24. Everyone Has a Startup Idea; Here’s Four of Mine
They say that everyone who’s anyone in the Bay Area has a startup idea. Here’s four of mine. They’re sketchy and incomplete and I’ve left out some important bits, so please contact me if any of these seem sufficiently worth doing that you want to cofound or throw some money at them. Hope springs eternal. These are very loosely ordered from least exciting to most exciting to me personally, both in terms of how much I want to do them and how likely I think they are to see any kind of returns.
SURGERY (NOT IN THE MATH SENSE) (BUT ALSO IN THE MATH SENSE):
It occurs to me, looking at some schematics for both clothes patterns and for medical surgeries, that a lot of what makes a given stitching pattern work or fail to work comes down to compatibility of metric connections in the appropriate Riemannian manifold, which in both cases isn’t even a fully general one but rather reasonable approximations to the human form. You could thus conceivably found a startup - or at least, have a project for a research firm - on the basis of discovering better new stitching patterns for rejoining various parts of nearby skin or cloth that could then be used for clothing assembly, garment repair, and especially surgery.
POCKETWATCH QRNG:
This one’s fairly simple. The practice of overcoming indecisiveness through appeal to some random outcome - coins, dice, or whim - is a decently well-known and well-supported one, and more recently as quantum computing draws closer to commercial applicability, people are coming to a great appreciation for quantum randomness - though plenty of people, including me, already delighted in the idea of taking the many-worlds interpretation seriously and thus taking comfort in the idea that if you can’t make up your mind on a single choice, to instead make all of them. At any rate, there’s got to be some safe and inexpensive source of quantum randomness that fits in a pocketwatch sort of form factor - maybe muon count measurements using some appropriate Poisson distribution fit? or some common radioisotope? - so you can have a few bits’ worth of true quantum randomness available at need without having to set up an AWS account just to use ANU’s machines. You could dress it up fancily as well: use some shiny lights off a watch-battery power source, or maybe just have it be USB-C-rechargeable; add in some lovely silver or brass fittings, or plate it in gold, and decorate to taste with synthetic gems, like ruby, sapphires, and diamond; probably also make it easier to generate random draws from more than two alternatives. Make sure that the whole thing is elegantly and tastefully designed, and play to the trendiness of all things quantum. You’d make a mint. Surely.
THE HYDROGEN SEEPS THING:
I got so excited when I learned of the existence of hydrogen seeps. Free hydrogen! Coming out of the ground, as predicted by simple models of the lower crust! Ripe for exploitation and harnessing! Then I got to thinking. The basic idea here is that using some fairly standard drilling equipment, you can double-dip on carbon sequestration and produce hydrogen-dependent outputs. The chemical mechanism is serpentinization: at temperatures around 500~1,000 °F, olivine - the single largest component of the Earth’s crust and mantle - reacts with water to form serpentinite and a variety of gases, primarily hydrogen and some methane; this mostly happens at crustal boundaries, especially on the ocean floor, but can also be observed in Iceland and parts of the Permian Basin, to name two locations. What this means for a startup is that you could sell some combination of carbon credits, hydrogen gas, synthetic hydrocarbons, ammonia, and quicklime, depending on what sells best. The plan is this: you drill down anywhere, because there’s olivine everywhere, and pump water down, causing far less disruption than fracking. At this stage, you might even add carbon dioxide to the water to sequester some carbon, using the same talc-carbonate alternation that can already occur whenever serpentinization occurs. Then you pull out the hydrogen gas and either sell it directly, or more likely use it on-site: you could use some to power a calcium oxide/carbonate-method carbon dioxide-concentration setup, or make Haber-process ammonia, or combine it with the carbon dioxide from the concentration setup (or from on-site atmospheric condensation for the nitrogen for your ammonia) to make assorted hydrocarbons - monomers, say, or isopropyl alcohol, or the like. I haven’t run the numbers on costs and sale prices, but this seems like it would work? Maybe it’d require a larger market in carbon credits.
KOREAN TACO TRUCK DRINKS:
Funnily enough, the one that I think is most promising is maybe the most prosaic. It occurs to me that taco trucks often sell aguas frescas, which are delicious traditional Mexican punches. Likewise, Korean culture has its own traditional drinks - hwachae, or flower punches, as well as sikhye and sujeonggwa. In California especially, the two food cultures have joined forces… and yet I’ve never seen a Korean taco stand selling any interesting drinks; indeed, they generally don’t even sell aguas frescas. That seems like a huge missed opportunity! A few flavors I’ve thought of include: hibiscus punch, given that hibiscus is the national flower of Korea, and maybe the most common flavor of agua fresca when known as jamaica; a sikhye horchata, given that sikhye is a lightly fermented rice drink and horchata often has a rice milk base; more standard mainstays like watermelon or pineapple punch, present both as hwachae and agua fresca flavors; and maybe even a more heavily spiced sujeonggwa-alike, given that the combination of persimmon, rock sugar, and cinnamon seems well-suited to adaptation to whatever defines agua fresca-ness. In some cases you’d possibly want to add a bit of rock sugar, cinnamon, and ginger to the agua fresca recipes. You could even straightforwardly sell these as canned drinks; the market there seems fairly untapped.
28806/32768
SURGERY (NOT IN THE MATH SENSE) (BUT ALSO IN THE MATH SENSE):
It occurs to me, looking at some schematics for both clothes patterns and for medical surgeries, that a lot of what makes a given stitching pattern work or fail to work comes down to compatibility of metric connections in the appropriate Riemannian manifold, which in both cases isn’t even a fully general one but rather reasonable approximations to the human form. You could thus conceivably found a startup - or at least, have a project for a research firm - on the basis of discovering better new stitching patterns for rejoining various parts of nearby skin or cloth that could then be used for clothing assembly, garment repair, and especially surgery.
POCKETWATCH QRNG:
This one’s fairly simple. The practice of overcoming indecisiveness through appeal to some random outcome - coins, dice, or whim - is a decently well-known and well-supported one, and more recently as quantum computing draws closer to commercial applicability, people are coming to a great appreciation for quantum randomness - though plenty of people, including me, already delighted in the idea of taking the many-worlds interpretation seriously and thus taking comfort in the idea that if you can’t make up your mind on a single choice, to instead make all of them. At any rate, there’s got to be some safe and inexpensive source of quantum randomness that fits in a pocketwatch sort of form factor - maybe muon count measurements using some appropriate Poisson distribution fit? or some common radioisotope? - so you can have a few bits’ worth of true quantum randomness available at need without having to set up an AWS account just to use ANU’s machines. You could dress it up fancily as well: use some shiny lights off a watch-battery power source, or maybe just have it be USB-C-rechargeable; add in some lovely silver or brass fittings, or plate it in gold, and decorate to taste with synthetic gems, like ruby, sapphires, and diamond; probably also make it easier to generate random draws from more than two alternatives. Make sure that the whole thing is elegantly and tastefully designed, and play to the trendiness of all things quantum. You’d make a mint. Surely.
THE HYDROGEN SEEPS THING:
I got so excited when I learned of the existence of hydrogen seeps. Free hydrogen! Coming out of the ground, as predicted by simple models of the lower crust! Ripe for exploitation and harnessing! Then I got to thinking. The basic idea here is that using some fairly standard drilling equipment, you can double-dip on carbon sequestration and produce hydrogen-dependent outputs. The chemical mechanism is serpentinization: at temperatures around 500~1,000 °F, olivine - the single largest component of the Earth’s crust and mantle - reacts with water to form serpentinite and a variety of gases, primarily hydrogen and some methane; this mostly happens at crustal boundaries, especially on the ocean floor, but can also be observed in Iceland and parts of the Permian Basin, to name two locations. What this means for a startup is that you could sell some combination of carbon credits, hydrogen gas, synthetic hydrocarbons, ammonia, and quicklime, depending on what sells best. The plan is this: you drill down anywhere, because there’s olivine everywhere, and pump water down, causing far less disruption than fracking. At this stage, you might even add carbon dioxide to the water to sequester some carbon, using the same talc-carbonate alternation that can already occur whenever serpentinization occurs. Then you pull out the hydrogen gas and either sell it directly, or more likely use it on-site: you could use some to power a calcium oxide/carbonate-method carbon dioxide-concentration setup, or make Haber-process ammonia, or combine it with the carbon dioxide from the concentration setup (or from on-site atmospheric condensation for the nitrogen for your ammonia) to make assorted hydrocarbons - monomers, say, or isopropyl alcohol, or the like. I haven’t run the numbers on costs and sale prices, but this seems like it would work? Maybe it’d require a larger market in carbon credits.
KOREAN TACO TRUCK DRINKS:
Funnily enough, the one that I think is most promising is maybe the most prosaic. It occurs to me that taco trucks often sell aguas frescas, which are delicious traditional Mexican punches. Likewise, Korean culture has its own traditional drinks - hwachae, or flower punches, as well as sikhye and sujeonggwa. In California especially, the two food cultures have joined forces… and yet I’ve never seen a Korean taco stand selling any interesting drinks; indeed, they generally don’t even sell aguas frescas. That seems like a huge missed opportunity! A few flavors I’ve thought of include: hibiscus punch, given that hibiscus is the national flower of Korea, and maybe the most common flavor of agua fresca when known as jamaica; a sikhye horchata, given that sikhye is a lightly fermented rice drink and horchata often has a rice milk base; more standard mainstays like watermelon or pineapple punch, present both as hwachae and agua fresca flavors; and maybe even a more heavily spiced sujeonggwa-alike, given that the combination of persimmon, rock sugar, and cinnamon seems well-suited to adaptation to whatever defines agua fresca-ness. In some cases you’d possibly want to add a bit of rock sugar, cinnamon, and ginger to the agua fresca recipes. You could even straightforwardly sell these as canned drinks; the market there seems fairly untapped.
28806/32768
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