Category Archives: Business_Ideas

Five Links for August

Every month I try to share the most mind-expanding links to read/watch/listen. If you find these interesting, please do share with your friends.

Here are five links worth reading…

Beliefs are Fashions by Erik Torenberg
People don’t choose beliefs based on logical value or merits, but based on how much status they can garner in their tribes.

Little Ways the World Works by Morgan Housel
If you find something that’s true in more than one field, it’s probably important. A look at the rules from statistics, philosophy & evolutionary biology and the broader truths we can learn from them.

Listen: David Epstein: Never Underestimate the Generalist
In a complex world, thinking broadly is more important than ever yet society increasingly values narrow subject expertise. Explore the pitfalls of specialization and how to think about your own career.

Geographic mobility is one secret of successful immigration by Tyler Cowen
Without hometown roots, immigrant families are more likely to move to areas with higher opportunity, resulting in better outcomes than their native-born economic peers.

Correlations go to One, in Good Ways and Bad by Byrne Hobart
Markets, both in the economic sense and the financial one, are machines for producing valuable information about how the probabilities of different events are connected. There is no free lunch.

Bonus (Listen): Gary Marcus: The Failed Promise of Artificial Intelligence
Is AGI really right around the corner? What will it take for AI to reach the next threshold of capability? Gary Marcus offers some insight and a critical perspective in a complex field. 

Graph of the Month: Quality of AV systems don’t scale with wealth

Books:

The Making of the Atom Bomb by Richard Rhodes (Must Read)
(this is a really long book but one of the best books i have read in the last 20 years)
HT: Matt Clifford

The End of the World is Just the Beginning by Peter Zeihan
HT: Johnnie Moore

Lights Out by Thomas Gryta and Ted Mann
HT: Marc Andreessen

Spy Wars by Tenent Begley

Tweet of the Month:

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Five Links for July

Every month I try to share the most mind-expanding links to read/watch/listen. If you find these interesting, please do share with your friends.

Here are five links worth reading…

The Current Thing
Why is everyone up in arms about something new every month? Due to mimetic desire, social psychology, and social media, the mainstream converges to an intellectual monoculture.

Listen: Liv Boeree: Developing a Probabilistic Mindset
Probability seeps into every aspect of our lives, yet most people don’t apply it all to their daily activities. Liv lays out frameworks everyone should apply to life, society and science.

The Purpose of Technology
Technology’s proximate purpose is to provide leverage and do more with less – effectively reducing scarcity. But its long-term purpose is to reduce mortality, the main source of scarcity.

Optimism
It’s a lot easier to sound smart as a cynic than as an optimist. But the upside of optimism is unlimited, it’s like a call option on society. So why do so many people choose to be pessimistic?

Trying Too Hard
Being a novice can be more valuable than being an expert. Everyone wants to be an expert, whether it’s law, medicine or investing. But often, the best answer is the simple, obvious one.

Bonus (Advice): 103 Bits of Advice I Wish I had Known
Life advice from one of the greatest optimists. An invaluable list covering abstract and tactical topics that would certainly make everyone a better person.

Bonus (Listen): Antonio Garcia Martinez: A New Approach to Regulation
Regulation which appears great on paper often has many unintended consequences. This is especially true when it comes to big tech and privacy regulation.

Graph of the Month: Trust your gut, but only sometimes

Books:

Range by David Epstein
HT: David Epstein, Brett Sylvia

Team of Vipers by Cliff Sims
HT: Cliff Sims

The Bond King by Mary Childs

Why We Fight by Christopher Blattman
HT: Tyler Cowen

Investing: The Last Liberal Art by Robert Hagstrom

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Five Links for June

Every month I try to share the most mind-expanding links to read/watch/listen. If you find these interesting, please do share with your friends.

Here are five links worth reading…

The New Science of Alt Intelligence
The perceived objective of AI has always been to mimic human behavior. But most researchers today don’t want this. Instead, they’re focused on building what’s called “alt intelligence”.

Listen: Glenn Fogel: The Greatest Acquirer in History
M&A is messy and most of it fails. Fogel has somehow managed to complete several successful acquisitions while building Booking Holdings. What does he know that others don’t?

Perspective: What people get wrong about political polarization
While it may feel like polarization is at an all-time high, that democracy is crumbling and that misinformation is destroying society, a closer look at history may suggest otherwise.

Why don’t nations buy more territories from each other?
You can count all the transactions involving the sale of land from one country to another in the past century on one hand. Why don’t more countries sell off land? Tyler Cowen explores why.

Listen: Barry Nalebuff: A Radical New Way to Negotiate
Most negotiations are unfavorable for all parties because more time is spent bargaining for a larger slice of the pie and not enough time is spent defining the pie. Defining the pie can unlock win-win scenarios in most negotiations.

Bonus (Adorable): Coco: Investment Committee Memo
Dogs are undoubtedly the highest returning investment for most people. Here’s a very compelling memo explaining why.

Bonus (Listen): Introduction to Mimetic Theory
Most people want what others have. Rene Girard coined the term Mimesis, the desire to imitate one another, and concluded that it was Mimesis that drove most of society’s problems.

Graph of the Month: Slack is great… until it’s not

Books:

The Machiavellians by James Burnham (must read)
HT: Marc Andreessen

The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber & David Wengrow
HT: Sashi McEntee, Pete Zajonc, Roy Bahat

Blue Ocean Strategy by W. Chan Kim & Renee Mauborgne
HT: Russ Thau

Tweet of the Month:

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Five Links for April

Every month I try to share the most mind-expanding links to read/watch/listen. If you find these interesting, please do share with your friends.

Here are five links worth reading…

It’s our moral obligation to make data more accessible
The deep truths of humanity are at our fingertips. But we remain unwilling as a society to harness the power of our greatest asset: Data.

The Future of the European Union
The EU has all the makings of a global superpower: size, population, GDP and military. But why has it been left behind over the past 2 decades? Ukraine might be the catalyst to change this.

Listen: Daniel Gross: Why Energy is the Best Predictor of Talent
Spotting talent is really hard and identifying A-players can feel impossible. Daniel Gross (CEO, Pioneer) explains how to distinguish between good and great employees & what makes a 10xer.

Deep Learning is Hitting a Wall 
Despite all the innovation in artificial intelligence, we’re still very far from where we thought we’d be. This is largely due to inherent limitations of deep learning. 

Google Search is Dying
If you’ve also had a terrible experience searching on Google, you’re not alone. People are looking for authentic content and SEO is killing search. Reddit may be an alternative solution.

Bonus (Listen): Tyler Henritze: Thematic Investing to Predict the Future
Tyler has worked on over $100bn of transactions at Blackstone Real Estate. He shares how Blackstone predicted the future with large concentrated bets that paid off. 

Bonus (Personal Growth): Managing people
Most people are terrible managers (I too am trying to improve every day). Andreas Klinger shares very tactical advice on how to be a better manager. 

Graph of the Month:

Books:

Talent by Tyler Cowen and Daniel gross (must read)
Great read on how to identify talent that can transform an organization

Amp It Up (must read)

Functional Medicine by Kevin Hoffarth

Tweet of the Month:

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a service to help you understand all the products and services your friends use

Enter: UltimateReviewer!

If you’re a company and want to pick a vendor, you can check out what products companies you admire use (see SafeGraph’s list of vendors on Siftery (a service of G2 crowd)). You can browse tools they use and discover tools that make sense for your company.

But there is no way to do this in your personal life.

Want to learn what the best mattress is? The most efficient way is to either go to a definitive review site (like WireCutter) or poll your friends on Twitter/Facebook. It would be a lot better if many of the people you know have already logged what mattress they use and what they think about it.

Of course, this is true for everything you use. What to find a plumber? What about a good tennis racket? How about where is a good kid-friendly resort near Tampa?

Note: This is a series of my free open-sourced business ideas. Feel free to copy, fork, use them, etc. All I ask is that if you become a bazillionaire, you must take me to dinner.

Getting a graph of your friends and colleagues today is cheap. It is easy. You can pull down graphs from Facebook, Twitter, and your mobile contacts.

But 15 years after the social networking revolution, it is still amazing that most of these services are 100% aligned to get you to spend massive time on the site (all about user engagement) rather than focused on giving you more value. Most social graph services are just about time wasting rather than making you much more productive or knowledgable (which is where their real power comes in).

There should be a service to help you understand what you want to spend money on and giving you tools to more quickly and efficiently make purchases. This is still a holy grail of the Internet that has not yet fulfilled its promise.

You can get a full list of someone’s purchases or actions by asking them to auth their email (or credit card or physical location). You can get a graph of their friends from email mining, Facebook, Twitter, auth’ing contacts, and more. Combine what you bought and who you know and you have real power to help people!

People spend a crazy number of hours researching things to buy. They research and research and research. And then research some more. Sometimes it is a local search (like house cleaner, plumber, doctor, dentist, or car repair). Sometimes it is more of a global search (like the best bluetooth earbuds). Many people spend more time planning their vacation than actually being on vacation.

Imagine a service where one can put in past purchases and it uses that data to recommend products (purely unbiased). The service should be acting in the REAL best interest of the consumer (not like most recommendation services which are specifically designed or gamed or hawk specific higher margin products) so one can implicitly trust the service.

Purchases can be anonymized for privacy reasons (so the service does not broadcast to others that “Auren Hoffman” bought the headphones … but instead it aggregated to give real value AND protect sensitive information.

Of course, the simple revenue stream is affiliate links. But once you get the trust of the buyer, you can also add an ad-words-like feature (which would be incredibly compelling to an advertiser to get in front of a person right at the time of purchase).

Summation: UltimateReviewer is another billion-dollar idea that I will never do … so offering the idea up for free to all of you to take on.

The Dinner Party — restaurant for engaging discussions

So you and your significant other are headed out for the night. You want to do something intellectually interesting … but going to a lecture can be so boring. Plus, there is no good food at a lecture. You could go to a movie but the only thing playing is Transformers 8. So what to do?

Enter a new restaurant theme: The Dinner Party.

Note: This is a series of my free open-sourced business ideas. Feel free to copy, fork, use them, etc. All I ask is that if you become a bazillionaire, you must take me to dinner.

Buying a ticket (pay-up-front to prevent no-shows) is required for to The Dinner Party. You arrive at a designated time (like 8p) and you sign up for the type of discussion you’d like — from religion, art history, sports, entertainment, modern history, physics, bio-ethics, book discussions, or even U.S. politics. You also choose a knowledge level.

You can come single, with your significant other, come with a sibling, or arrive in a big group. You get assigned to a table of the topic of your choice. The table has up to 8 people and is very small so you can hear everyone at the table (ideally the room has a series of small sound-proof booths) complete with question cards to pose to the table.

The Dinner Party would be a marketplace for dinner discussions. It can help create a better world by allowing people to change their mind.

It is simple and fun. But it is work. And it is run as a “private club” so you can readily exclude “members” that are jerks or not respectful of others (or people that get insulted too easily). Everyone rates their table mates and The Dinner Party keeps tabs of everyone’s ratings. Want to be at the big kids’ table … you have to prove yourself over time.

It is like having a built-in intellectual Dialog any night of the week. And if you are on a business trip in Kansas City and do not know anyone there, this is a great place to have an interesting discussion, learn a lot, and meet super interesting people.

There is a real need and desire for people to learn and to engage with others. But most smart people do not want to just be talked to … they want a real participatory discussion.

Summation: count me and my wife in as regular customers when you create The Dinner Party.

selling the ultimate pill – the “Placebo”

The most effective drug in the world is “Placebo.” Placebo is more effective than most of the drugs on the market. Placebo cures the flu, fever, the common cold, and is even more effective at fighting cancer than most drugs.

Yes, Placebo is the wonder drug.

It is usually made of the compound C12H22O11 which is abundant in the Americas. When taken orally, C12H22O11 is very sweet and delicious. It is often used as a sweetener in cookies, baked goods, and candy. So next time your mom tells you that candy is bad for you, tell her it is full of Placebo.

For this free open-sourced business idea, I’m offering you the wonder drug of all wonder drugs: Placebo. All you need to do is market it and get it on the shelves of Walgreens (alert: there is already a whole load of candy on the shelves of Walgreens).

Talking Placebo will cure your pain, combat your depression, and even marketably improve your sex life. It is just that good.

Placebo is also getting better and better over time. And, even crazier, the more you charge for it, the better it works. As Dan Ariely says, “drugs are are effective because people believe in them.” The more you believe, the better it works. It turns out the mind is truly powerful.

So take two Placebos and call me in the morning.

kickstarter for real estate development

Note: I’m spending much of this month open-sourcing business ideas. Feel free to copy, fork, use them, etc. All I ask is that if you become a bazillionaire, you must take me to dinner.

One of the interesting things about new destinations is that they become more valuable as they become popular. If you could get together with 100 of your friends and all decide to buy a lake house on the same random lake in Minnesota, you’ll find all the property on that lake and around that lake will likely triple in price really fast.

People don’t go to Aspen or the Hamptons just because they have great mountains or great beaches. There are plenty of places that are beautiful. They go to these well-known destinations because everyone else wants to go there.

Places are popular purely because they are popular. There is a recursive loop. Popularity breeds investment which breeds exclusivity which breeds more popularity.

So let’s say you find a really beautiful lake in Minnesota. It is gorgeous as a summer destination. It is close enough to a major airport. It has natural beauty. It is close to some amazing restaurants. The people are really friendly. And, oh yeah, you can buy two lake-front acres for $100,000.

How do you profit from that?

A traditional real estate developer will buy up a massive amount of property on the lake, build a community, and maybe some shared tennis courts and a golf course. Then the developer would market it as “Lakeside Commons” or something trendy like that and target rich people in Chicago or Houston (to escape the summer heat) to buy into the community.

Traditional real estate is very risky so it is in the real estate developer’s best interest to reduce those risks. Things are kept cookie-cutter. Things don’t deviate much from the tried-and-true approach.

enter kickstarter for real-estate

Now let’s revisit a new business idea. A community that forms online that wants to start a in-real-life community together. 50 to 250 families getting together to use their joint buying power to purchase a place. Each person is committed to marketing and building the new area so they see price appreciation (and a community that they want to spend time in).

Envision an entrepreneur scouting an amazing place and creating a vision for what it could be in the future. She negotiates to buy it. Then she recruits people to her vision and, if enough of them commit their dollars, they buy in. But not buying in just as investors … they buy-in as members of the community.

“We will buy this property if we raise at least $10 million from 100 different families.”

And sure, some of the community members will flip their holdings and make a quick profit. But most of the community will be formed with committed members that want to invest the next decade into seeing it blossom (and then benefit from the real appreciation).

Just think about getting together with your 20 best friends from high school and all deciding to focus your energies on owning a second home in the same place. You’d have an instant community.

Summation: if you start a kickstarter for real-estate, invite me to join your community.

Photo by eberhard grossgasteiger on Pexels.com

the ultimate combination: doughnut and mochi – the Doughchi

Note: I’m spending much of this month open-sourcing business ideas. Feel free to copy, fork, use them, etc. All I ask is that if you become a bazillionaire, you must take me to dinner.

We’ve all heard of the cronut — the croissant crossed with a doughnut that is yummy delicious. (I have not yet tried one myself, but I 100% take for granted that they are amazing). I have had the pretzel croissants at The City Bakery in New York which are out-of-this-world good.

That got me thinking … the doughnut is amazing food. It represents much of what is great in life. The doughnut crossed with lots of things is almost certainly going to be really good. And lots of people have already tried. (though not sure I would recommend the pickle-doughnut).

One thing that is super over-rated is the jelly doughnut. Jelly is just not a good filling. Jelly isn’t really tasty.

But other doughnut fillings ARE really good. Nutella-filled doughnuts are mouth-watering.

So started to think … what would be an even better filling for a doughnut???

Well, the only thing that is better than a doughnut is mochi. Mochi is amazing. And I’m not talking about crass ice-cream filled mochi. I’m talking about pure rice-and-sugar mochi.

only mochi is better than a doughnut

So pretty much the best dessert in the world would be a mochi-filled-doughnut. Whoa … my mouth is watering just thinking of it. I’m about to fly five Chicago police-officers (the best doughnut experts I can think of) to Tokyo for a taste test.

Just think … you bite into a doughnut and have a delicious chewy middle.

Yum.

And yes, you will have a 18% chance of having a heart attack.

But … yum.

Ok … the next thing is marketing. We need to market this invention really well so that everyone remembers it and forms crazy lines around the block hours before the Brooklyn bakery opens (yes, this is mostly likely to happen in Brooklyn … or Portland).

Originally I was thinking of copying the “Cronut” (which is actually trademarked) and calling this the “Monut” or even the cooler “Moghnut.” But besides for worrying about trademark violations, that name might be selling this creation short.

First, this creation would not have a hole in it (because it is a filled doughnut). Thus, no “nut.” Plus, who cares about the “nut” part of the doughnut anyway. The “dough” part is what everyone really likes.

So I give you (drum roll please): THE DOUGHCHI !!!

Enjoy the doughchi. And if you are lucky enough to create one, please consider me to give you needed product feedback. I will also offer up my kids and wife as beta testers.

Summation: enjoy this free business idea.

Tipping for is popular in B2C … could it be a new trend in enterprise software?

Have you noticed that there has been a proliferation of opportunities to tip people? Tipping has become ubiquitous. It is everywhere. Well, everywhere in B2C. But I have not yet seen it in the B2B world.

Backstory: I absolutely hate tipping.  I have tipping anxiety.

Tipping is an awful thing. I’m the sucker that always gives a 20% tip (it is much easier math than 18%), even when the service does not warrant a tip. When I go abroad, the servers are shocked at my “American tips.”

Random questions:

  • Why are tips a percentage of revenue?  (The rich just get richer)
  • Why tip at all in a restaurant? Even worse, tipping at checkout counter.  Square has massively increased my tipping anxiety.  It is just a way of squeezing an extra 20% out of suckers like me.
  • Why isn’t tipping just included in the price? You don’t (yet) tip when you buy an airline ticket or buy a book from Amazon.

Tips used to be for showing appreciation but today they are usually just to avoid embarrassment.  

Tipping in the enterprise

In my almost 20 years of selling software, I have never been “tipped” by a client.  

But that got me thinking, maybe SafeGraph should start asking for a voluntary 15% “tip” during our quarterly-business-reviews (with customers).  Maybe 25% of clients would pay (if they had a way of doing it).  
I have no idea how these customers would pay … but wanted to put it out there to some of your smart readers can figure it out.  

Summation experiment: next time your lawyer does an outstanding job, try to tip her.

Photo by maitree rimthong on Pexels.com

child care in San Francisco needs help

Many working parents in San Francisco have to move for one simple reason: they cannot find child care.   In the most liberal city in America, getting your kid into a child care program takes nepotism, bribery, some luck, and a whole lot of headache.

One friend of mine has been on the waitlist at five different locations for over a year.   And they put their current odds of getting into a program at less than 10%.   It is a shame.  

not knowing anything about caring for children (i'm still struggling with caring for my plants), it seems like there is a big business opporetunity to provide affordable, yet quality, childcare for working parents.