Ideas For Your Next Tech Startup

prostoalex writes "Business 2.0 magazine enumerates tech ideas that venture capitalists are currently interested in, listing the amounts they have ready to invest." From the article:"A column that appeared on Business2.com the next day described the company Armstrong envisioned and his wish list of criteria. Those who thought they had the right stuff could send Armstrong a business plan. A few weeks later, Armstrong had a new gripe: He'd received more than 20 solid plans and couldn't decide which of three finalists he wanted to fund -- not just for $1 million, but for as much as $5 million. He has since winnowed the list down to two. That got us thinking. Why not ask dozens of VCs a tantalizing (but often unasked) question: What types of ideas would you fund tomorrow if the right pitch landed on your doorstep? After a few weeks of trolling Sand Hill Road and beyond, we got 11 leading venture firms to spill their most promising business ideas -- and to pony up $50 million in funding to the entrepreneurs who can pull them off. "

Comments

It's just because...

[Philip K Dickhead]

These guys need a place to put their money, and avoid paying taxes on it "while it's doing some work," again.

"One more bubble, and we retire with half-a-billion."

Tiresome. The ideas are as fruitless as before - many more of us will go broke working 75 hour weeks, while big investors walk off with a tax break, if not the rewards for effort.

Re:It's just because...

[fireman sam]

"many more of us will go broke working 75 hour weeks, while big investors walk off with a tax break, if not the rewards for effort."

It is not the effort, it is the risk that is rewarded. "Nothing ventured, nothing gained."

By working your 75 hours per week you are secure that you will receive a set amount of money. You have a low risk. VCs give their money to startups in the hope of receiving a high return, they have a high risk.

If you want to take chances, there are investment houses that will take you money, pool it with others and then act on your behalf to invest your money based on the amount of risk you are prepared to take.

Re:It's just because...

[ucblockhead]

Exactly. I worked for a dotcom. I suspect the investors lost a substantial part of their investment. On the other hand, I got a good salary and free snacks. Sure, I'd have much rather we succeeded, but all I lost was hours worked and potential stock options.

Re:It's just because...

[Telastyn]

Low risk. Right. Perhaps you're looking at different startups than I am but standard employees often work those 75 hours a week for:

- generally rock bottom salary.
- the chance that even that will disappear on a moment's notice.
- perhaps some stock options that are unlikely to ever be worth more than the bits they're taking up in some HR database
- the possibility of having that startup's failure emblazened upon your resume for the rest of your days [more important for execs, but still]

And that ignores all of the social risks taken by spending that much time at your job and not with your mate/kids/friends.

Not to say that investors aren't risking a bit, but to steal a tidbit of wisdom from the poker world, "100 chips is a lot more valuable to a man with 100 chips than a man with a thousand."

Yawn. The same old stuff repackaged..

[MrPerfekt]

We want our cell phones to do everything and we want to market PCs and content to everybody on the planet. I think that's a decent summary of all the "ideas" there.

Is it just me or did everything sound incredibly boring?

Re:Yawn. The same old stuff repackaged..

[nicklott]

Venture Capitalists are people with money but no ideas. If they had money AND ideas they'd be doing it themselves.

Asking VCs the specifics of what they want to invest in is pointless; they don't know. What they do (or should) know is a good idea when they see it.

Weak!

[ColdWetDog]

I dunno. Not impressed. Maybe the banking stuff is OK but the "home monitoring" idea is complete BS. This guy is asking for a remote vital sign monitoring machine - which really ought to be easy to do - and would end up being pretty worthless.

Disclaimer - I'm a physician. I can't really see a use for being able to know what a patient's vital signs are for someone "needing" to be in the hospital. In fact, according to recent insurance guidelines, if all you're doing is checking vital signs, you will not get paid for said hospitalization. Reminds me of a recent slashdot article about some bizzarre japanese medico-toilet which analyzed your various outputs and told your doctor about it.

I sure don't want to here about that.

Administering meds? IVs? Enemas? Who you gonna call?

Prediction

[ucblockhead]

None of those ideas come to anything.

The real moneymakers come out of nowhere. If it sounds like something you've heard of, but with maybe a tiny twist...look elsewhere.

The really amusing thing is that the biggest success in recent times, Google, was simply "we want to do search engines just like everyone else. But we'll do it better".

What makes real money isn't a hot new idea. It's doing something well. Quality. If I were a VC, that's what I'd be looking for. Competence and pragmatism.

Hospitals

[Create an Account]

You'll play hell getting hospitals to adopt this. Imagine going to the Director and telling him:

"We want to help your patients save money, by letting them buy less of your services."

Sure, some hospitals are having a capacity problem, but it's way better to be overbooked than over-capacitied. This is especially bad when you consider the incredible fixed costs they have (think malpractice insurance for 75-150 doctors and a trauma center.)

Re:In Soviet Russia...

[JollyFinn]

Yeah right there is a LOT to gain from that.
Consider a first few programming class you took. Consider a average guy there. That's what you get when you try to build 25 person team plus all your time will go managing those twenty guys. However consider few nerd friends you got, and thats what you can get if you go for 5 person team. Next thing to consider is the communications thats more or less n style thing. There is only so many independent peaces you can split the application, and still those need to communicate with each other. In the end for us the 25 person team is a LOT worse solution than going for 5 person team.
I think I'd go for 5 person team at beginning rather than VC:s just to have better productivity and higher code quality.

Really dry

[heroine]

These proposals sound really dry. It feels like while the rest of the world moved on to robots, spaceflight, and defense, Silicon Valley is still in these really tiny internet experiments from the 90's. Not only are the monetary amounts miniscule, the proposals seem to condense into more networking, more ecommerce, and more tiny parts of something that hang off of something big in Taiwan.

Indian startups normally get $50 million but they seem to be doing more ambitious projects.