> It all seems like "X but for Y" Web2.0ish companies.
This has been somewhat frustrating for me to see. I'm curious what you think actual moonshot companies look like? Are we talking novel medical tech? Advancements in aerospace? I'm specifically ignoring AI, though a few companies in that sphere will be moonshots.
Not the one you asked the question to but I'd say some examples would be:
Robotics (either to automate household drudgery or to eliminate terrible jobs nobody wants to do)
Space colonization
Terraforming (to reverse climate change which imo we are not going to solve via the austerity nonsense politicians and green activists keep pushing)
Detecting and countering AI generated spam (if this is not solved, AI could easily make "Dead Internet Theory" a reality)
Solving problems created by companies seeking profitability over the good of society. For example, dating which has been FUBARed by dating apps seeking to maximize active users. Problem here is there's no profit in it if you do it the right way for society.
Fast, safe, reliable mass transit in the US (i.e. disrupt Greyhound and/or build high speed rail more competently than California's mismanaged disaster)
Addressing homelessness, mental health and drug addiction.
Many of these would probably be best funded by a government staffed by the best and the brightest like we had between the 1930s and 1960s (think Manhattan Project, Marshall Plan and Apollo Program) not the crooks and incompetent buffoons that seemingly staff the government nowadays. But some of these could be companies or non-profits.
I'd personally love to start a company in one of these spaces (or something similar) but don't have runway so I'd either need it funded or a co-founder who's wealthy enough to also fund my living expenses until it is funded.
> Robotics (either to automate household drudgery or to eliminate terrible jobs nobody wants to do)
There's a lot of potential for integrating automation into existing heavy industry. Everything from inspection, materials handling, manufacturing, quality assurance. The way forward is 1) knowing an industry well enough to know the pain points, and 2) addressing a pain point in a compelling manner.
> Terraforming (to reverse climate change which imo we are not going to solve via the austerity nonsense politicians and green activists keep pushing)
I want to hear more about this. What can we do in the Sahara or the Mojave (or the American Southwest as a whole)?
> Solving problems created by companies seeking profitability over the good of society. For example, dating which has been FUBARed by dating apps seeking to maximize active users. Problem here is there's no profit in it if you do it the right way for society.
Curious that you mention dating. What would a profitable solution look like in this space?
> Fast, safe, reliable mass transit in the US
High speed rail is hard, especially in a place where people would use it. For example, a line from Chicago to Green Bay, to Madison, and then on to MSP would cost billions in property acquisitions or leases. There will be NIMBYs and speculators. Environmentalists will want a pound of flesh. This would be -- probably -- the single hardest thing to do well on your entire list.
> Addressing homelessness, mental health and drug addiction.
How can this be done and still turn investors a profit?
> I'd personally love to start a company in one of these spaces (or something similar)
> There's a lot of potential for integrating automation into existing heavy industry. Everything from inspection, materials handling, manufacturing, quality assurance. The way forward is 1) knowing an industry well enough to know the pain points, and 2) addressing a pain point in a compelling manner.
One of the top things that comes to mind for me in robotics would be cooking robots. Restaurants have a big "nobody wants to work anymore" problem that I suspect will come back with a vengeance once interest rates go back down. This could eventually be commercialized into a home robot that could save the time wasted preparing meals. Ideally the cooking robot would also be able to handle handwashing dishes.
A machine that could automate laundry would also be really useful. Even one that could just handle the task of running the washer and dryer plus folding once loads were already sorted and knowing when to split an oversized load into 2 loads. Folding and putting away a clean load of laundry alone can easily eat up 15-30 minutes of my time in part because my solution to enable doing laundry less frequently has been to buy more clothes. My guess is a laundry robot could probably be trivially modified to do the Amazon warehouse jobs where they stick people's orders into boxes and it wouldn't surprise me if Amazon is already working on this given the unsustainable rate at which it is running through human workers.
> I want to hear more about this. What can we do in the Sahara or the Mojave (or the American Southwest as a whole)?
I think machines at a large enough scale could alter the atmosphere. For the desert, you'd probably need to modify wind patterns to ensure they get sufficient rain. I'm not sure of the details and obviously you'd need to factor in the species that already live in the desert along with the effects elsewhere.
The more obvious terraforming technology would be a machine that reduces CO2 in the atmosphere much like a dehumidifier reduces water in your indoor air. If a machine can create water out of thin air then I'd imagine there has to be a scientific way to do the same to get rid of carbon dioxide.
> Curious that you mention dating. What would a profitable solution look like in this space?
What I'd see as a solution in this space would be intentionally unprofitable and designed to destroy the profits of Match Group. Basically, the goal would be to get the users into a serious relationship that would lead to a marriage by filtering out users who want casual relationships or to date multiple people at once. Ideally with zero monetization.
The profit from it would be that some group with a vested interest in more marriages happening would make more money selling marital related products and/or baby products. Possible candidates to fund it would be religions, jewelry stores, wedding dress makers or even the US Republican Party (which almost always polls better with married people). It would have to be a non-profit because any for-profit dating app company would inevitably recreate Tinder.
> High speed rail is hard, especially in a place where people would use it. For example, a line from Chicago to Green Bay, to Madison, and then on to MSP would cost billions in property acquisitions or leases. There will be NIMBYs and speculators. Environmentalists will want a pound of flesh. This would be -- probably -- the single hardest thing to do well on your entire list.
I think it's probably something that would need to be backed by a federal government with enough political capital to ignore environmentalists and NIMBYs and eminent domain land away from speculators. You'd probably need a Lincoln or FDR caliber president to make it happen.
Fully autonomous trains would probably be very helpful in terms of making this work and, so long as the track is elevated or underground, probably wouldn't suffer from the safety problems that make fully autonomous cars non-workable. They'd also be quite helpful for restoring slow speed passenger rail to discontinued stations and more frequent rail service to the stations that still have trains. High speed rail would be more palatable once more people were already riding trains.
Disrupting Greyhound and other notoriously terrible inter-city bus services would be much easier in terms of mass transit. A bus company that actually cared about providing a good service that didn't subject its customers to the dregs of society and constantly break down would attract customers who have other options. Especially if it was cheaper than flying or offered more room for luggage. Such buses would be ideal use cases for EVs as long as the routes were within the battery's range.
> How can this be done and still turn investors a profit?
Any kind of organization aimed at helping fix homelessness, mental health and/or drug addiction would probably need to be either a government funded non-profit or a non-profit funded by groups that would profit from having the problem fixed. Either employers that need cheap labor or developers that want to increase property values would be the most likely private investors. If American cities were as safe as Tokyo, almost everybody would want to live in them. But many people don't want to have a homeless encampment or an open air drug market outside their home.
If it isn't government backed, it would be much harder because you can't force people into your program. Which means it would have to be something they actually want. If it is government backed, it's easier because you can use the government to coerce them into the program. It's also easier if you're coercing them to do unethical things so you'd have to be really careful to make sure you're actually helping.
> What would you do?
Robotics projects would be the top choice for me because the time wasted on household tasks is the main pain point for me. I'd ideally like that to be 0 or as close to 0 as possible without another human having to do it for me. That's not a task that I think any human should have to waste time doing. Long term, the goal would be intelligent or possibly even sentient robots but I strongly doubt that can be done today.
The terraforming space would be a second choice for me as a prerequisite for colonizing space. If you want to increase the human population, you then have to find a place for humans to live that isn't Earth. Since I'm not a scientist, such a company would require experts to make the technical decisions. I imagine any excess CO2 sucked out of Earth's atmosphere could be useful for export to Mars (or sold to Elon for that purpose?) to cause global warming there if we don't have any other use for it on Earth. Or maybe there's some way to turn it back into an energy source?
I suspect I'd need to think on this more and do more research into the problem spaces if I were going to do any of this for a company. Above all, I'd want to found a company that actually solves humanity's problems not a company that profits off of creating new problems.
Let me see if I can find it, but you might be interested in multilayered permaculture. My mother knows of a guy who has made an in depth study of permaculture and the outcomes are very impressive. If I can find it, I'll drop it here.
It's worth pointing out that Google wasn't really moonshot stuff.
It was a search engine, and there were other search engines. already.
Then it became an advertising network before IPO, to make the $$. There were other ad networks already.
The key thing is that they were able to invest heavily in infrastructure to do... big stuff... for many years before IPO. Like, boatloads of fiber, data centres, expensive employees, R&D.
That money also let them make a superior UX that didn't dump crap in your face, which then acquired customers.
I kind of wonder if the time might be ripe for new social networks to replace Facebook, Twitter, etc. that would be to existing "social media" what Google was to Yahoo or AltaVista or Lycos. Not garbage. Not in the way. Seemingly (for a time) ethical. User focused. Working with some new metaphors. Moderated. Civil.
Facebook used to be a place to connect with friends and family. A thing that took the place of MySpace, Friendster, etc. and rapidly blew up because it was a way to get a hold of people and stay connected.
Now it's ... something else. (I won't waste time here explaining why it is hot garbage now).
I just don't know how that makes money without taking the same crappy path that FB did. But, Google also didn't know how it was going to make money.
This has been somewhat frustrating for me to see. I'm curious what you think actual moonshot companies look like? Are we talking novel medical tech? Advancements in aerospace? I'm specifically ignoring AI, though a few companies in that sphere will be moonshots.
What does the future look like to you?