Here are 10 ideas that I'd like to fund that could be billion dollar businesses.
1) Social Commerce App. TaoBao has seen massive growth in China opening up a new sector of e-commerce and a new business model for the web. Sellers or influencers can stream live product explanations and viewers can buy the product in real time. It's both entertainment and live shopping. (think a more woke QVC infomercial that anybody can host).
2) AI Powered Title Insurance - Title insurance is a $25 billion dollar a year business dominated by 3 companies. Payouts are 5% of claims compared to car insurance which is around 65%.
3) Search for Shopify Stores. There should be a way to search across all shopify listings. Similar to eBay but for Shopify stores.
4) Non fungible tokens for all digital content. Imagine a way to hash photos, videos, blog posts, digital art, memes so that we could trace the content creator to its original source and pay royalties in real time.
The problem is that anybody can change one pixel or shave off 1 second on an mp3 file and the hash will change, allowing anybody to copy and publish without attribution.
I'm not sure this is ever solvable but it would unlock many new types of web business models and opportunities.
5) Website logins without username and passwords. The internet just knows who you are. Like when you walk into a store you pick what you want and check out.
Crypto addresses seem like an obvious first attempt. We can already "login" to any web3 based dApp with our metamask browser using only our ether address. Now imagine our ether address contained a username (ens domain) and any profile info we wanted to share with the website. We could actually walk around the internet without having to login again to every new website.
Customer acquisition strategies could change as well. Instead of buying ads companies could send a coupon directly to your ether address and it would instantly redeem when you use the site.
6) No-code Developer Tools. No-code tools are finally starting to live up to the hype. The tech has improved to the point where non technical developers can build both mobile apps and fully functioning websites with API integrations and relational databases. I believe we will continue to see an explosion of new products in this field along with a few new unicorns.
7) Anti aging Treatments or drugs. New research is indicating aging is a disease that can be prevented. David Sinclair wrote a book on it. If true, researchers will eventually find the "cure" or at least develop some drug to slow down the process.
I think this will be one of the biggest discoveries of the century if successful.
8) Carbon Sequestration Machines. Cheap, effective carbon sequestration machines we can scatter across our rooftops like AC machines.
9) Prebuilt or Prefabricated Housing that is actually cheap to build, permit and install. Currently it is still cheaper to build stick built homes in most major cities. It's also cheaper to build up usingapartment buildings that leverage economies of scale. (IE. one roof, one city water/sewer connection, same unit designs etc). Regulations in most cities require any building over 3 stories to have concrete foundation so we can't stack prefab housing units together like an apartment building.
10) New Business Models for the Web. I think we are only in the first inning with what's possible online. Ad based business models currently dominate the landscape with affiliate marketing, SaaS just behind it. I'm interested in novel business models that haven't been tried before. Social commerce is one example. Here are some others:
- Tipping (in cents) content articles in real time
- Pooled Interest accounts to fund a particular purpose like Pool together
- Paid for your browsing history (like brave browser is experimenting with)
- Something we haven't thought of yet
Bonus (just for fun): Nuclear Fusion Energy. Nuclear fusion energy is the greatest form of energy production we know about. It's how our sun can produce seemingly limitless energy its whole life. If we could harness fusion energy to power our electrical grids, container ships and transportation system we could really begin to live in abundance and focus on the next chapter of the human race.
Fusion has been a dream for decades since we first discovered nuclear energy. While it has eluded us for centuries I believe we now have the tools to unlock it before the year 2100.
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