A working collection of businesses, technologies, institutions, and ambitious problems I think might be worth pursuing.
227 ideas
Make communication with satellites and distant space missions feel immediate, despite distances of hundreds of thousands or millions of miles.
Develop systems for forecasting, mitigating, or safely relieving the threat from civilization-scale volcanic events.
Let private patrons fund named missions that travel to and orbit a planet, collecting data shared with both the patron and NASA.
Advance the long-running effort to build a space elevator and dramatically reduce the cost of reaching orbit.
Use sensors, computer vision, and AI to continuously track populations, spot collapses early, and guide reintroduction and habitat work.
Sell compact controlled-environment farms with minimal water use and closed air and water loops for cities, arid regions, and space habitats.
Analyze employee screen recordings to find repetitive workflows, bottlenecks, and the best opportunities for automation.
Create a discreet earpiece powered by movement that runs edge AI, captures notes on demand, and fades into daily life.
Pursue physically possible but extremely difficult recycling that breaks mixed waste into basic feedstocks and recombines them into useful material.
Bring venture capital and a visible founder culture to Seattle, centered in SODO and expressed through a distinctive Northwest hard-tech identity.
Startup community reference ↗Startup gallery reference ↗Storytelling reference ↗
Reinvent eyewear with optical zoom, monitor replacement, eye tracking, and eventually screen-projecting contact lenses.
A working business name or concept that still needs a clear product thesis.
Generate controlled atmospheres for sealed off-world habitats, homes, and vehicles.
Build a company around the mission “help humanity stay human and become cosmic,” with technology backstage and human life center stage.
Revive the Roman bathhouse as a modern civic commons where people practice excellence in body, mind, relationships, and character.
Build a subtle wearable that measures breathing depth, rhythm, and full-breath frequency throughout the day.
Build enormous human-operated machines for forestry, construction, earthmoving, and other work where scale matters.
Coordinate availability, choose plans, book venues, and manage reminders for groups of friends.
Build a recursive game platform where creators can prompt entire games and players can explore worlds generated and remembered by AI.
Let players and AI minds guide a civilization from the present into many possible futures shaped by philosophical, ethical, economic, and political choices.
Build tools or biological interventions that measurably improve reasoning, memory, learning speed, and judgment.
Build advanced suits that extend human strength, endurance, sensing, and survival in extreme environments.
A deliberately provocative research concept: study highly autonomous AI from an isolated Antarctic base with rigorous safety, containment, and governance.
Recommend what to read, watch, or study next based on the ideas and media a person has recently consumed.
Let followable citizen-historians generate, debate, vote on, and preserve stories about any person, place, event, or day in history.
Combine a global startup directory with a live map-driven view of technology companies and activity.
Let small products pay for 100 real people to use a tool and report what confused them, delighted them, or should change.
Measure neural activity well enough to reconstruct, paint, draw, or model a person’s thoughts and mental imagery.
Answer questions by drawing whiteboard-style explanations with images, labels, and relational graphs that make ideas easier to remember.
Generate a 3D model from an idea, preview it in augmented reality, and send it to a high-end fabrication network.
Take people directly to the page or answer they want, while offering optional rich visual result cards instead of default blue links.
Detect coordinated foreign narratives, trace how they spread, and show their influence on domestic opinion.
Let someone describe the website they want and build it through an approachable visual and conversational interface.
Make saving, budgeting, investing, credit, and everyday financial decisions easier to understand and act on.
Aggregate media from every source into a personal feed optimized for curiosity rather than platform engagement.
Turn a repository into a live Figma-like component canvas where visual edits write back to code and code changes immediately update the design.
Reimagine the browser around agents that can navigate, act, organize context, and complete multi-step work.
Build an encrypted, locally owned timeline and vector database from a person’s screen activity, files, communications, and important moments.
Use AI and immersive media to let people enter a richly reconstructed historical moment.
Build large, socially rich Roman-inspired bathhouses with thoughtful clothing norms, inclusive and single-gender areas, and seamless booking.
Use AI to build living curricula that students traverse like a game, unlocking concepts and seeing their progress through a knowledge graph.
Rethink the NYSE for modern, programmable, more transparent capital formation and ownership.
Align employee and referral incentives through phantom equity, automated legal documents, payout tracking, and referral codes.
Create small, meaningful projects around optimism, technological literacy, better public dialogue, writing, and personal concierge help.
Create a healthier setting for difficult political conversations that rewards curiosity and discourages polarization.
Teach ordinary people how to use current tools, build useful things, and feel agency and excitement rather than fear.
Pay people to run models on their own computers and route inference requests to the most suitable available machines.
Use biological or advanced material systems to rapidly form safe shelters after disasters.
Build toward a Star Trek-like system that turns standardized matter and digital designs into a wide range of finished objects.
Attach non-invasive brain-computer interfaces to people and collect aligned neural and physical-motion data at large scale.
Save every AI conversation into an organized, durable archive such as a dedicated Google Drive folder.
Create a company’s domain, email, social accounts, password vault, analytics, and payment setup from one guided flow.
A self-hostable replacement for core cloud services that lets a phone communicate directly with a home server and run private AI.
Teach children practical money skills alongside enduring ideas from the classics.
Turn a personal site into a durable local archive that preserves every linked source and piece of media.
Build explicitly human or non-generative alternatives in categories where customers value restraint, privacy, and predictable tools.
Rethink shared business storage as an open, self-hostable alternative to Google Drive that works naturally with the browser.
Expand the browser into a rich real-time 3D and simulation runtime so websites are no longer limited to conventional pages.
Combine launch and mission APIs with Gaussian splats and a navigable 3D universe for exploring spacecraft, missions, rovers, and planetary activity.
Provide lightweight structures for groups of trusted people to pool capital, define rules, and invest together.
Use Wi-Fi or other radio-frequency signals to detect motion and presence without cameras.
Build a better street-mapping system that preserves every survey so people can see how places change over time.
Send probes to worlds humanity has never observed up close and return unprecedented imagery and measurements.
Create enclosed, modular farms that bootstrap engineered ecosystems using only energy and tightly closed air and water loops.
Deploy indoor drones automatically when a fire starts and use targeted suppressant before it spreads.
Find overlooked communications, sensing, logistics, or scientific uses for inexpensive high-altitude balloons.
Find valuable industrial transformations that abundant solar heat or electricity can perform beyond conventional power generation.
Redesign materials, interiors, clothing, tools, and rituals so living in space feels humane rather than merely survivable.
Let individuals, schools, and organizations lease time on orbiting telescopes and exploration satellites.
Study whether humanity could safely reduce harmful climate variability associated with El Niño.
Make tooling dramatically faster and cheaper so physical-product teams can iterate more like software teams.
Deploy wind- and solar-powered autonomous sailboats to collect environmental and scientific data worldwide.
Offer modular personal satellites with swappable instruments and approachable software for astronomy and exploration.
Deliver a complete, automated garden that makes growing a meaningful share of household food simple.
Make high-quality venture investment accessible to more people without reproducing the complexity of a traditional fund.
Move beyond vertical farming by finding safe ways to compress crop growth cycles—eventually aiming for fruit in days rather than months.
Research carefully governed use of sea-salt aerosols to brighten selected clouds and reduce regional warming.
Develop controllable cloud formation for cooling, rainfall, agriculture, or emergency climate response.
Coordinate drones to find missing people, dangerous actors, targets, or objects quickly across large areas.
Grow structural wood or wood-like biological material quickly enough to reduce pressure on mature forests.
Replace the mouse and keyboard for many tasks with reliable gaze and intent-based control.
Let anyone summon a drone, load an item, and send it directly to another person.
Create an on-demand, all-electric, high-end bus network that feels more like a private lounge than public transit.
Develop practical vehicles that hover or fly while remaining usable in ordinary transportation systems.
Let a human control a humanoid robot through intent, gaze, and neural signals.
Place data centers in the ocean to use natural cooling and unlock new siting options.
Use breakthroughs in material science as a platform for products across energy, space, construction, and defense.
Deploy controllable arrays near a Lagrange point and lease temperature-control capacity to nations.
Move freight between continents through high-speed, low-pressure tunnel systems.
Create an operating system for Earth that senses, predicts, and coordinates climate, traffic, energy, agriculture, and the biosphere.
Connect an agent to analytics, source code, search data, and product telemetry so it can propose and implement conversion and SEO improvements.
Propose landing-page variants, code approved experiments, deploy them, and measure which version performs best.
Develop technologies and supply chains that turn difficult waste streams into valuable, trusted products.
Help people lawfully organize demonstrations, communicate logistics, and keep participants safe.
Turn a business URL into a polished end-to-end product demo with script, visuals, narration, and editing.
Build a self-hostable, extensible control center for running a software business through community-built modules.
Scan or photograph a job, publish a clear scope, and match it with qualified local tradespeople.
Bundle the services a small company needs into one discounted subscription and one place to manage billing.
Package the essential infrastructure for selling and operating software into one approachable platform.
Replace conventional Alt-Tab with a system that predicts the window, document, or task the user intends to return to.
Turn a teacher’s curriculum into accurate visual lessons, slides, and videos, then let educators share or sell their creations.
Create specialized AI agents—or a platform for building them—for research, portfolio monitoring, and finance workflows.
Give an AI any web tool, let it learn the interface, retain what it learns, and operate the tool through natural-language requests.
Continuously find effective new software, compare it with a company’s current stack, and recommend worthwhile replacements.
Build a focused PostHog alternative that summarizes user sessions and recommends the highest-leverage conversion improvements.
Build a Dune Analytics-like system for exploring, querying, and sharing economic data.
Build an open-source communication platform where every community can deeply customize its own space.
Use browser-driving agents to find relevant prospects, hold useful conversations, and introduce a product without spam.
Present every country’s branches, agencies, bills, and decision paths through an explorable 3D globe inspired by Civilization.
A library-themed learning game where people progress through AI-generated knowledge trees and collect books as they master subjects.
A $10-per-month personal-site and blog builder with a beautiful editor, full customization, data ownership, and one-click export to self-hosted code.
Develop garments that reduce visible and thermal signatures using advanced materials.
Replace individual charging cables with surfaces or areas that power devices automatically.
Pursue the deepest physically plausible approaches to communication across planetary or interstellar distances.
Create a silent, premium flying companion with onboard AI and a new propulsion system—more personal device than toy drone.
An AI strategic partner for startup CEOs that tracks priorities, deadlines, communications, and the health of the business.
Buy and operate a solar farm as a proving ground, then sell the automation software and playbook to other growers.
Rebuild the components of a game engine around AI to create an unusually faithful simulation of reality and the universe.
Analyze Slack, Discord, email, project systems, and direct messages to help a manager coach people and allocate attention thoughtfully.
Let people publish, sell, review, and build reputations around original business ideas.
Turn target keywords into a clear plan for metadata, page titles, descriptions, headings, and content structure.
Store concepts, links, books, videos, and unfinished questions in a searchable second brain that recommends material and quizzes the owner.
Connect people with capital to people ready to build, handling identity, escrow, company formation, milestones, and controlled fund release.
Build a company focused on active planetary stewardship and large-scale ecological engineering.
Offer businesses a drag-and-drop way to build a custom community news hub while retaining ownership of the underlying code.
Let verified people cast one vote on questions and explore how answers vary across geography and demographics on a shared globe.
Use a keyboard shortcut to turn any screenshot into a small actionable task with extracted text, links, and an AI summary.
Send people to thoughtfully selected, surprising corners of the internet.
Build an Excalidraw-like writing environment that connects notes spatially and automatically links mentioned studies, people, and concepts.
Let individuals create transparent funds, set compensation rules, accept capital, and manage investments under programmable constraints.
Investigate contested questions by mapping evidence and arguments across the full range of viewpoints rather than returning one answer.
Create a serious long-form writing app that can publish directly to a customizable website, similar to how visual builders ship sites.
Preserve people’s journals and stories in digital, printed, public, private, or anonymous formats that they fully own.
Upgrade the Mac clipboard into a fast, visible queue for multiple copied items and repeated workflows.
Photograph physical annotations, organize them by book, and make every note searchable and shareable.
Investigate scams and theft, trace likely fund flows, prepare complaints, and coordinate with relevant authorities.
Make it easy to ask a trusted circle for specific help sharing a launch, post, or business announcement.
Track what people read each week and let others follow their information diet.
Continuously map and categorize interesting websites so people can discover the web without knowing what to search for.
Protect sensitive on-screen information from nearby viewers using software and device sensors.
Create a candle alternative that reacts safely with air to release a pleasant scent for years.
Show a company as a living tree of people, responsibilities, projects, and management relationships.
A native digital workplace designed specifically for software teams to coordinate, build, communicate, and retain context.
Create a browser extension that adds a shared discussion thread to any page on the web.
Detect new subscriptions, show their cost, and provide the exact path to cancel them.
Choose a destination before downloading, surface recent and suggested folders, and keep download progress visible across tabs.
Create fair, realistic work simulations that help companies identify strong developers better than résumés or puzzle interviews.
Create a place where community builders share operating practices, tools, and lessons with one another.
Let people choose among understandable feed archetypes, then customize the sources and ranking rules behind them.
Build technology and operating systems that make manufacturing in the United States radically more competitive.
Actively cancel unwanted sound waves across a defined physical space.
Make daily team updates nearly effortless, chase missing check-ins automatically, and give managers a concise health report.
Collect and illustrate many coherent philosophies for living so readers can understand and apply the ones that fit them.
Connect someone to a capable remote helper within seconds, bill by actual time, and remove the friction of finding and hiring for small tasks.
Track who currently owns each task, request lightweight progress updates, and remove the manager’s need to repeatedly check in.
Help people buy property, hire local managers, and operate the investment from one place.
Transmit power to drones so they can recharge or extend flight time without landing.
Launch service satellites dedicated to inspecting, repairing, refueling, and extending the life of other spacecraft.
Give workplaces and public venues lawful, precisely controlled ways to restrict selected device functions.
Create a focused network where entrepreneurs share ideas, find collaborators, build reputation, and unlock benefits through contribution.
Explore responsible genetic engineering that could make humans more resilient to radiation, low gravity, isolation, and long-duration missions.
Build a Starlink-like system for transmitting or coordinating electricity across long distances.
Create genuinely complete, convenient nutrition as a pill, smoothie, or ready-to-drink breakfast tailored to different diets.
Replace multiple car keys with one secure device that can enroll and access several vehicles.
Explore server-side AI as a native application layer that interprets intent, coordinates tools, and adapts workflows.
Analyze a person’s sources and follows to reveal political, scientific, and cultural biases in their overall information intake.
Create IMDb-like profiles for writers, accounts, organizations, and websites showing history, reliability, and demonstrated leanings.
Train systems on outputs from major generative models to estimate whether content is AI-made and which model family produced it.
A social network only for submitting claims and evidence for public verification, discussion, and voting.
Design products and venue practices that help people stay present with one another, especially in restaurants.
Create a plastic-like material without persistent waste, toxicity, or poor recyclability.
Protect people and critical infrastructure from increasingly accessible offensive drones.
Make glass containers competitive and desirable enough to displace disposable plastic bottles.
Build specialized hardware and systems that make training and running AI models faster, cheaper, and more accessible.
Revisit shared vacation ownership with transparent economics, flexible usage, and far less administrative friction.
Write a book about combining deep mastery in one field with broad competence and curiosity across many others.
Acquire land, add utilities, and create well-designed communities for tiny homes, campers, and RVs.
Bring distinctive nonperishable foods, dissolvable teas, robes, and other Lebanese products to new markets.
Bring high-quality Levantine and broader Arab furniture, textiles, and home décor to customers who cannot easily find them locally.
Generate production-ready 3D characters, objects, and environments for games from natural-language descriptions.
Listen across email, texts, phone calls, and group chats for commitments, then create and maintain calendar events automatically.
Send members everything needed to try a new hobby each month and collect the equipment when they move on.
Use low-code platforms to create focused internal products for overlooked company workflows.
Place beautifully branded, self-service retail and coffee experiences in overlooked high-traffic locations.
Sell goal-specific bundles with the products and schedule someone needs to begin a healthy routine, especially while traveling.
Make reliable automated watering simple for normal homes rather than only sophisticated growers.
Build a modern iPad and mobile system for navigation, weather, planning, vessel data, and sailing workflows.
Build the polished, integrated planning and situational-awareness product for sailing that ForeFlight provides for aviation.
Match drivers with available private and commercial parking spaces in real time.
Replace confusing resin codes with an immediately understandable recyclable-or-not label that shifts accountability toward manufacturers.
Give people a place to share life problems and receive constructive advice, with AI moderating for safety and civility.
Replace much of the conventional agent process with transparent software, guided documents, and direct buyer-seller coordination.
Build a focused, affordable home for ASMR creators and audiences rather than making them live inside general-purpose video platforms.
Produce calming videos from real objects and sounds, then sell the featured physical items.
Continuously find cheaper choices, better cards, and smarter spending patterns tailored to an individual’s real behavior.
Build products, spaces, and practices that help overstressed people slow down, reflect, and care for themselves.
Cover constructive research, progress, and useful developments without relying on outrage or catastrophe.
Turn product returns into one predictable pickup, packaging, tracking, and refund experience.
Let customers decide which categories matter most and shape their own reward structure.
Design attractive everyday clothing specifically around safe, comfortable concealed carry.
Make intimate overhead videos of real journaling sessions to show how reflection works in practice.
Build a neighborhood gym in Eastlake around a clear community and wellness identity.
Normalize journaling as a practical tool for men’s reflection, emotional health, and decision-making.
Offer short readings, quotes, and reflective exercises across spiritual traditions in a Daily Stoic-like format.
Help people choose hobbies, follow a path to mastery, find teachers and communities, and buy the right starter equipment.
Teach young people both self-knowledge and the practical financial skills required for an independent life.
Find neglected aviation workflows where better software or hardware could improve safety, planning, training, or ownership.
Bundle solar, water generation, storage, communications, and control software into a complete system for off-grid living.
Build or operate quiet cabin, tent, and glamping destinations near Seattle with solar power and a reflective connection to nature.
Offer premium Airstream stays or road-trip rentals with a consistent hospitality experience.
Produce premium, odor-resistant rope sandals inspired by Turkish originals.
Use stranded renewable energy to run flexible workloads such as AI inference or cryptocurrency mining.
Create a visually rich collection of practical life lessons designed for visual learners.
Publish short, useful philosophy videos in the spirit of Daily Stoic.
Combine brewing, ASMR media, nature, and software-building in a rural setting outside Seattle.
Use location, vision, and audio to explain the places and objects around someone while they walk or drive.
Design a digital card game centered on cooperation, shared goals, and the strategic tension between individual and collective outcomes.
Open a high-quality brewery in Istanbul’s Moda neighborhood.
Guide people through foreign residency, citizenship, property, income, and asset diversification for a broader and more affordable life.
Create a simple, trusted person-to-person payment network tailored to Turkey’s banking and consumer landscape.
Give hosts one place to manage bookings, maintenance, communication, finances, and local operators across their rentals.
Buy distinctive properties around the world and operate them as a coherent international hospitality and real-estate brand.
Acquire and operate a duplex as an accessible first step into long-term residential real estate.
Model real estate, stocks, bonds, cash, and crypto together with visual budgets and possible-return scenarios.
Handle bills, rental operations, scheduling, and routine paperwork through one AI-assisted concierge.
Create a subscription-funded bank that holds customer money one-to-one rather than investing deposits in bonds.
Introduce the Turkish lemon, salt, and sparkling-water drink to the United States as a simple electrolyte beverage.