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1. Compile a list of problems that need to be solved

Owned by Nathan Wailes
Last updated: Jan 03, 2018
10 min read

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Amazon - Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration



2013.01.17 - Wired - Larry Page on why moon shots matter
http://www.wired.com/business/2013/01/f ... -page/all/

Larry Page lives by the gospel of 10x. Most companies would be happy to improve a product by 10 percent. Not the CEO and cofounder of Google. The way Page sees it, a 10 percent improvement means that you’re basically doing the same thing as everybody else. You probably won’t fail spectacularly, but you are guaranteed not to succeed wildly.

That’s why Page expects his employees to create products and services that are 10 times better than the competition. That means he isn’t satisfied with discovering a couple of hidden efficiencies or tweaking code to achieve modest gains. Thousand-percent improvement requires rethinking problems entirely, exploring the edges of what’s technically possible, and having a lot more fun in the process.
[...]
Wired: But you have to gradually improve your existing products too, right?

Page: Of course. But periodically, every n years, you should work on something new that you think is really amazing. The trick is coming up with those products. I could probably give you a list of 10 major things that are wrong with email. I try to maintain lists like that in my head.
[...]
  • Even better than maintaining lists like that in your head is doing it on an internal wiki site.




2004 - Playboy - Interview with Page/Brin

Brin: In 1993 and 1994, when Mosaic, the predecessor of Netscape, was launched, a "What's New" page listed new websites for the month and then, when more began appearing, for the week. At the time, search engineers had to deal with a relative handful of sites, first thousands and then tens of thousands. By the time we deployed our initial commercial version of Google in late 1998, we had 25 million or 30 million pages in our index. Today we have billions--more than 4 billion, in fact. That volume requires a different approach to search technology.
  • Lesson: Look for places where new technology is being adopted by people, and then try to figure out how to ride that wave.


Playboy interview with Bezos: It was when he saw statistics in '94 about the insane growth of the internet



2014 - 1776 - a Venture Capitalist visits
A VC came to 1776 and said something that really struck me: while talking about Bitcoin, he said "The technical people--the engineers--are getting very excited about it. And that's important to pay attention to, because that means they are going to build things on top of it, which will increase /cement its value." I had never thought about technological progress like that.





Look at the problems failed companies were trying to solve

Related pages


  • Just because a company failed while trying to execute a particular idea doesn't mean that the idea was a bad one. It may just have been that the timing wasn't right, or the team wasn't right, or the strategy wasn't right.

Examples

  • Facebook
    • There were several failed social networks before Facebook: SocialNet, Friendster.
  • SpaceX
    • I believe there were other commercial spaceflight companies before SpaceX that didn't fare so well.
  • Tesla
    • Ditto for electric car companies

 

 

Look for companies charging their users money

Examples

  • PlentyOfFish
    • Back in 2001 after my birthday someone in the office introduced me to online dating sites.  I went back to my desk and checked out udate.com and kiss.com and lavalife/web personals. I was bored and I wanted to chat with people.  I was really annoyed when I found out you had to pay for everything, I ended up telling the girl who introduced me to the sites that I could do better and make them for free, so I went and registered Plentyoffish.com.
  • WhatsApp
    • They grew very quickly because the cellphone companies were charging users for sending text messages.



Look for older industries / companies / jobs / fragmented markets


  • Zenefits went after the old, fragmented market of insurance brokers

 

2015.02.28 - Huffington Post - Airbnb Gained A Very Powerful Friend In Warren Buffett

Expecting record attendance, Buffett said he enlisted Airbnb to help obtain extra listings in Omaha around the time of the May conference.

“Airbnb’s services may be especially helpful to shareholders who expect to spend only a single night in Omaha and are aware that last year a few hotels required guests to pay for a minimum of three nights,” he wrote. “That gets expensive. Those people on a tight budget should check the Airbnb website.”


Compile a list of existing jobs and determine which can be automated

 

Monitor / scrape news sites for developments / opportunities


Problems businesses have

  • When you're growing a company, you often need to pass on knowledge from one person to another. For example, a cofounder may be doing a job for a while and then need to hand it off to someone else. At the moment wikis are the way this is done, but these are pretty time-intensive to do well. Another way information is passed on is through in-person 1-on-1 discussions or through group presentations; these methods are easier for the person passing on the knowledge, but have the big problem of the receiver of the information forgetting most of what they're told. Another way information is passed on is through email / gchat, which is somewhat fast for the person passing on the knowledge and allows the receiver of the information to search for it later, but the downside of that is that new people can't search through this backlog of information. One way to fix that might be by making all business-related communication searchable by everyone at the company, which I think Bridgewater sort-of does(?). Another middle option would be for people to record videos of themselves giving these in-person presentations and then having links to the videos on the wiki page.
  • Make a booklet or series of videos about how to be a better employee and pay your employees if they pass a test on it every year. Or do something else to raise the engagement and productivity of employees.
  • List all the problems you've seen at all the companies you've worked for.


Problems individual people have

  • Change the way books are written / consumed! The content of the books should be broken down into main ideas which can be automatically turned into flashcards. Everything should be organized in a very structured way, where you can hit little plus signs next to an idea to dive deeper into it.
  • (Clean this up:) Make a program that helps people figure out what kind of company they should start, or if they should even start a company. I think figuring out how to get people to work together via the Internet (eg git) is a promising field. Take the concept of Google maps and apply it to the rest of peoples' lives. For example, have people coordinate what they wear so that you don't have two people wearing the same outfit. Have video game makers coordinate the types of games they work on so that everyone's game is as different as possible from the other games. Have people coordinate the careers they go into so that you don't have too many people in one career. And let people build their own communities, a la reddit.

  • Help companies and individuals get the maximum amount of value from their work by making it easy for others to take a piece of their work and use it for something else. For example, a videogame company or maker could upload all their assets to the site and have them all individually available for purchase. Maybe build on the selling method of the Unreal 4 engine, where you can use all their stuff for free up to a certain point in sales, at which point they get a cut of the profit (or something like that).
  • Look for underserved groups! Look f


Spend time with various types of people to see what problems they have

Spend time with small business owners to see what problems they have

  • I think if you used this method you could have found the problem that Parker Conrad solved with Zenefits.
    • The question is, would you have been able figure out that the insurance brokers were going to drop their small businesses?

 

Think about what new problems have been created by new technologies

  • Examples:
    • BuiltWith solved the problem of knowing what websites were built with. That was a problem created by new technology; that problem didn't exist before.


What new technology or social trends do you see happening over the next 10-20 years?

  • Put the cuban quote about new technology meaning new opportunities.
  • Put the Dennis quote about his starting a computer magazine and riding that wave as it got more popular.

The pace of people's lives will get faster

  • Get the quote from that interview that Lindybeige did with that guy who lived in that ancient situation for a year. The guy said when he got back to the modern world he was most shocked by how fast-paced it was.
  • Most movies are really fast-paced. I think people would enjoy it if life was as fast-paced as a movie.
  • You'd basically have your life scheduled from the second you wake up until you go to sleep.
    • But you'd also want to have total flexibility to do something different. You don't want to feel at all constrained.
    • I was reminded of this idea while watching this video:
    • You'd want constant variety to make things really exciting:
      • Constantly going from one place to another, seeing new things, meeting new people, doing new activities.
        • Visiting new cities like when I was touring Europe
        • Meeting new people also like when I was touring Europe
        • Doing fun activities like playing soccer with new people, cooking stuff with people you've never met, etc.

What problems have you seen at the companies you've worked for?

  • Even if you don't have experience working in in an industry, you may be able to figure out what problems they have by interviewing people working in an industry or asking how they spend their time and money.
  • Examples:
    • Michael Bloomberg created a company that solved a problem he'd dealt with while working at Salomon Brothers.
    • Parker Conrad created a company that solved a problem he'd dealt with while managing ~30 employees at his first startup.


2015.05.18 - New Yorker - Tomorrow's Advance Man

He tried many different things, but eventually settled on an idea he got from working at Slide: building a sophisticated analytics software that helps apps track and learn more about its users. Although general analytics software like Google Analytics were available, Doshi noticed Slide was spending over $1 million on building its own customized, internal analytics software.

“At Slide, they would measure crazy things. It was like they were quantifying every part of what they did,” Doshi says.

Mixpanel is designed to do exactly that. It measures more detailed “engagement” numbers, such as when the user clicks “likes” on Facebook or “filters” on Instagram, not the more traditional pageviews or install figures.


What ubiquitous problems do you see around you?

Mark Cuban:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y7sgICX5m0o&t=2m00s

For somebody aspiring to take things to the next level, or even surpass their wildest dreams, there's always going to have to be an element of luck, but I think more important is putting yourself in a business that can be ubiquitous, that really doesn't have limits, because otherwise--there's always going to be a grind to it, but if it can't be something that you can visualize every business using, or every consumer using, it's gonna be tough to scale to be big enough or to have the perceived value to get to that billionaire club.
  • There may be an easy way to do this.
    • All existing companies seem to exist to solve one or more problems.
    • So a list of existing companies could be used to generate a list of problems in society that need to get solved.
    • It would be interesting to try to think of a problem that doesn't already have a company attempting to solve it in one way or another...
      • ...maybe problems that come into existence with new technology?

 

Where do you see other people doing very well for themselves?

 

Choose the Right Mountain
 
The world is full of money. Some of that money has your name on it. All you have to do is collect it.
 
If you are not just reading this book for a bit of entertainment (nothing wrong with that), and if you seriously do wish to get rich, then I am going to ask you to memorize the words below, close the book and repeat the words again to yourself. Let's go:

THE WORLD IS FULL OF MONEY. SOME OF IT HAS MY NAME ON IT. ALL I HAVE TO DO IS COLLECT IT.
 
Done that? OK, now we're rockin' and rollin'. The first question to answer is where is the goddamn money? Let's imagine it is in a mine in a mountain. Fine. Which mountain? The mountain that is already making a lot of other people rich would be a good bet.

Gold rushes don't happen in old mines. There will be people making a good living out of old mines, but they won't be too keen to let you muscle in on their stake. Look for new mountains where gold is being mined; or will be mined soon. 

Source: Felix Dennis, How to Get Rich 

 


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