A Backwards Kickstarter
A crowdfunding & crowdsourcing platform where you go to post your problems that you'd like to be solved, products that you'd like manufactured, programs or services that you'd like to be made, and how much you'd be willing to pay for it.
This takes LSM validation principles and reverses it - don't waste time finding out what the market wants - have them tell you, then
focus on fulfilling it.
The closest thing to it that I'm aware of would be Quora , except every upvote on a question (idea) represents $10. Everything is editable a la wikipedia. This would enable you to view trending ideas in realtime. You can give unlimited upvotes to ideas because it is deducted from your 'bank' of credits that would be linked to your PayPal or Credit Card.
Alternatively, you can follow ideas for free, and optionally receive notifications on updates or immediately actionable items that match your domain of expertise.
On the fulfillment/programming/manufacturing side, anticipated trajectories of certain categories could create clarity as to what students could best invest their time and efforts in.
If you are interested, message me and I can share more details, mocku...
Better bra sizing.
It's an idea I've been kicking around for a few days. The technical and marketing-based obstacles towards getting it to work have turned me off pursuing it, but I figured it was worth sharing.
I work with operational databases for a luxury fashion retailer, and bra sizing as it currently exists (back size + cup size) makes absolutely no sense. I will sometimes ask female friends to explain how the size given for a garment can possibly be of any use in determining comfort and fit. Their answer: it doesn't.
Their actual answer tends to be a rant about inconsistency between product ranges and how contemporary bra sizing is next to useless. A couple have been both eloquent and insightful. A few times a year I'll have an idea I get excited about turning into some sort of web-based service, and in spite of its silly-sounding nature, this one is easily the one that's had the most philanthropic weight behind it.
The idea: a website containing a comprehensive list of commercially available bras. Users sign up, locate bras they own (or have tried on) and rate them along various measures of comfort/fit/support, etc. The service then locates clusters of users with simil...
Anecdotal evidence from female friends suggests that if you can make bra sizing not suck, you will indeed make life quite a bit better for quite a lot of people.
It seems to touch upon an incredibly raw nerve. Many of my friends are quite thoughtful and verbose people anyway, but I get the impression some of them could talk for hours about their dissatisfaction with bra sizing. If nothing else, it's given me a good heuristic for spotting potential consumer interest: follow the moaning.
Here's an incredibly brilliant idea for a rationalist startup! You know how it is when you've got too much food, like a cheesecake or something, that your guests didn't finish or whatever, and your brain refuses to throw it out because you don't want it to be wasted, but you don't want to have to eat it all either? This startup would have a registry of polite, well-dressed, grateful, hungry people in your vicinity, who'll come over and eat it for you - there in ten minutes or your money back! SunkMunch.com - "We eat your food, now!" YC '13, here we come!
A simpler solution: contrive to get on the mailing list for graduate students at a local university.
polite, well-dressed, grateful, hungry people in your vicinity.
Dress for success! (Or at least dress for food. Right. "Undress for food" has been done before.)
Tagline: Coursera for high school
Mission: The economist Eric Hanushek has shown that if the USA could replace the worst 7% of K-12 teachers with merely average teachers, it would have the best education system in the world. What if we instead replaced the bottom 90% of teachers in every country with great instruction?
The Company: Online learning startups like Coursera and Udacity are in the process of showing how technology can scale great teaching to large numbers of university students (I've written about the mechanics of this elsewhere). Let's bring a similar model to high school.
This Company starts in the United States and ties into existing home school regulations with a self-driven web learning program that requires minimum parental involvement and results in a high school degree. It cloaks itself as merely a tool to aid homeschool parents, similar to existing mail-order tutoring materials, hiding its radical mission to end high school as we know it.
The result is high-quality education for every student. In addition to the high quality, it gives the student schedule flexibility to pursue other interests outside of high school. Many exceptional young people I know dodge the ...
Modern compulsory schooling seems to have at least three major sociological effects: socializing its students, offloading enough caregiver burden for both parents to efficiently participate in the workforce, and finally education. For a widespread homeschooling system to be attractive, it's either going to need to fulfill all three, or to be so spectacularly good at one or two that the shortcomings in the others are overwhelmed. Current homeschooling, for comparison, does an acceptable job of education but fails at the other two; consequently it's used mainly by people with very strong objections to the curriculum or other aspects of the school system. That's a small and inelastic market, and you aren't going to enlarge it much without some significant incentives.
Socialization could be addressed by integrating access to hobby groups, sports teams, Scouting-like services and what have you into the program's structure; you'd probably have to push this hard to overcome the perception gap, but it ought to be doable. Some facility for students to self-organize into study groups might also help at the high school level, but it's unlikely to be practical at younger ages.
Offloading ca...
Because the way you interact with small children is wildly, radically different from the way that either adults or children interact with their own peers. This is also a trend I've observed much more widely than just myself. Homeschooled children come out weird unless their parents are very, very aggressive about socialization, much more so than most people would consider reasonable.
Related idea: semi-computerized instruction.
To the best of my (limited) knowledge, while there are currently various computerized exercises available, they aren't that good at offering instruction of the "I don't understand why this step works" kind, and are often pretty limited (e.g. Khan Academy has exercises which are just multiple choice questions, which isn't a very good bad format). One could try to offer a more sophisticated system - first, present experienced teachers/tutors with a collection of the problems you'll be giving to the students, and ask them to list the most common problems and misunderstandings that the students tend to have with such problems. Then attempt to build a system which will recognize the symptoms of the most common misunderstandings and attempt to provide advice on them, also offering the student the opportunity to ask it themselves using some menu system or natural language parser. (I know some existing academic work along these lines exists, I think applying Bayes nets to build up a model of the students' skills and understanding, but I couldn't find the reference in the place where I thought that I had read it.)
Of course, there will fr...
A certification system to replace high-school and college.
With the explosion in independent study on all education levels, certification is the main missing piece. One solution is tests. For example, Pearson's is offering this service to Udacity students. However, certification-by-testing has had a hard time getting prestige. In the high-status parts of the software industry, getting Java/Microsoft/etc. certification is a slight negative on your job value -- i.e., one is expected to countersignal.
So, we need a certification system that succeeds at serving as a signal.
What successful examples can we find? The actuarial industry has a system of advancement with ten exams. There is no requirement to get a certain degree to take them. The top level is considered an intellectual achievement roughly equivalent to a PhD.
Perhaps the certification we're offering should test useless skills which require a long time to acquire, proving that one is not just smart but hard-working. Compare Latin in earlier periods, and the software language Scheme (a language used mostly for theory, not for product development) in the software industry today.
The usual trappings of signaling, like association with prestigious people, would be an essential part of the marketing.
Some non-nitwit (actual-economic-value-generating) startups I've heard proposed lately by people in this or related communities:
Zvi Mowshowitz is now trying to refound a startup to provide evidence-based, rationalist-filtered medical care
What happened to the first one?
In addition to my last idea, here's another thing I've been kicking around:
Anki-as-a-Service
Problem: Anki is great, but the user interface is mediocre and it acts as a standalone application on the platform of your choice (desktop, mobile, etc).
Solution: A hosted version of Anki accompanied by a mobile application that allows users to enter items manually, capture items from the browser via a javascript bookmarklet, or allows third parties to submit information for users via an API. In essence this would amount to "learning as a service" and could eventually be extended beyond the feature set currently offered by Anki by including customized tests for different content types.
Current development: Very much in the idea stage. Interested in hearing what ideas people have around this.
I imagine this would be very hard to monetize and get customers as-is. The below is merely a brief list of problems that I've thought about
The average user needs to be sold on the effectiveness of a product very fast, on the first usage (or perhaps even sooner!) in order for them to continue using. However, SRS software in general are almost by definition antithetical to that goal: Their benefits do not come until far into the future, worse still it's an undefined time in the future. Sure you can use arguments about the benefits of SRS and the psychology of memory and , but it would appear to be an uphill battle to make the benefits immediately relevant and immediately relevant to the people who wouldn't already be using Anki and other free equivalents.
In addition, before you can even start using the product as advertised, you have to learn how to make cards that are easy to memorize or download a deck which is already well made. The first is "Wait so you want me to learn all these tiny rules before I can even start learning? ". The second presents a chicken-and-egg problem. How are you going to have high quality decks that teach things? By having users! How are you going...
I think Micaiah_Chang mostly nailed this. I actually wrote a site that did this a few months ago. I had about 4000 users who had actually gone through a complete session.
it would appear to be an uphill battle to make the benefits immediately relevant
As guessed, the problem is that I couldn't get people to start forming it as a habit. There is no immediate payback. Less than 20 people out of 4000 did more than one session.
you have to learn how to make cards that are easy to memorize or download a deck which is already well made
This one is easily solved. The Anki decks have a (weak) rating system, and allowing people to import anki decks was easy.
Additionally, there are at least 18 competitors. Here's the list I made at the time. Very few seem to be successful.
I shut the site down about a month ago. There are numerous free competitors which don't have any great annoyances. I wouldn't suggest starting another of these sites unless you figured out an effective way to "gamify" it.
I used SRS to remember my student's names. They thought I had superpowers.
(I didn't have the TA facebook until after the first session, and so I introduced myself and shook the hand of every student, and then got the facebook and memorized the names with SRS before the second session. It might be similarly impressive to know their names before the first session without them telling you, but that runs the risk of seeming creepy.)
I'm not sure if this is the kind of project you were thinking of at all, but a friend and I have been brainstorming about starting a restaurant that's optimized to serve, primarily, autistic people, and secondarily, people with other disabilities, particularly mental/emotional ones like social anxiety. Notable differences from a regular restaurant are that ordering will be entirely computerized (enabling nifty features like being able to have the computer remember and act on each diner's preferred/dispreferred/forbidden foods list) with an option but not a default of talking to a waiter, all tables will have built-in textual communication devices to allow diners to communicate with anyone in the restaurant (including waiters and management), the restaurant will have a silent section where even talking is forbidden and private rooms that can be reserved ahead of time, the menu will be optimized to allow for personalization of items in terms of content, size, order of presentation, and so on, and the decor will be designed to be sensorily inoffensive while also providing detailed descriptions of local norms via signage.
It will also make a point of hiring autistic people for all posit...
Business/website idea: OKCupid for jobs, or possibly just for co-founders.
Different workplaces have different cultures. There are probably a wide variety of cultures that work, but mixing different cultures in a workplace leads to conflict. For example:
An OKCupid-like system of asking questions about one's preferred work culture might lead to good matches between co-founders and possibly between workplaces and employees. (Though, of course, there are many non-culture-related considerations that this kind of system doesn't evaluate. While that's true for dating too, it might be even more true for work, making this system less effective.)
Hi Michael,
Great suggestion! Like Patrick mentioned, this is really our focus, though I typically refer to it as 'eHarmony for hiring'. :)
We pair a more intimate understanding of a professionals education, experience, personality and interests with a deeper understanding of a company, their culture and what it takes to be successful in a particular role. We use this data to come up with the "Path.To Score" which is a 0-99 measure of how compatible a particular individual is with a specific role at a specific company, which we use to market positions to the right candidates and provide introductions between businesses and potential employees.
Without getting into too much detail we use a number of signals to inform and evolve the scoring. These range from basic Q&A to semantic analysis and natural language processing of local and external data sources likes Facebook, Twitter, GitHub and Dribbble.
It's been fascinating thus far and I'm really excited with the road ahead.
Hi folks - long-time reader, first-time poster here. I'd like to share my new startup, formed over the past few months. In short, we use human computation to create employment opportunities in the developing world while enabling new types of data analysis for solving complex problems.
Some background and justification: extreme poverty is bad. I won't say too much to justify this point, other than that human suffering and the lost potential for individuals to do great things are two of the big things that make it bad. And just to be clear, by "extreme poverty" I am referring to the "living on $1 per day" kind (though that's a not a very good definition, it's at least in the ballpark). One way to combat extreme poverty is by creating employment opportunities so that people can help themselves, rather than giving them free shoes, or corn, or wells, all of which are suboptimal for meeting their varied pressing needs. So our approach is to hire them to do human computation work.
Human computation is when people do things that are easy for people but hard for computers. A good example is image processing/recognition (this is why reCAPTCHA works). By combining ...
Yes, Mechanical Turk is another platform that enables human computation work. We looked a lot at that in our early research. It does not, however, implement any internal quality control mechanisms, and it also only allows payment in US dollars, Indian rupees, or via Amazon gift card. The interface is also clunky and difficult for people with limited computer/internet experience to understand (too many windows within windows, basically).
So there are a number of reasons to sidestep Mechanical Turk.
I'm an entrepreneur looking to found or join my next project, so I'm particularly in interesting what people are thinking about and working on.
An Improved Platform for Reading
Problem: We forget almost everything that we read. Current reading platforms (e.g. Kindle, Instapaper, Nook, web browsers) are very crude at helping us make the most of the time we spend reading.
Solution: A platform that uses the latest in efficient learning techniques to improve the quality of recall from reading. By adding interactivity and enhancing the reading experiencing using techniques like active recall and spaced repetition, I think we can build a considerably better interface for reading articles, books, and papers.
Real-world implementation: I think that this sort of platform could be very easily built as a browser plugin and/or mobile app for tablets. As users read a document, they would be able to highlight, add notes, and share these annotations. If users want to memorize a sentence-long summary of a particular document or a particular quote, word, or note, they can select to do so. Summaries of the notes made during reading would then be emailed at the each of day, and push notifications would...
I have a resource that could help someone's project: my time. I'm a novice programmer looking to gain some practical experience, and I'd be willing to work, say, 20 hours a week for free, at least for a month or two. PM me if you think I might be able to help out.
To sound a note of caution... I spent a number of years acquiring various kinds of non-monetary capital that are useful for startups. Looking back with my current state of theoretical knowledge and memories, I suspect I may come to see this period as involving too little caution. The key concept acquired between then and now is Kelly Betting.
I still haven't worked through the applications of this concept to startups in a way that I feel is "settled", but depending on the precise nature of the risks and rewards and the bankroll of the typical person accepting startup equity in place of cash, the Kelly Criterion may indicate that startups should usually not be more than hobbies for "normal" (non-rich, non-certainly-immortal, declining-utility-in-dollars) humans. Note that if startups are roughly as risky as a simple Kelly calculation says they should be, this might still be cause for concern because most people who raise theory/practice issues with Kelly say that it over invests in risks.
I'm still exploring ways that the theory might line up with reality, but even my limited state of knowledge has caused me to scale back my startup enthusiasm in the last year o...
I have extensive experience in this realm, including both independently re-deriving Kelly before learning about it and then working extensively with variations of it, in nominally Kelly-optimal conditions. Kelly is only optimal under a very strict set of criteria, and those criteria de facto do not occur in practice. It's a great guide to the landscape, but a terrible perscription in most situations. Common errors include misunderstanding what counts as a bankroll, inability to access large portions of the real bankroll, changing returns to investment size, the existence of limiting factors, having almost any real utility function, unknown unknowns and edge uncertainty which is almost always correlated, psychological impact and inability to precommit credibly to Kelly, outside perceptions and their impact on your bankroll or utility, not accounting for calculation errors, odds or outcomes that are impacted by bet size, and more.
I may write a top-level post going into more detail (feedback on this idea is appreciated), but here I will deal only with this particular case.
In a start-up, the bankroll definition and potential is one key. Your bankroll includes more than you think, and ...
Your comment rings my "math applied incorrectly" alarm -- I may just be misunderstanding, e.g. you might be motivated by a logarithmic utility function in amount of money made, but that's a very different thing from the reason we would expect the financial system to be dominated by Kelly-following-financial-entities -- so just in case, let me try to explain my understanding of why Kelly is so important, and why it doesn't obviously seem to be related to the question of whether to start a startup. Any corrections very much appreciated!
Kelly and financial markets
Suppose three investment funds are created in the same year. Let's say the first fund is badly managed and loses 5% of its capital each year; the second fund gains 5% each year; and the third fund gains 10% each year. After 100 years of this, which of the three will be the most important force in the market? I didn't specify that they had the same starting capital, but the first fund is down to 0.6% of its start capital, the second fund has increased its capital 130-fold, and the third fund has increased its by a factor of 13,800, so if they didn't differ by too many orders of magnitude when they started out, the th...
I started MyPersonalDev a year ago to develop a data-driven personal development web application. The minimum viable product I envision is a task manager for people who like to think about utility functions (give your tasks utility functions!) My long-range vision is to use machine learning and collective intelligence to automate things like next-action determinations, value-of-information calculations, and probability estimates. I've written most of the minimum viable product already and use it extensively to manage my own tasks, but I haven't released anything publicly because it's easier to develop the software without having an existing user base.
The downside of having no user base is that there's no revenue, which is a real issue for me as a cash-strapped college student. I'll graduate in May with a degree in computer science, and I've been thinking hard about what to do after that. My impression is that working for my startup post-graduation would likely involve a period of extreme financial difficulty that I'd like to avoid. Consequently, I've been considering shutting it down and trying to get the best existing job I can get, using salary as the base metric and making adjus...
Colby (at the Berkeley LW meetup) is wondering about what your market is - people interested in utility functions are economics professors and Less Wrong readers. How do you envision reaching out to more people and who would you reach out to?
Group consensus: Advertise it to somewhere like Less Wrong, then if people say its cool and email you, go with it, if you don't get good feedback, let it go.
Let me just toss out some caution here.
I'm all for getting excited and making stuff happen. Maybe it really is that there have not yet been any LW startups because we all just failed to coordinate on it and in hindsight we'll all say "why the hell did we all wait for so long". That said, let's not forget a few key things here.
And, as I already said, for some reason we haven't already had a bunch of successful LW startups. It's certainly not for lack of smart people, entrepreneurs, or technical skills.
If a LW startup is going to succeed, I think we would benefit from understanding first why we don't already have successful LW startups (not even one).
Just to toss in my own strongest suspicion. Among LWers under 25, they probably see themselves as young and still learning and not yet brave enough to throw themselves all in to something. For those over 25, they (myself included) probably see themselves as already busy doing something and would need some pretty strong motivation to do something else, even if it does align with core values.
Thanks for voicing this. A lot of people said similar things to me privately before I posted the article. Apparently a lot of people have tried similar attempts to this article and had them massively down voted and go nowhere. I'm very thankful that these people shared their concerns with me, because if I hadn't gotten that feedback, I would not have put nearly as much effort into editing and honing, and almost certainly would have bombed as well.
I have a lot of thoughts on this - I'm currently just finishing a course by the Rejuvenate people that teaches coaches and holistic practitioners how to create successful businesses. I've been inspired both by the workshop and the comments in this article to switch niches from working with people who are depressed, to creating a program that combines what I'm learning with Rejuvenate and my knowledge of Less Wrong types and futurists in general. (what they teach totally worked for me - I took their program "Double Your Practice in 90 Days" and quadrupled my (small) income in a month, after coaching for years) Working on this problem of helping people in the community implement their ideas successfully is so much higher leverage than anything else I can think of that I could do.
On how to realise it: What about LW-crowd sourcing? For a "month" ideas for for-profit start-ups are gathered. For a "month" the LW crowd ranks them (by for example committing real money) , for a "month" people interested in the 10 most funded ideas can apply for a job, the LW crowd has a month to choose which people will be "hired". Solves part of the funding problem and the team-makeing.
Idea related to peer-to-peer lending, and to increase returns on investment and decrease borrowing costs
Streamline the process of lending between users heavily invested in an internet community
One problem with P2P lending is the problem of scammers, dishonest people, and general "Parfit's Hitchhiker non-payers". However, if you have been involved in a forum or internet community, then you've built up considerable "community capital". That investment helps to establish credit among the community members, but not with formal banks. So if you could put up your community reputation/karma as collateral for the loan, you could provide stronger evidence of willingness to repay the loan, and of costs you would suffer from not doing so.
The role of the entrepreneur here would be to make it easy for intra-forum lending to happen, in exchange for some kind of fee. Services would include:
First off-the-top-of-my-head idea:
An organization that would fulfill a role similar to GiveWell, but for people looking to invest money ethically in businesses. Ethical Investment could evaluate companies on how much their business reduces x-risk, improves the human condition, as well as other factors like environmental impact. What would save this from outright hippiedom is that it's actually encouraging investment in worthwhile companies, not saying "boo capitalism".
Potential problems
I'm sure there are others.
Assassination.
Are you serious?
Of course he isn't. Nobody makes money in assassination these days, the market is oversold.
This article is a little old (July 2008), but Paul Graham has a list of 30 startup ideas he'd like to fund. With Craigslist turning evil recently, the 25th item about a better Craigslist seems timely.
I love #23, about replacing Wikipedia. That's something I've been considering doing for a while; I would much rather have a comprehensive knowledge site than a mere encyclopedia.
There's a lot of similarity between the statistical tests that a scientist does and the statistical tests that auditors do. The scientist is interested in testing that the effect is real, and the auditor is testing that the company really is making that much money, that all its operations are getting aggregated up into the summary documents correctly.
Charlie Stross has a character in his 'Rule 34', Dorothy Straight, who is an organization-auditor, auditing organizations for signs of antisocial behavior. As I understood it, she was asking whether the organizations as a whole are likely to behave badly - though one way that the organization as a whole might behave badly is by sifting out or creating leaders who are likely to individually behave badly.
What I'm trying to say is that there will be a field of auditing an organization's 'safety case' - examining why it believes that it is a Friendly organization, what its internal controls entangling it with the truth are and so on, something like GiveWell for for-profits.
Betting
I’d like to encourage betting under this post. Zvi has agreed to advise someone on how to set up the market if a volunteer wants to take this on! Zvi is an expert on betting markets, and having him as an advisor is an awesome opportunity. If you think this sounds like something that you would like to capitalize on, and you are willing to commit to putting in the effort to do the project justice if you are chosen, please fill out the the form.
Bets could be on things like:
Basically, whatever measurable aspects of success or failure people are interested in.
For bets, I encourage people to keep in mind the mission:
Let's collect people who want to work on for-profit companies that have significant positive impacts on many people's lives.
Thus, my request is that you only bet against a project if you think you can prevent yourself from sabotaging people’s efforts as a result. Negative bets are quite valuable, they help give people more realistic expectations and give people something to bet positively against!
The rul...
Short version: Make an Eckman-style micro-expression reader in a wearable computer.
Fleshed out version: You have a wearable computer (perhaps something like Google glass) which sends video from its camera (or perhaps two cameras if one camera is not enough) over to a high-powered CPU which processes the images, locates the faces, and then identifies micro expressions by matching and comparing the current image (or 3D model) to previous frames to infer which bits of the face have moved in which directions. If a strong enough micro-expression happens, the u...
Organization
If this post succeeds, it will create a lot of data that will be much more useful if it is organized. I’d like to follow it up with posts in the discussion section, or possibly main for big things, that are focused on more specific niches within the broad topic of businesses that make the world better.
It would be great if more people want to join me with optimizing the organizational end of this. I think the ideal would be to start a discussion thread for this once we see what sorts of responses come in. Perhaps a simple rule to start might ...
If you would like to help make these ideas happen, I highly recommend asking questions to the people who presented them.
Most ideas will get glossed over because they are not specific enough.
The easiest way to help people get specific enough that I know of is to ask yourself the question "What could this person say that would catch my attention and cause me to want to work with or invest in them if I were in their target demographic?"
If you use that for your compass of what questions to ask them to be more specific about, and they answer well, ...
I'm really excited about software similar to Anki, but with task-specialized user interfaces (vs. self-graded tasks) and better task-selection models (incorporating something like item response theory), ideally to be used for both training and credentialing.
Feedback on Reichart's idea given as an example:
The best advice is like the best shoe: it doesn't matter how much I like it if it doesn't fit your foot. Related.
And expressed a third way: the best answer to a question depends on both the context and content of the question. Who is asking, and why? What answers will be useful to them, and which ones useless? When someone asks me what computer they should buy, I respond with questions, not statements.
As for the bible functionality- there are few resources for atheists undergoing serious stress, compared to t...
I notice you chose the word "important" rather than "altruistic" or making some reference to social entrepreneurship. Of course I want to start an important startup- but it turns out that importance is much easier to determine looking back than looking forward.
Feedback
Negative: Negative feedback is valuable. If you think an idea is terrible, don't just downvote, also explain. The trick to giving good negative feedback is doing so with productive goals in mind, which means, rather than saying “this is the worst idea I’ve ever heard”, think about what specifically it is that you think makes the idea infeasible in its current form, and what would turn it into a good, or at least a better, idea.
Keep in mind that negative feedback is a double edged sword. It helps people refine their ideas, and can create succ...
I think the biggest problem with your proposal is that it's hard to do a startup with founders who don't know each other well. The founders and early employees will face long hours, stress, and possibly financial woes. Some background history and an interview aren't enough to ensure that someone won't flake. The best co-founders are friends who have worked together previously. As Paul Graham says:
And the relationship between the founders has to be strong. They must genuinely like one another, and work well together. Startups do to the relationship between the founders what a dog does to a sock: if it can be pulled apart, it will be.
Yeah, that's definitely tricky and a downside.
I think having the common philosophies of Less Wrong would go a long way. It would also be an upside if all people are passionate about the cause and have thought it through in a lot of detail before committing to work together. There is also nothing to say that people can't get to know each other well before embarking on a project together, even if they do hook up on this blog. Things like Skype and even planes are easy to use in this day and age - if people are truly motivated and taking initiative, they can overcome that sort of obstacle.
The Less Wrong blog already has a very strong filtering effect, plus the other filters just mentioned, so I think that if/when people get to the point of deciding they want to work together, they'll likely be decent matches. For example, ideas will get chewed on much more thoroughly in this context than most, so I think there is likely to be more consistency of vision between different founding members.
Obviously I'm quite biased having written this post, so I discount my enthusiasm, and am curious about what other issues are that people see.
Looking at other comments, I want to be a little more specific about why I have more hope for this particular forum than an average group of people reading a blog post who could potentially be cofounders together.
As someone who is part of the culture, I find people who are hardcore Less Wrong types to be much easier to get along with than most people when it comes to conversations that might upset people. Having the common values of truth-even-when-it-hurts and clarity go such a long way toward making communication work and progress happen, among many other great memes. I've met a lot of the crowd in person at this point, living in the Bay Area, and find that even with someone I don't know at all, if they're coming through that filter, I can talk more freely and openly with them than I can with most people, without worry about offending them or other undesirable consequences.
It is my guess that a lot of the interpersonal conflict that kills start-ups comes down to lack of clarity and poor communication. Friends getting along better fits with this notion, because they would probably communicate better and have more shared values and ways of perceiving the world than strangers.
I believe there are results (linked by Hanson recently?) showing that cofounders do better when they're selected for merit reasons (i.e. this guy was the best coder we found) rather than identity reasons (i.e. we both went to the same university). It's also relatively easy to get to know people quickly.
Flakes as cofounders, however, is a critical error that must be consciously avoided. I like your mention of previous projects- whenever someone tells me they think we'd make a good founding pair, I try to look for a small project that we can ship in a few months that will give us a taste of how we work together. I've avoided a few mistakes that way.
Something I learned from watching a nearby train wreck: The emotionally dominant person in a partnership should not be a compulsive spender.
Food Subscription Service. The natural extreme on the Just In Time pipeline applied to food. This means less wasted food at every stage, and gets you all the benefits of buying/ selling in bulk, meaning the potential for lower price and other gains from trade.
Rough Idea: Send brilliant, destitute kids to great schools from an early age in exchange for a percentage of their lifetime earnings.
Depending on the study you read there are up to hundreds of millions of children in the developing world that are in the primary/middle school age range that will never get the chance to attend a school. Some of these children have the genetic potential to be top tier in terms of intelligence and productivity but will never realize this potential.
Develop a cost-effective selection mechanism for finding these diamonds in the ...
Tacit Political Map
The condensation of informal community rules and customs in to a wiki. The urban dictionary of legal systems.
Enter a foreign community. What are the expectations? How would one surmise what they could offer? How to assimilate oneself?
~
Arrive at your personal paradise, mentally first. Look around, connect, coalesce.
Cartography
Second, my concept ... essentially, borrowing money from your future self for something with a postive ROI expectation value.
Economists can (OK, do) roughly value certain life milestones, such as the increase in lifetime earnings for finishing high school (for the sake of this discussion, let's use $500K for that number). They also believe that certain goals (e.g. passing grades for a semester) can be cash-incentivized. So you let an individual borrow a portion of their future benefit (10%? $50K buys a lot of incentive from a HS student) in the present, wi...
First, a meta-discussion ... I think when a lot of people hear the word "startup" they think two things: long hours in an under-funded environment, and the hope of a short-term payoff (or at least an exit strategy). This may be incompatible with the idea of pulling a bunch of hours away from a bunch of bright people already involved in other things. It may also be counter-productive to the goal of benefiting people: one of the shortcomings of established corporations is the focus on near-term gains, even at the cost of long-term viability or bene...
I've been thinking of developing a way for homeowners to hire the local teenagers and children to do small jobs like lawn mowing, babysitting, dog walking and housesitting etc. A lot of people like to hire local kids, but don't know enough people in the neighborhood, and don't have time to search. It would be a way to strengthen community ties, and foster teen work ethic as well as give them an opportunity to get a start on financial planning and budgeting.
It would just be a way for them to get in touch, and help choose someone reliable. I still don't kno...
Reinvent the Refrigerator. Since its debut in the 1940s, it hasn't changed much in design. Put a bunch of food in a large cooled box and hope you remember to eat its contents before it rots. There has been some lame attempts by slapping a LCD panel on the front with an RFID scanner, but you still have to remember where you store the food. I think automation and inventory management via mobile device is key. There is a lively discussion on quora right now, but I'd like to also invite people to poke holes and/or add value to my idea.
Basically it's an automa...
active browser history
I've noticed that more than a few people will have 20+ tabs open in their browser, for weeks at a time, while actively using only two or three tabs. These websites will occupy significant portions of the flash memory, using several gigabytes.
I call it active history because this is a management tool for tabs that you're not yet ready to search through your history for.
The browser plug-in would allow ' x ' recent tabs (or a memory limit), and kill the page for any older tabs. The url would be saved, the tab would still be there, and...
I am developing a decision making app.
The user is prompted with the phrase "I want."
The user's request is matched against a database of peer-generated responses. But the search does not end there. The search results are a front end to the content which is also peer-generated. The content payload could potentially be any function of the smartphone, though it is usually screen output such a set of instructions or a link to a website. Request parsing and wild-carding is integral to reduce the number of database entries.
Should the user not be satisfi...
I work for a start-up, and I've worked for a number of them over the years. While it's been some of the best and most fulfilling work I've done, there are several things you need to consider.
1) Real start-ups (as opposed to ordinary new businesses) are a strange kind of betting game. They are long-shots that pay off extremely well if they hit, such that investors can afford to fund a hundred of them to get five that survive and one that hits big. This is a very different economic landscape from the one that your average job exists in, and many of your hard...
A web community where users gather relevant information/media about recent news
Problem The internet is huge now. Information or media about stories in the news is all around but not always easy to find, especially in one focused area. That video this article mentioned. Those photos that were reported on. That relevant information only people with expertise sits on, that the journalists hasn't found because they have a tight schedule. It's out there, you just don't know it.
Solution A dedicated website where users gather this information from all the corners...
Lendle's for sale...
http://lendle.tumblr.com/post/23184237439/for-sale
They're looking for low six figures afaik, but I figure I should at least bring it to the table.
Product Distribution in Rural Africa ("Amazon.com for the developing world")
Manufactured goods can improve the lives of poor people drastically at very little cost. Some low-cost frequent buys are already well-distributed, like soap and prepaid phones. But bigger-ticket items are not -- for example, hand carts and solar powered lanterns. Existing microfinance structures and NGOs can help farmers obtain these items, and the items' high utility quickly allows the farmer to repay any loan. However, the gap is distribution: the farmers don't know tha...
I have unusual abilities that I would like to share for a cause.
My terms:
For short-term projects and consultations that I accept, I will consider a "pay only if I make you money" or "we have no money, tip you later if possible" agreement, basically "volunteering with the risk of getting paid". I do not have the ability to leap off the cliff and go full-time into the start-up world at this point. I do not have part-time hours available.
Abilities:
I'm a psychology enthusiast with a special interest in gifted adults. ...
Solving quagmires. I've been in a lot of quagmires in my life. Like, imagine a quagmire that has quagmires for fingers and toes - and THOSE quagmires have quagmires for eyes! I have developed my problem-solving abilities to the point where I tend to get myself out of ugly quagmires. Give me a paperclip and some duct tape, ask me to do something impossible and see what happens.
BS detector going off like crazy... To start, have you learned to not get into quagmires in the first place?
If you're playing the biggest game you can, you should keep getting into quagmires by continually putting your limits to the test. A favorite quote of mine from the cofounder of the coaching school and leadership program I attended:
"If you're not failing half the time, you're not trying hard enough."
If you've never been slowly and publicly tortured to death and then resurrected in order to experience it again, due to having pissed off Mexican drug lords, the Pope, the International Red Cross, the Chinese Communist Party, 4chan, the CIA, Clippy, an FAI, Lord Voldemort, the goddess Takhisis, and whoever it is that's running our simulation, all at once, you're too risk averse.
If you solve an urgent problem, you are a hero; if you anticipate a problem before it becomes urgent, you are a troublemaker.
Dark Arts For Career Growth variant:
Mention all problems anticipated with p>.5. Do nothing more than simply mentioning them, if questioned claimed you don't know what could be done about them. Once problems happen, reveal that you knew it all along, and that now, having seen it happen, a flash of genius tells you how to resolve it immediately and prevent it from happening again.
I've seen this pattern in use. The Darth deliberately waits for the problem to happen, ready to be the first to jump on it (and its low-cost solution). Sometimes, they even subtly try to nudge things towards the problem happening. Even if there are lives at stake.
What made this seem to you like an appropriate comment?
Surprised no one has mentioned anything involving sustainable/clean tech (energy, food, water, materials). This site does stress existential threats, and I'd think that, given many (most?) societal collapses in the past were precipitated, at least partly, by resource collapse, I'd want to concentrate much of the startup activity around trying to disrupt our short-term wasteful systems. Large pushes to innovate and disrupt the big four (energy, food, water, materials) would do more than anything I can think of to improve the condition of our world and min...
Wanted to save this one for the Reverse Kickstarter, but it's too important to be kept in my brain without a backup, so here's my ace in the hole.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subvocal_recognition
This tech exists, it is out there, I have tried to contact some of the people at NASA to no avail. (Should probably give them a little longer than 24 hours, but I only found out about those experiments yesterday. I did email them, and that's what counts.) Make this a pick up for stream of consciousness logging, allow me to parse it, or add stuff to the calendar or ...
Tagline: Cheap Transportation with Unmanned Aerial Drones
Mission: Replace oil and roads with electric aviation. Move small packages initially, and scale up to large freight and eventually people.
Technology: Electric aircraft are cheap and GPS enabled autopilots using Arduino are less than $500.
I'm working for a mid-size startup and have been gathering insight into successful startups for a couple of years. Here is what I think is important.
Create value. Make sure your idea actually creates value in the world. Lots of value. It should conceivably be useful to many of people, and it should conceivably be of significant value to them. Value means your product would be important enough that, if forced to, they would give up other things in exchange for it.
Don't focus on monetization. Startups are subject to all sorts of counter-intuitive economics;...
Update: Sinak's SRS system as reviewed by Hacker News: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4496647
I'd love to be part of an important startup. Here are some of my ideas so far.
Also would like to see Keith Lofstrom's Server Sky, Launch Loop, and Power Loop propos...
Betting
I’d like to encourage betting under this post. Zvi has agreed to advise someone on how to set up the market if a volunteer wants to take this on! Zvi is an expert on betting markets, and having him as an advisor is an awesome opportunity. If you think this sounds like something that you would like to capitalize on, and you are willing to commit to putting in the effort to do the project justice if you are chosen, please fill out the the [form].
Bets could be on things like:
-minimum number of projects that will get started as a result of this ...
I have an idea for a sort of digital currency. It's hard to describe in a few words, but I'm pretty sure it can be implemented. It would be way better than bitcoin because it could be converted fluidly to other currencies and back again. It could also be fluidly converted into party-specific loans and contracts.
Cool. What is your next step for the idea?
If you are interested in seeing the idea get implemented, I highly recommend elaborating in as much detail as possible.
If you are looking for someone to work on it with you and want to be secretive because you plan on implementing the idea in a company you're in and believe that you have what it takes to do this, I recommend thinking about the sort of person you want to work with, and presenting what it is about you that you think would make this person want to work with you.
SUMMARY: Let's collect people who want to work on for-profit companies that have significant positive impacts on many people's lives.
Google provides a huge service to the world - efficient search of a vast amount of data. I would really like to see more for-profit businesses like Google, especially in underserved areas like those explored by non-profits GiveWell, Singularity Institute and CFAR. GiveWell is a nonprofit that is both working toward making humanity better, and thinking about leverage. Instead of hacking away at one branch of the problem of effective charity by working on one avenue for helping people, they've taken it meta. They're providing a huge service by helping people choose non-profits to donate to that give the most bang for your buck, and they're giving the non-profits feedback on how they can improve. I would love to see more problems taken meta like that, where people invest in high leverage things.
Beyond these non-profits, I think there is a huge amount of low-hanging fruit for creating businesses that create a lot of good for humanity and make money. For-profit businesses that pay their employees and investors well have the advantage that they can entice very successful and comfortable people away from other jobs that are less beneficial to humanity. Unlike non-profits where people are often trying to scrape by, doing the good of their hearts, people doing for-profits can live easy lives with luxurious self care while improving the world at the same time.
It's all well and good to appeal to altruistic motives, but a lot more people can be mobilzed if they don't have to sacrifice their own comfort. I have learned a great deal about this from Jesse and Sharla at Rejuvenate. They train coaches and holistic practitioners in sales and marketing - enabling thousands of people to start businesses who are doing the sorts of things that advance their mission. They do this while also being multi-millionaires themselves, and maintaining a very comfortable lifestyle, taking the time for self-care and relaxation to recharge from long workdays.
Less Wrong is read by thousands of people, many of whom are brilliant and talented. In addition, Less Wrong readers include people who are interested in the future of the world and think about the big picture. They think about things like AI and the vast positive and negative consequences it could have. In general, they consider possibilities that are outside of their immediate sensory experience.
I've run into a lot of people in this community with some really cool, unique, and interesting ideas, for high-impact ways to improve the world. I've also run into a lot of talent in this community, and I have concluded that we have the resources to implement a lot of these same ideas.
Thus, I am opening up this post as a discussion for these possibilities. I believe that we can share and refine them on this blog, and that there are talented people who will execute them if we come up with something good. For instance, I have run into countless programmers who would love to be working on something more inspiring than what they're doing now. I've also personally talked to several smart organizational leader types, such as Jolly and Evelyn, who are interested in helping with and/or leading inspiring projects And that's only the people I've met personally; I know there are a lot more folks like that, and people with talents and resources that haven't even occurred to me, who are going to be reading this.
Topics to consider when examining an idea:
An example idea from Reichart Von Wolfsheild:
A project to document the best advice we can muster into a single tome. It would inherently be something dynamic, that would grow and cover the topics important to humans that they normally seek refuge and comfort for in religion. A "bible" of sorts for the critical mind.
Before things like wikis, this was a difficult problem to take on. But, that has changed, and the best information we have available can in fact be filtered for, and simplified. The trick now, is to organize it in a way that helps humans. which is not how most information is organized.
Collaboration
Finally: If this works right, there will be lots of information flying around. Check out the organization thread and the wiki.