stream of communication
doesn't work as well because it's difficult to track conversations. It's also
not inclusive by nature; I have to invite external people to participate,
which is a security concern at my company, so it's disabled and used for
internal purposes only.

All that said, I love Slack but it is what it is. Asynchronous email is still
very valuable to me, much more than Slack.

~~~
icc97
Slack replaced Skype chats mostly for me and it did also reduce email.

It was really important for us, because important decisions were being agreed
in the midst of a Skype chat, which was only in your history on one machine
and not easily searchable.

We also had Google Hangout chats/conversations which are searchable. However
this caused further confusion about having to search via email/Skype/Hangouts
to find out what was said. Also the conversation from one Hangout was
separated from the other - where as we could replace that with one slack
channel from all the Hangouts that we had.

Skype for Business now does something similar in that it also keeps you chat
history in Outlook.

However I really like the clean separation of emails vs Slack chats. Slack is
completely independent of my email so I'm not dependent on Gmail or Outlook.

For me it means that email becomes reduced but I regard it as a channel that
is reserved for more important communication, i.e. I'll email something if I
want it to be on record as having been written. All the chat fluff gets dumped
in Slack.

~~~
achievingApathy
I am routinely amazed that people find Slack innovative. It's basically a
pretty front-end to IRC. And your chat logs were always searchable.. open in a
text editor and Ctrl-F. Even the integrations aren't novel, IRC bots have
existed for decades.

IRC also has the added benefit of being scalable and free. And everyone has
their favorite client already that is more customizable than any Slack client.
And you can own your own data/conversations, as an organization. I have never
really been comfortable with the notion that Slack can poke around in any
channel's history regardless of how secret those conversations are thought to
be.

~~~
ryandrake
A great deal of tech, especially today, is just re-writing things from the
past, closing up the protocols, and then putting marketing behind them to make
it look like you're inventing something. Slack (IRC) is one. Look at the
dozens of instant messaging clients that are just clones of ICQ from the 90's.
Social networking sites are pretty much rehashed (albeit giant) BBS systems.

------
yalogin
How about smaller scale ideas? For example is it worth starting a social
network + IM combination? Let's say it's targeted towards a niche audience.
How do you evaluate those things? Is the general rule don't take FB, Snap head
on?

------
jpatokal
(2012)

I also can't think of any startup in the 5 years since that has really taken
off by pursuing one of these ideas. (Unless you stretch the definitions enough
to consider Snapchat a replacement for email.)

~~~
nathan_f77
Slack could be described as a replacement for email, but in a behavioral
sense. DuckDuckGo was the attempt at a new search engine, but it hasn't
reeeally worked. Khan Academy is replacing universities. Even universities are
starting to replace themselves by offering many of their courses online, and
streaming many of their lectures. Netflix is obviously the winner under
'Internet Drama', and it's clear that a lot has changed in the last 5 years.
No idea about the next Steve Jobs. The Moore's Law thing: Heroku, Kubernetes,
and many other startups that try to simplify the cloud.

So you're right, not many "startups" in here, with the exception of Slack and
DDG. I think it's more common for an existing and mature company to take over
these spaces when the time is right.

------
gigatexal
Taking on Google means finding away around the moat they have with their
economies of scale due to their size in the market and the mindshare that goes
along with it (when the term google became a verb I figured search was a
solved problem and Google had won).

Better for someone to find a better way to organize the world's internet data
or links or find a way for me to get more out of it. It's one thing to find me
the most relevant website but maybe finding a way for me to do more with that
will get me to leave Google.

------
dustingetz
What are the most frighteningly ambitious YC startups in recent memory?

~~~
joshvm
They weren't YC as far as I know, but Planetary Resources comes to mind.

------
hoodoof
Don't do what venture capitalists want you to do - do what you want to do.

And if you don't have any ideas then you shouldn't be an entrepreneur because
then you're just in it for what, the money? Entrepreneurship is about making
something that you MUST get out into the world because you are so driven to do
so.

Being an entrepreneur without an idea building what Paul Graham tells you to
means you should have a job, not a company.

------
Entangled
Apple is underplaying Siri and they should morph her into a full fledged TEXT
search engine. I rarely use voice to make any search on my laptop but text
would be the perfect input mechanism for Siri integrating her with all apps,
the web, and the IoT.

------
tomnj
We tried #6 at ufora: "make a large number of CPUs look to the developer like
one very fast CPU."
[https://github.com/ufora/ufora](https://github.com/ufora/ufora)

------
em3rgent0rdr
Don't reinvent email. Just add tags to indicate TODO fields in the email
headers. Then youre building on the preexisting infrastructure. And it can
handle the degenerate case where the TODO is to read, since it is email.

~~~
mgkimsal
header tags could also indicate if something was to be interpreted as a
certain type, no? "quick message/alert" vs "long form message" vs "automated
message" vs "from human", etc. Agents could then determine what to do with it
- log it, send other notification, delete it, auto-reply, add to calendar,
etc.

I'm no expert, but I'd think some of this is already being done, no? However,
there's more value to a few companies to have walled-garden messaging
platforms vs 100% open and interoperable, and that's not a problem solved by
tags.

------
tyingq
_" A New Search Engine"_

I really wish the moat weren't so big on this one. The path Google is taking
pretty clearly ends with no merit driven organic search results.

------
utkarshohm
I believe we are in the early phase of the adoption curve for #2 replace
email- slack, #4 internet drama- netflix, hbo etc, #5 next steve jobs- elon
musk.

------
marze
Safe to say that almost all wildly successful, frighteningly ambitious
startups now and going forward will be enabled by machine learning/AI.

------
wwarner
I would think that any regular reader of HN would think this list is tame and
unimaginative.

But I'll agree that investing in computational power is worthwhile. I say that
because of all of this year's news in quantum computing, and because the
amount of energy required to represent and flip a single bit should be
infinitesimal. So I don't think that it's been shown in principle that
achieving higher speeds requires higher (at runtime anyway).

Honestly, it should be NATO initiative. It would be worth a lot more than
landing on the moon.

------
eli_gottlieb
Ok, (3), (6), and (7) are _actually_ reasonably ambitious. The rest seem like
making a business out of small conveniences.

------
jansho
I also feel that Google search results have become spammy lately. For
technical topics, or opinions on a social topic, HN's search box can yield
some gold mines.

What struck me the most from the essay is the section regarding universities.
I don't think universities should be replaced. I think that they should _go
back_ to what they originally were, centuries ago, but enhanced by technology,
better understanding of the learning process and sensitivity to each learner's
personal development.

That means students who are there because they want to learn, not just as a
career stepping stone or for rites of passage, and who are free to follow
their interests flexibly.

Tutors who are passionate about their subjects, and want to share and who care
about the flock they've taken in.

A better peer-learning system; to openly share ideas, adjust and enrich own
thoughts and build projects together.

A dynamic curriculum; solid trees of knowledge that are open to wide-ranging
thoughts and student needs and whims.

Taking advantage of current technologies, blending them in the curriculum for
a better learning experience.

Greater sensitivity to each student's circumstances, who may change their mind
to pursue another interest, who may decide to take a break from learning, who
may be suffering from crises, ranging from personal to existential.

...

Universities are supposed to be where you can learn freely, and possibly for
the undergraduate, to prepare him/her for the real world.

Yet your university experience is measured by what grade you graduate with. No
doubt students need assessments - but it should be feedback for further
development. Why can't we see the university as an incubator of personal
development, where learning is a naturally iterative process?

But it seems that in the "real world", all this seems to be wishful thinking.
Universities _have_ to make money! It's not just for commercial reasons, but
research needs funding, whole populations need educating (and get jobs.) And
recruiters are not that interested in personal journeys, because that's not
what companies want - they want newly minted cogs to add to their great
machines.

So yes, it is frightening to think about it - it's very messy! In my view, the
core issue with universities is that they are not adapting fast enough, and
has become too bloated and possibly too commercialised that they have lost
perspective of their original mission. So rather than build an entirely new
system to replace universities, wouldn't it be more feasible for existing
universities to be bolder and make the changes themselves?

The other approach is to provide an alternative learning experience to
universities (rather than replacing them.) This is an idea that has been
knocking around in my head for a while: how about a public learning centre
using _MOOCs_ as the main resource? This will democratise MOOCs even more; you
will have richer peer support, greater motivation to complete the course, and
local subject matter experts can volunteer as 'mentors' to support the group
though with no actual obligation to pass anyone.

 _Libraries._ Libraries can do this.

------
diyseguy
Why is he comparing YCombinator to a university? I don't get it

------
jastanton
I'm surprised health care isn't on the list.

------
yters
The days of true innovation are passed.

~~~
fuzzfactor
I agree, seems like the weeks, months and years are just beginning.

~~~
yters
What innovation is happening now? Everything is hype with little to show.

------
graycat
I very much like nearly all of Paul Graham's thinking. For his essay this
time, I don't like his thinking.

I believe that his essay here, and nearly all VCs and media pundits, make the
same, horrible mistake about planning successful startups:

(1) We have to realize that successful startups are exceptional, one in a
million or so. So, for the planning, we are likely planning something
exceptional.

(2) A successful startup is usually one of a kind, unique, quite different
from the past. E.g., HP, Seagate, Intel, Microsoft, QUALCOMM, Apple, Cisco,
Google, Facebook, Twitter, Applied Materials, Amazon, etc.

So, from (1) and (2), in planning a successful startup, we are looking for
something both exceptional and new. So, for our plan, we will have to dig
enough to be exceptional (the common, ordinary need not apply) and also new
(no sense in looking at and trying to build incrementally on the closely
related past).

E.g., for the A-bomb, don't go to a bunch of experts in WWI field artillery.
Instead, need something both exceptional and new.

E.g., many VCs claim to have "deep domain knowledge", but that has to mean
that they spent a lot of time looking at poor business plans and what is in
the market now -- not both exceptional and new.

So, (1)-(2) is the horrible mistake.

But, wait, there's more:

(3) Given a candidate startup plan, how to heck to evaluate it accurately? All
concerned very much need to know.

Well, good planning of projects both exceptional and new really is possible:
Examples include Hoover Dam, the Empire State Building, the Channel Tunnel,
Ike's Overlord (invasion of Normandy), the Manhattan Project, turbojet
engines, the H-bomb, the US SSBNs, the Boeing B-52 and 707, the engines for
the SR-71, the SR-71 in total, GPS, Intel's step to 14 nm, Microsoft's Windows
NT, RSA public key encryption, and much more.

So, it is possible to evaluate projects; a project that passes a good
evaluation becomes low risk, indeed, for both the technical risk and the
market and economic risk.

Then, on (3) PG's essay and VC work in general is short on how to evaluate
projects.

My startup is one of the ones on PG's list. I don't regard the project as
risky.

Okay, let's see how this goes: The project is a new Web site. The site is
totally safe for work and squeaky clean and respectable. The site has only two
main Web pages, and both are just dirt simple, so simple they will work fine
on essentially any device with a Web browser up to date as of about 10 years
ago -- mobile to high end workstation. The project is to solve a pressing
problem so far solved at best poorly and shared by essentially every Internet
user in the world, especially in the more advanced countries. The project
seems to deserve on average at least 30 minutes of eyeball time a week for
each of its users -- that's a lot of eyeball hours per year. The site is ad
supported with some quite good, new opportunities for good ad targeting.

So, sure, from the above, do some simple, back of the envelope estimation
arithmetic and come up with the most valuable company in the world so far --
sure, > $1 T.

Now do we need to look at this "obliquely"? Not really. Once explained, it's
all plenty clear and obvious.

Do we need to start on just a small part of the whole problem? Not really.

Does such a big goal have to be a big project? Not really -- I'm a solo
founder.

Is the project risky? Now, not really; for me, never was.

Is the project difficult to evaluate? Not really -- I had to evaluate the
project and would not have proceeded unless I saw a solid project. But so far
I'm the only person who has done any even a little serious evaluation of the
project.

Is the project a huge amount of work? Nope, not really. To date it's 24,000
Visual Basic .NET Framework 4.0 programming language statements in 100,000
lines of typing I entered into my favorite text editor KEdit on Windows XP
SP3. Nope, didn't use an _integrated development environment_ \-- for me
learning to use one of those was harder than just typing in the code!

As of now, all the code is as I originally designed it and appears to run
correctly. Debugging was no problem. The code is surprisingly fast and
efficient (at one point, converting to a solid state disk drive would make the
code fast beyond belief). The code is nicely documented. No _refactoring_
needed. The code is fine.

I want to do some more testing, tweak a few places, add some data, and then go
live. The code as it is is ready for fairly serious production, and the
architecture is easily scalable to serve the world.

So, how can my project be so exceptional? And new? Well, it's new because I
thought of it, and on first glance nearly no one would believe that the
problem could have a good solution. Well, without some good original research
in applied math (the users will never be aware of) with some advanced
prerequisites, there is no good solution. So, without looking into the math,
and nearly no one in business can, there is no way to believe in the project;
so, I'm the only person who does believe in the project.

Nothing "frightening" about it!

So, my view is that the essay is poor on (1)-(3) and, with that poor
foundation, makes lots of mistakes, e.g., that big results need a big project.

~~~
georgewsinger
What's your startup?

~~~
graycat
I was just trying to comment on PG's essay and say that there needed to be
improvement on (1)-(3).

For an example, I used some of the attributes of my startup.

For my startup, I intend to announce a beta test here at HN.

For any equity investors, I totally gave up: They make the mistakes (1)-(3)
which means that they don't like my project and I don't want to report to a
BoD with them on it -- on my BoD, after my first presentation of the ad
targeting part of the project, they'd all upchuck, soil their clothes,
furniture, and carpet on their way, screaming in agony and outrage and
terrified of their fiduciary whatever, to the restrooms. After they recovered
they'd meet at the closest bar and vote to disband my company. Why? My
presentation would have some math in it, math they didn't understand, and
listening to math one does not understand for more than five minutes at a time
is worse than a root canal procedure. In all their careers they've never seen
any role for math. E.g., for ad targeting, they'd be thinking in terms of
demographics, gen X, Chablis and Brie set, McMansion set, etc., and none of
that would be in my targeting math.

The equity investors didn't want me when I started writing the code; now I
don't want them; and as soon as my project gets any reasonable revenue forever
I won't want them, their check, their BoD, or anything else. My project is to
be exceptional; equity investors are not exceptional.

------
e12e
It's (still) a good essay, but should probably have a (2012) in the title.

~~~
fuzzfactor
There certainly is a ripeness factor when it comes to idea suitability and
this can be a major or minor influence depending on the situation.

Sometimes ambition is great enough even when finances are inadequate, where
just moving a little bit in the ultimate direction (like shipping hardware) is
materially out of reach for such an extended period, startup and growth
potential can never be realized without the most exceptional source of funds
to provide leverage.

This pushes the time horizon further out as it would naturally take much
longer to connect with such an elusive benefactor on terms that can truly
maximize the performance of the combined resources.

So it seems like a good idea to have ideas that can stand the test of time,
the more ambitious you are.

Great advice from pg about tactically limiting the depth to which your full
ambition is displayed day-to-day so that rather than pie-in-the-sky being
constantly pursued, stakeholder interactions can be punctuated by achievable
milestones they can visualize being reached.

In a capitalist arrangement it can come back to the visionary exceptionalness
of the capitalist as the limiting factor as to when or if you can bring your
full potential squarely within sight.

------
GlobalServices
I think there may be room to replace the telephone. Most of my phone calls are
junk. Amazon may be on the way to doing this with Echo calling.

Make a new spam free telephone system on the ip network

------
miguelrochefort
You know what's frighteningly ambitious? Replacing ALL apps and websites by a
single one. That's right, my plan is to build one system that will make all
the others obsolete.

I've been expecting and actively looking for this for more than a decade. I
have never found anyone discussing this idea, even less attempt to implement
it. People really can't imagine what the post-app world will look like. Even
people here on Hacker News. I don't expect most VCs to appreciate it either.
I'm on my own, and I hope people will realize how important this is when
they'll see it.

The key to understand this is to realize that it's not just about building
another app. It's not just about building another OS. It's not just about
building another programming language. We need to completely rethink the way
we think and communicate. We need to invent a new communication paradigm, a
new medium for thinking.

The goal should be to eliminate the gap between the thought of something and
the existence of something. I should be able to think about X, and X should
then exist. That's the gist of it.

Obviously, it's unreasonable to expect that gap to disappear within the next
10 years. However, I believe that 10 years is enough to reduce that gap by
more than it was reduced in the past 1000 years.

Google asked themselves what email would look like if it was invented in 2009.
I'm asking what language would look like if it was invented today. Who else
attempted anything like this in recent history?

Now back to something more concrete you can all relate to. How many apps do
you have on your phone? How many online accounts have you created in your
life? How many different messaging apps are you using? Most people are very
adaptable, and don't realize that the answer is "too many". We've seen many
attempts to improve this situation, with things like the semantic web, OAuth,
WeChat, personal assistants, ethereum, Vurb, bots, Google Lens, etc. That's
not sufficient. We need something much more ambitious. We need real
disruption.

I intend to make 50% of existing jobs obsolete within the next 10 years. I'll
need some help. Who's in?

~~~
narrowrail
>How many apps do you have on your phone? How many online accounts have you
created in your life? How many different messaging apps are you using?

"Single point of failure," "Separation of concerns," and "Don't put all your
eggs in one basket" are the phrases that come to mind. Risk mitigation is a
concern for many of us, and what you describe sounds Orwellian to me.

Have you checked out Urbit? I believe it's a decentralized/federalized system
instead of the centralized on you describe.

But, I'd be interested in seeing your prototype of The Borg :)

~~~
miguelrochefort
What I'm describing is a completely decentralized system with no single point
of failure.

