Lesswrong startup ideas from Who Wants To Start An Important Startup?

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, mockups, etc.

I'd love feedback, remembering that 'criticism is the cornerstone to progress', and 'if version 1 isn't embarrassing, you've released too late.'

Other ideas that probably wouldn't make a lot of money

• Welcome to the internet page

• Accountability Engine - many have an easier time helping other people than they do themselves, why not trade tasks at 5 min, 30 min, and 1 hr intervals? Alternatively, everyone in your group has to post a series of 3 screenshots or images of the progress that they've made towards two publicly declared goals. I want to make inaction inexcusable.

• Your liaison in XYZ - want something shipped to or from a friend? Need someone to represent you in another country?

• Intelligent alert system - Hey, you've just spent 10 minutes on Facebook - how about you work on what you should be working on instead?

• AnswerMe - Questions? Ask them via text or email, and it will automatically be posted to Quora, ChaCha answers, and just for laughs - Yahoo Answers. At the end of the day or week, the answers are forwarded to your email or texted direct. If you're a premium user, it costs cents to post to Amazon's Mechanical Turk (and they have an API!) and only a couple dollars to post on Odesk to get hours worth of research. (I regularly hire people at $3.33/hr in India, since standard of living is so much lower.)

Odd ideas:

• Relationship advice hotline - text or call a phone number, direct connect with someone that can help

• LevelUpLife - Lend a GoPro camera necklace to someone, have them wear it to a social occasion or work environment situation, then advise them specifically on how to be funnier, happier, or better in some way that they choose. This can also be done with a personal recorder or iPhone in their pocket for more seamless suggestions.

Self-selecting from an audience that took the time to read this is likely worth connecting with, if at least online. If you happen to be located in the bay area, I spend most of my time in Berkeley, San Francisco, and Palo Alto, and am happy to meet up for tea or join you during an event with anyone who is even slightly curious.

Disclaimer: You may end up with photos of your face,, learning how to card manipulate, contact juggle, or flip a butterfly knife.

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 traditional schools early in life. This product gives everyone that opportunity.

By lowering the cost of going home-school, this product will enlargen the home school market and threaten traditional educrats while producing more exceptional minds.

With direct access to millions of students, the website will be able to monetize through one-on-one tutoring markets, college prep services, and other means.

Course material can be bootstrapped by constructing a curriculum out of free videos provided through sources like the Khan Academy. The value-add of the Company will be to tailor the curriculum to the home-school requirements of the particular state of the student.

My background: I cofounded a company that's had reasonable success. I'm not much of a Less Wrong fan - I find the community to be an intellectual monoculture, dogmatic, and full of blind spots to flaws in the philosophy it preaches. BUT this is an idea that needs to happen, as it will provide much value to the world. Contact me at firstname lastname gmail if you have lots of money or can hack. Or hell, steal the idea and do it yourself. Just make it happen.

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!

Some non-nitwit (actual-economic-value-generating) startups I've heard proposed lately by people in this or related communities:

• Kevin Fischer is interested in identifying useful sub-chemicals in certain legal psychoactive plants. Anyone with biotech, chemical-identifying training would be useful to him.
• Mike Darwin (not LW-style rationalist, but cryonicist) says that his research and numerous other papers show that melatonin, among some other chemicals, is very effective at preventing cerebral-reperfusion ischemic injury which is the real killer in heart attacks and strokes, and for which there are apparently not currently approved medications.
• Zvi Mowshowitz is now trying to refound a startup to provide evidence-based, rationalist-filtered medical care - evidence-based doctors as opposed to just evidence-based medical research that often gets ignored by actual doctors.
• John Schloendorn is the most competent biotech guy I know. He was literally trying to cure cancer - by trying to duplicate the abilities of a 100%-cancer-immune strain of mice, in humans - when his startup ran out of money; and he has a lot of other low-hanging fruits on his list as well.

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 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.

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:

• Suits or jeans?
• Hands-on management or delegation?
• Flexible telecommuting or rigid office hours?
• Work 60 hours a week or 35?
• Prefer to keep social life separate from office or integrated? Office romance approved/disapproved?
• Is highest status given to engineering or sales or management or who?
• Is the focus on maximizing profit or creating value for the world or what?
• Is the focus on an exit (like an IPO or acquisition) or a lifestyle business?
• Risk-averse or risk-seeking?
• In software development, programming-conservative or programming-liberal?

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.)

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.

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:

• Administering the karma-reductions/deadbeat labeling
• Providing pre-made, time-tested contract formats
• Acting as certificate authority for digital signing of agreements
• Having network of local people who can take the time to pursue legal action if someone wants to go that route.
• Mediation and verification that payments happened

If you can provide a way to ensure payment through these community mechanisms, you would allow borrowers to pay a much lower rate than credit cards would charge, and lenders to get much higher returns than the market allows. (Incidentally, I recently just made such a loan to someone I had known for ten years only through internet forums, and I just got his final repayment.)

Edit: tl;dr: Basically, an internet karma pawn shop (although it's crucial that people not see it as simply a way of cashing in karma)

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 or so. The math might come out more positive if you value the knowledge capital gained through startup work in the correct way, for example, but that's particularly tricky to calculate. If anyone else has thoughts on this subject I would love to read or hear them.

For reference, Robin already wrote about Kelly betting to claim that the present era is visibly unstable because most investment firms, and the economy in general, seems not to be engaged in a Kelly strategy at the present time. In some sense, Robin claimed, a financial system not dominated by Kelly-following-financial-entities would probably be a system that has no significantly old Kelly-following-financial-entities, because in the long run they "win" at finance.

Another source on Kelly betting that is directly applicable to startups flows with the "invest in the team, not the idea" dictum. The post "Optimal startup burn rate and the Kelly criterion" is no longer available in the wild but is retained on archive.org and discussed the optimal team size and experimental product cycle given a starting bankroll. (The blog is LaserLike and is not itself down.)

For what its worth, I'm not totally bearish on startups, and sort of have one cooking... I'm just trying to pursue startup stuff with an eye on keeping a bird or 6 in the hand while pursuing startup stuff in parallel. In this vein, if anyone is or knows a solid hardware hacker with RFID experience/interest, especially if they are ethical, planful, world-savey, "rational", and/or live in (southern?) California, I'd appreciate hearing from you. No particular startup interest or equity tolerance is important -- just hardware skills, character, and an interest in educational conversation :-)

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 be used to aid users in memorizing selected text using spaced repetition.

Current development: At present this is very much at the idea stage. I'm an entrepreneur, developer and UI designer myself, and looking for people who'd be interested in helping me build this. I'm also very interested to know whether people would be interested in using such a solution, and any suggestions for improving the idea.

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 similar preferences to them (exact method of analysis still up for debate, but a few likely candidates stand out), and suggests specific sizes and ranges that would meet their needs.

There are three sides to this. The first is users getting the service described above. The second is the option to license out the size/fit data to interested third parties, such as manufacturers and retailers, which would probably be the most sizeable revenue stream. The third is the possibility of using the data to produce a better sizing scheme that more accurately tackles the real-world problem.

I see two main problems with the idea. The first is encouraging user uptake (convincing women to spend time inputting details about their underwear into a website). The second, which is related, is giving them incentive to do so without the recommendation algorithm in place. I have no idea if k-NN or spectral partitioning or probabilistic classifiers or regression analysis will be any good at all in carving up the data appropriately, and I won't know until I get a sizeable set of data to develop against. There'd need to be an existing service provision for the users to encourage them to sign up and provide the data before the interesting work even begins. An existing comprehensive list of commercially available bras complete with a flat non-super-stats-enhanced rating system might be enough to get the ball rolling.

I should reiterate that I'm unlikely to pursue this idea. While I have a background in web dev, data analysis and technical fashion retail, I'm far from an expert in any of them. Still, if anyone wants to convince me otherwise, give me more reasons why it's a bad idea, or steal it outright, please go ahead.

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.

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 the things people do well with the things computers (i.e. software we currently able to write) do well, we can enable new kinds of data analysis. For example, we can mine figures from the medical literature for depictions of biochemical pathways, recreate many of them together (molecules = nodes, interactions = edges), and create a more complete picture of our biology.

So that's our approach: find an interesting, complex problem (so far they have been in the academic research world), collaborate with the domain experts to design human computation processes to enable the necessary data analysis and synthesis, and using our web platform, pay people in developing countries to do the work. Interesting problems get solved, we get paid, and people in Kenya get paid. Win, win, win.

Interested? We are looking for:

• People with problems to solve using human computation. We are especially looking for domain experts here. Not sure if your problem is amenable to human computation? Let's talk.

• Programmers. We've got a platform now but are continually improving it. Python/django. There's also a fair amount of cobbling together datasets for input and output that presents ever-changing challenges in many different languages.

• Marketing/sales. Our concept is a hard thing to explain to people. People don't seem to be used to thinking about solving problems in this manner, so it's difficult to get people to think, "Oh yes! I have problem X and this will help me solve it!". We need to figure out some way to communicate this better in order to expand the problems to work on and increase revenue.

• Funding. We need to pay programmers, marketing people, and us.

• Other! Think this is a cool idea but don't fit into one of the above areas? Let's talk!

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 adjustments for things like quality-of-life and is-the-company-doing-something-worthwhile. While ideologically frustrating (I like the idea of working for my startup full-time post-graduation), that has seemed to be the most instrumentally rational thing for me to do.

Here are some options I'll throw out there:

• If there's collective interest in MyPersonalDev as a vehicle for some of the positive impact we're talking about in this thread, I'm interested in working with people to make that happen. Anyone interested in sponsoring development of the software or otherwise making it more financially viable during its startup phase should contact me. For the next nine months before I graduate, it could help to have a small, cheap office space near campus, as I'll be living on-campus and can't conduct commercial activity there. I'll plan to put a media kit together with more information on the company for interested parties.
• If other programmers want to work with me on MyPersonalDev, either now over the internet, or in-person once I graduate in May, that would be exciting! I'm not sure how we would work it out in terms of equity and salary, but I'm open to suggestions. Right now the company is a stock corporation, of which I am the sole director and shareholder. I like that because it's lean (I don't need to get permission from other people to make business decisions.) That said, I'd want collaborators to be fairly compensated. Some sort of funding or revenue seems necessary for this to happen.
• If I don't end up working for MyPersonalDev full-time post-graduation, I'm available as a programmer and aspiring rationalist who wants to work on something important. Until May, I'm available online; after May, I'm available in-person.
• If people want to form a startup together, maybe they should live together too! I started a roommate interest coordination thread two weeks ago for purposes like that.
• Like I said in that thread: If there were several people interested in working for their own startups, maybe they could lease a building together, or utilize collective purchasing to lower the costs of bookkeeping or legal services. (Is anyone interested in doing that?)

Look at my history of posts for more information about me. Like I said in a recent post:

I'm especially interested in collaborating with other programmers, working in Python or Go, working on data visualizations in D3, programming rationality exercises, or working on something that qualifies as "data science".

I want to work on something important. I want to work on a team. And I want to make enough money to live comfortably. When I graduate in May, I'm very interested in moving towards a more optimal living and working situation. Could we be a fit? Get in touch!

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.

• Most startups fail
• even when the principals are smart and motivated
• even when the idea is really good
• even when [x] is [y]

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).

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 post and when
• measures of success for various projects over various periods of time

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 rules for bets that projects will succeed are different in this context than in a lot of standard games. Because the mission is to win the game of making humanity awesome, as opposed to a more restricted game, everything that is ethical and legal is fair game for influencing the outcome of your bets. You can offer resources to increase your odds of winning, such as personal time/money investment in the projects, counseling, connections, office space, or any other resources that seem like they might be useful.

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 positions including management, and avoiding suppliers that donate to Autism Speaks while donating to the Autistic Self Advocacy Network as possible.

Our thoughts on the project so far are collected here - I'm sure I've forgotten some important things even given the length of the above infodump :). (Also, contacting me there will work better than contacting me here after the next few days - I'm not actually following LW anymore; I only knew about this because Alicorn told me.)

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.

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 am pretty ignorant about business issues so I don't know whether this is even possible. Is this data available, and if so is it legal to publish it? Could publishing critical data count as defamation, or whatever the business equivalent is?
• How to profit from doing this - doesn't spring to mind immediately.
• May already exist.
• Assassination.

I'm sure there are others.

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.

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.

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 be that if you feel inspired to start a new top level thread, post to the organizational thread first, and wait at least 24hrs for feedback before implementing. I think good, well-thought-out high level organization will go quite a ways toward productive discussion and ideas actually getting implemented.

It would also be nice to start a wiki, volunteers for this would be great, but I’d like some discussion about this for at least a couple of days on the organization thread before it happens, since the quality and implementation of the wiki will have a big impact on how useful it is, and it would be best to do it right the first time and not end up with multiple wikis.

For this post, I encourage people to start threads for things such as:

• people offering physical/material resources.
• people interested in working on projects in various fields.
• people interested in leading projects.
• people who have resources such as niche training or lots of money and a particular passion related to making the world better that they would be interested in making a certain project happen related to.

In addition to posting publicly if you are interested in working on a project, you can also fill out this form to be sent to me personally and not published on the web. I’ll do what matchmaking I can with the forms personally and only send them to people who I think have potential to be good matches. ) to be sent to me personally and not published on the web. I’ll do what matchmaking I can with the forms personally and only send them to people who I think have potential to be good matches.

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

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 success in place of failure. Unfortunately, even in its best forms, it also can easily sap a person’s motivation. It tends to do this on the monkey mind level, not on the analytic level, which is frustrating since negative feedback is such a beautiful tool for the analytic mind. I’ve seen how even the slightest negative feedback can have a huge impact, even stopping people from working on projects that are pretty decent on the whole. There is a minority of people who are relatively unfazed by negative commentary, but most of us can’t help but internalize it somewhat. Agentiness is rare, and something that can be cultivated or trampled with feedback. Being specific is the one of the most helpful things you can do to deliver the most constructive criticism, because the information tends to be more helpful toward solving the problems and less personal.

Another thing that helps avoid killing someone’s motivation is speaking with the assumption that the person you're talking to is an intelligent human being whose idea could be good if worked out a little further. This is often the case, especially here. When people sense that you anticipate that they'll come back with an intelligent answer, they often do.

Here's an example for making negative feedback more specific: Perhaps you think that a person is vastly underestimating the difficulty of raising funds for their idea. I would suggest phrasing it as a question: “How do you propose to get funding for this idea?” You don’t need to convey your doubt in the question, but if you do feel the need to bring it up, do it as specifically as possible: “When I’ve tried fundraising in the past, I found it extremely hard, and extrapolating that, I have a hard time imagining it working for this project. Can you please explain how you see this happening?”

In summary, I think that it is very much worth giving negative feedback, even though it does often harm motivation. Ideas need to be good if they’re going to work, and by giving negative feedback, you are helping people improve their ideas. Even if the person with the idea doesn’t get it or update, it might help bystanders. And there’s a decent chance that the person who you talk to will understand, and you might be able to help a project happen that wouldn’t have gotten off the ground without your well framed remark.

Positive: Validation for good ideas is really helpful. You may think that people who have a good idea know that it's a good idea already. I know a lot of people, though, who feel a little better and more encouraged - and who are more likely to follow through when given validation. So if you see someone mention something great, be sure to give them a thumbs up. It will be even more powerful if you respond with a comment saying specifically why it's a good idea, with as much detail as you can manage. Not only will the person feel validated, but other people reading are also more likely to see the value that you see, so the idea is more likely to get funding, refinement, and resources. If this thread goes as I hope, any comment or up/down vote that you make might well have a impact on whether or not a world-improving project gets implemented.

Clarification: Sometimes someone will make a good point that is obvious to you, but not obvious to other people. If you understand a good point that someone has made and you think it's not likely to get across to others, it's super helpful if you can restate it clearly and succinctly so that the concept gets conveyed to everyone.

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, then much better odds of a match happening, if someone in their target demographic passes through. And if they end up getting more clarity through your questions and realizing that the idea isn't actually something they want to pursue, then that's not a bad outcome either - they can stop worrying about it and move onto something better suited to them.

In addition to helping them get clear about things you think you would want as an investor, also questions that clarify what they would be looking for in general, and especially as a next step, for the project would help. Have they answered the question "What/who does this project need?" very concretely and specifically?

If you ask the right questions, you just might be able to make the difference between someone getting their project funded or not. We can make bets about specifics of this assertion with David's market ;)

Also worth noting that even though I phrased the question about "what cause me to want to work with or invest in them" in the positive, often what needs to be addressed are peoples concerns to show that the project is actually realistic - so asking the hard questions, that could prove that the idea is not good if the person can't answer well, is actually quite important. Its much better to risk genuinely disqualifying a project than to not give it a chance to be noticed.

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 user is informed by a tone or other notification. Alternatively, one could go the more pedagogical route by showing then a still frame of the person doing the micro-expression some milliseconds prior with the relevant bits of the face highlighted.

Feasibility: We already can make computers are good at finding faces in images and creating 3D models from multiple camera perspectives. I'm pretty sure small cameras are good enough by now. We need the beefy CPU and/or GPU as a separate device for now because it's going to be a while before wearables are good enough to do this kind of heavy-duty processing on their own, but wifi is good enough to transmit very high resolution video. The foggiest bit in my model would be whether current image processing techniques are up to the challenge. Would anyone with expertise in machine vision care to comment on this?

Possible positive consequences: Group collaboration easily succumbs to politics and scheming unless a certain (large) level of trust and empathy has been established. (For example, I've seen plenty of hacker news comments confirm that having a strong friendship with one's startup cofounder is important.) A technology such as this would allow for much more rapid (and justified) trust-building between potential collaborators. This might also allow for the creation of larger groups of smart people who all trust each other. (Which would be invaluable for any project which produces information which shouldn't be leaked because it would allow such projects to be larger.) Relatedly, this might also allow one to train really excellent therapist-empaths.

Possible negative consequence: Police states where the police are now better at reading people's minds.

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.

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

Topics to consider when examining an idea thread

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 benefits -- that mindset is exponentially worse in a time-accelerated enviro with a burn-rate that implies a near-future mortality for the corporate corpus.

Personally, if someone told me I had to do just 2 more years of what I went through with a startup in order to never work again, I'd say "no thanks". And while I'm happy to pitch in some time on concepts that either help humanity or personally enrich me (and am extra-eager if we can tie the two together), I'm not leaving my 30-hour-a-week, slippers-&-bathrobe-dress-code, commute-to-the-livingroom business any time soon (although I would if I got involved in something hugely beneficial and moderately profitable). So, I think some of the ideas already mentioned about marrying interests and abilities with different classes of start-ups need implementation if this is going to move from some sort of communal stew to a concrete business with distinct individuals making discrete contributions. [Aside: I think that's a start-up possibility right there ... a mechanism that allows arbitrary-sized contributions to a project (think open-source), but has some (community) basis for valuing those contributions, so when the cash starts rolling in, people can be compensated roughly in proportion to their contributions (yes, this is probably a harder problem than most of the startups suggested here). Thought exercise: if someone gave $1B "to Linux" (sic) for contributions to humanity, how would that money be doled out to contributors?]

Ideas with long payoff time frames are generally not good candidates for startups (unless the founders are willing to light their money on fire just because it's something they just want to see done), which limits the scope of things that can be done in a "non-philanthropic" enviro. I think you also need to delineate classes of businesses: some people will see the philanthropy angle as a mere selling tool to generate funding/interest; other people are interested in "doing good", and have ideas for companies that won't work any better as non-profits than for-profits.

So, for me: I'd like to contribute SOME time to a project with public benefit, and if I happen to get some money out of it down the road, I can decide to commit more time and/or consider that gravy. I've had a web design/hosting business (mostly LAMP) for about 15 years, and do a little bit of most things tangentially associated with that.

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 when the user opens the tab again the page reloads.

The point is that only the URL must be saved, and the system memory could be used for better tasks.

bits not gigabytes

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.

I have unusual abilities that I would like to share for a cause. The things I can do in a few hours may prove powerful, though I do not have time for more than here-and-there consultations.

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 and significant experience interacting with highly gifted adults / geniuses / brilliant people (I know, I know, defining those is hairy.) This specific focus is relatively rare and may be very useful at answering questions for people who are trying to find, motivate and organize multiple brilliant people and to create a good environment for them to actualize their potential in.

Communication. Have no idea how to explain your amazing idea? Don't know how to get through to everyday people? Can't get people to get along? I'm good at oiling situations like these.

Solving quagmires. I love trying to do the impossible. Sometimes I seek it out just for the sense of challenge. Not everybody is even willing to try doing a challenge that hard. Give me a paperclip and some duct tape, ask me to do something impossible and see what happens - I relish that.

Inventing stuff. I love inventing! I'm especially good with visual-spatial tasks and systems. I program all day, and then to relax, I make 3-D models with the goal of challenging myself to build something that is practical in ten ways at once AND beautiful (read: visual synthesis tasks). That is a favorite kind of challenge of mine. I am excellent at fine art and design. Yes, the "3-D models" I'm talking about are Minecraft structures.

Graphic design - if I get to have enough fun, I may do your project just to have done it.

Marketing ideas. I come up with tons of them. (Example) They tend to be clever "purple cows" (a term from Seth Godin's marketing books). Aside from some amusing success, my abilities are untested but a "pay only if it makes you money" arrangement is especially useful here. I can just give you purple cow ideas, you thin the herd and only pay me if the cows pay you.

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 know how to avoid untrustworthy people preying on children, and I do not know how this would work with child labor laws. As far as I know though, teens have been hired for this kind of work for years without any problems.

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 automated parking garage that is shrunk down to the size of a fridge. You can learn more here I apologize in advance that I'm linking to FB, it's just were the idea currently lives.

The benefit of the company is providing a greener fridge that helps people not waste food, which is a big problem right now. Americans waste 34 million tons of food waste each year. The amount of green house gases, labor, and transportation costs to produce food just to throw away food is maddening.

Obviously the first fridge will cost the same as a luxury car, since you're basically cramming a robot into a fridge, but so was the first computer. I can see this fridge being the next big opportunity where everyone throws out the dumb fridge just like everyone did with their CRT for an LCD.

That being said, I welcome your comments and questions.

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 the resources available to Christians. I think that is something that will be fixed by a growing community of atheist writers, poets, and musicians, not a bereavement wiki.

But perhaps there is a gem buried there- wiki software is designed for a growing web of knowledge. What he wants is a single, sequential work which can be edited and adjusted by many people at once: the combination of version control and the tradition of oral epics. Open source community works are already common in music, I think, but the closest thing for text seems like fanfiction, which is far from the idea I'm discussing.

(Feel free to give feedback on this as an example of feedback, as well as the actual content.)

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 of the web. A community where everyone focus on finding that photo and enlighten each other.

Progress I've actually created that website.

As an example of how the site works, a user saw an article about french tourists who got suspended jail in Sri Lanka for taking demeaning photos next to a buddha statue. The user then created a "subject" about it, found here: http://upnorthtimes.com/index.php?option=com_categories&view=popularsubjects&layout=subjectdetails&subjectid=248

Later, that user set out to find those photos. After finding them, he created a discussion thread within the subject where he posted the website where they can be found: http://upnorthtimes.com/index.php?option=com_kunena&func=view&catid=239&id=146&Itemid=267

Now users can see the photos for themselves and lay to rest the question of "wonder how bad those photos were?".

Obstacles We still have a few bugs to sort out. If you visit the site and the page loads everything to the left, just reload it until it loads correctly. There is also the matter of promoting the site correctly. If any of you have a good idea or want to help contribute/spread the site I would be thankful!

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 satisfied with the results presented, then the request will be broadcast through the network to peers with a favorable history. In the first pass, peer's database will be searched. If this is not sufficient the request will appear as an unanswered question to be answered by other users if they choose to respond. I shouldn't need to tell the LW audience that Bayes' Rule is used to evaluate the responses by peer. An optional milieu field helps to narrow down areas of expertise for individual contributors.

The program is integrated with phone's calendar function, allowing delayed and repeating execution of requests.

The application incorporates a screensaver which builds upon the individualized database arrangement to deliver peer-created scenes to a fixed storyline, which showcases emerging technologies. These stories display links for users to access speculative technologies, then the users are directed to open source projects (if they follow my links).

On top of all this, add the usual slew of social media options: upvoting, banning, groups, multiple user profiles, anonymous searches, recruiting incentives, et cetera.

My intention is to leave the code open source and offer free and paid versions of the app. The consumer version I am calling 'Hope' and the developer's edition I am calling 'Plan A.' Working on my own I hope to get this project to a working demo in December of this year. Currently the code is hosted at BitBucket. I plan on moving over to GoogleCode when I iron out some connectivity issues.

As a closing note, let me mention that this project was originally inspired by the question: "Why aren't more people putting 3D printers to practical use?"

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, with a promise to repay that over a very long time period at a very low interest rate (something that works out to about 20% in total repayments, before factoring inflation, if I had to peg it to something for the sake of argument). A website would have a schedule of incentive schemes, possibly scaled by degree-of-difficulty (passing grades being tougher for weaker students, e.g.), and upon meeting the short-term milestones of that goal, and the final goal itself, incentives would be paid out. This could apply to any process that has a {present value of all future returns} greater than the amount needed to repay: reduced medical costs for weight reduction and smoking-cessation, job certifications (passing a CPA or actuarial exam), time off from work to acquire a work-related skill, cost of improving a home/installing energy-reducing features, etc. Yeah, some of those may not work, but I'm sure there's no shortage of quantifiable processes or goals with a positive future ROI. & I can see that measurement could be tricky, but in the school example we could have schools sign on to the program, in the certification example we get a copy of the certification from the certifying body, etc.

There's an additional monetary multiplier, in that the younger version (the borrower) is almost certainly in a lower income bracket than the older version (the lender), and the money is valued more highly ... I'd happily give $20 inflation-adjusted dollars (a pittance now) to my younger self just to go have fun with (who felt $20 was a lot of money), even taking into account that I wish I'd worked/studied harder when I was younger so I could coast more now. And when it comes time to repay the loan, the fact that I am effectively repaying myself might reduce deadbeatedness.

Of course, not everyone will repay their loans, and the payoff in this venture would be very long-term. So who would provide the seed money for this until repayments match outlays? Well: - The same people who loan money to Kiva, not to make a profit, but because they believe incentivizing people is more effective than aid, and if they make a few dollars off it eventually, that's gravy - The same people who give gift annuities to schools (a similar mechanism) - Foundations with money to invest and an ethical dictate to do something with that money - People trying to solve long-term problems (eradicating diseases, improving the education system) who just want their money to do the best thing possible - Alumni of the program who see the value (the same way universitites have an easy time getting money from graduates who believe school was one reason they have high incomes) - People who see it as a Very Good Idea and choose to fund that instead of a non-profit (I understand you personally may not consider it a VGI, but weaker concepts have attracted more money)

Please proceed to poke holes/refine. thnx. -b.

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 that the items exist, and if they found out about the item, they would still have trouble getting it.

The idea is to develop a distribution network. This is not an easy task. To help farmers learn about the goods, you could distribute brochures via NGOs and the microfinance system. To transport the goods, use group buys to lower the costs, and the bus network seems potentially viable for small deliveries. In a few years, the internet and smartphones will be widely distributed in the developing world, so the possibilities for a technology-based platform will start to come into play. This is a slow, long-term idea; there will not be any cashing out anytime soon, and it's going to be a painful grind. That said, I think it's an enormous business with a huge positive impact on the world.

Note: I'm working on another startup right now and don't intend to switch ideas until this one is done, so this is a long-term play. But I figured I'd post the idea anyway, see if people have interest or special insight. I know someone who's started an NGO to produce hand carts (http://anzacart.org) as well as some people in the optimal philanthropy community, who presumably have connections via NGOs to Africa.

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 rough and present them with a deal. They are moved to a top-level boarding school in a developed country (This could be a partnership with existing schools or a school developed specifically for this program, maybe there is a year long english prep trial school they go to first, there are many details to consider). In exchange they commit to paying some percentage (10% feels about right as a gut-check) of their income to the company for the rest of their lives (maybe there is an option to buy out of the contract for kids that end up sufficiently wealthy, again, many details to consider).

Biggest issues I see:

• The program will take many years, potentially 2 decades, to start generating revenue.
• A host of legal hurdles
• Social/litigious blowback from groups that don't like the idea of plucking third world children from their families and signing them up for what may be interpreted as indentured servitude
• Reliably selecting the right kids may turn out to be prohibitively expensive

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; it's unrealistic to plan exactly how you will make money. Make sure you're creating value, and check that there's nothing that would prevent you from ever collecting any of that value. Then go back to creating value.

Iteration beats brilliance. The speed at which you iterate is more important that the brilliance of the initial idea. Trying out a product in the real market is an experiment: the feedback your receive entangles your startup with other players in the market. Each experiment steers you towards a local optimum. To win you need (1) to start in the general vicinity of a good local optima and (2) rapid convergence to that optima.

The quality of the team is key. Early stage investors invest largely in the perceived quality of a team, and so should you invest your time alongside great people. An early stage startup should never hire consultants (wrong incentives), should never live in different cities (bad communication). Entering into a startup is like a marriage: it's very hard to get out.

Choose investors cautiously. You're also "married" to your investors on the day you sign a term sheet. Pick ones that you trust, that share your goals, and that can help you in ways other than by providing capital.

An existing example of what Reichart is talking about (I think) http://examine.com/

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.

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 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.