requests for startups

problems i want there to exist solutions to. if you're building one of these, let's get in touch!

note: this should really be called “requests for innovation”, since many of these societal problems may not be optimally solved by the shape of commercial vehicle that venture capital has to offer. venture capital's incentives may not be aligned with what's best for humanity in the long-term.

Build the “Later” in “Save for Later”

The 'Save for Later' or 'Bookmark' feature is a graveyard of user intentions across all the platforms it's on. Users save for many different reasons, but later never comes. Surface these intentions at the right time in the form of tools, dashboards, or proactive agentic action, so that users have a “Later”.

I'm working on a CLI tool that aggregates known libraries to pull Saved for Later content from across platforms, and outputs as JSON.

Teach ways of thinking, not facts

We should be teaching our children ways of thinking—not rote fact memorization. Time to build a new curriculum! More on this in rebuilding education from first principles.

Food transparency data

I believe consumers will pay for more verified claims of quality for the food they eat. Third-party testing shows unacceptably high levels of lead in most mainstream plant protein brands and cocoa powders. Democratizing this data would “price-in” the health impacts of toxic food, aligning market incentives towards optimizing for what's healthiest for humanity. Using blockchain or similar technologies, work with food producers and distributors to solve consumer access to cheap, verifiable food transparency data at scale.

Solve the fresh food crisis / kill hub-and-spoke food distribution

Ruthlessly target food spoilage and quality loss. Amazon-ify fresh food: re-imagine cultivation, processing, transportation, preparation of perishables from the ground-up as an integrated system to minimize waste and maximize quality. Eliminate spoilage waste, eliminate nutrition/quality-reducing artificial shelf-life extension for perishables. Create abundance by improving freshness and ingredient quality while reducing margins and friction.

Current modular food production systems optimize for shelf-life at the cost of quality loss, leading to consumers purchasing produce that looks fine but tastes inedible. Shelf life stabilizes [the] global food supply chain, so there is abundance, but of low-nutrient untasty food. Canning: exposing food to intense, sustained heat cooks it inside the container. This destroys delicate vitamins (like Vitamin C and B), breaks down cellular structures to create mushiness, and alters flavors into a distinct “cooked” or metallic taste.

Global cold chain infrastructure is fragile & expensive. Access to fresh food improves only when the cold supply chain is shortened. This can take place in two ways: upstream (bring supply closer to the end consumer) and downstream (radically reduce transportation time and cost).

[sources: PMC10417803, modern industrial food preservation techniques]

Purpose-built accelerator

Create new accelerators whose sole purpose is to steward to the market those civilizational upgrades that would be incompatible with the exploitative-by-nature venture capital model:

how can we best create the conditions to safely incubate civilizational innovation?
how can we maximally leverage the idea of the startup for an all-encompassing civilizational upgrade?
how can we align incentives so that the wealth of the future belongs to its denizens?
how can we preserve slow experiments with long-term payoffs, or at least prevent venture from having to kill net profitable experiments that haven't yet 10x'ed?
how do we enable and inspire the next generation of entrepreneurs, in and outside of silicon valley, to answer humanity's call for innovation?