Unmet Needs

#Calm for Companies - making workers feel happy

#Recharge - Better tech enabled solution for recycling old technology products and batteries.

We need to eliminate the wage gap. How do we do it?

#American Dream 2.0 - the American Dream is broken due to low social mobility. How do we fix it?

Tech Experts Mentor Underserved Students. A mobile app where underrepresented youths can access mentorship resources, creating a pathway to discovering possible career opportunities or encouraging the pursuit of higher education in the (oh-so-very!) homogenous tech fields.

#EVNow - a marketplace for EVs to accelerate the adoption (Carvana/Vroom/Shift exclusively for EVs)

#College 2.0 - College is expensive and not delivering for a broad swath of people. How can we redefine what a new version looks like?

#Invest-in-change - Investing app that is focused on climate or cleantech focused investments. Save the environment while you save for you.

On-demand pair programmers. Make better code and better coders.

Early intervention in wildfires using swarms of drones

There needs to be a paradigm shift on how quality is perceived in products and packaging. The historic association is with heft and abundance. The new approach for quality product and packaging needs to be sustainable and considerate of end-of-life. Gone are the days of heavy products that have an abundance of material and packaging that has layers. #climate

#DistributedFarming - there are numerous benefits of having micro urban distributed farming. Healthier produce, lower transportation costs, lower carbon footprint. I believe there is a need to create a distributed, low-cost system

We all have good ideas, but building a "Minimum Viable Team" around that idea is really hard to do. What if we had a platform where you could recommend people for different roles around ideas? I created a quick MVP: https://teamvite.app

#Do-good, get paid - a marketplace for people to donate money to specific causes (park cleanup, river cleanup, etc.) and gig workers to make money completing those tasks.

#Text-learning - Text message based micro-learning for busy people hoping to continue their education or upskill themselves.

Global decentralized survey that records census data but includes well-being /happiness as well as financial attributes tracked over time. Self soverign data but incentive to share through monetization (healthcare, governments, peer-to-peer etc)

#KnowledgePlace - Building liquidity for knowledge via a marketplace. Starting with pairing functional or content experts with startups and thereby minimize wheel reinvention.

AI projects for b2b use cases. The big companies I work with often have a data/AI need but sometimes its really more of a feature they are looking for than a product. Current use cases include 1. Data from Optical sensors 2. Low Code/No Code software, analyzing where in a large company with tons of legacy code where to use it 3. Sweethearting, preventing retail employees from not scanning products and giving to their friends 4. Ordering flowers in an upscale retail store chain when they are getting a little wilted. All of these are real life use cases for AI and at least in my mind they dont quite fit a startup but also don't want to do a custom project either.

Content Delivery outside of App Stores. Nobody wants to pay the app store tax. Delivering content on the web is not a technical challenge. There are emerging non app store distribution channels (Facebook) - Don't need a metaverse to stream content, but facebook trying to unbundle app stores will be a forcing function

An accessible solution to harvest fog and use this captured water not just for agricultural purposes, but also for human consumption. This problem/need is real for many parts of the world, including the west coast of the US, California. Existing Adaptation to Global Warming solutions can be found around the world but none has been adopted as a standard.

Digital Store Fronts/Augmented Reality Experiences - A mobile/Augmented Reality(AR) device based app which combines AR experiences with the real world. The app may use tracking and mapping technology where users can create and interact with AR experiences/ Art / Signboards/ Ad's in real locations.

Co-browsing with your app customers to troubleshoot their issues and onboard smoothly - without back and forth chat/email (something like www.cohere.so)

The representation of Latinxs in board seats across Fortune 100 and Fortune 500 companies is in the negative digits, dropping. They’re the most underrepresented group while quickly becoming a non-minority in terms of population. How do we fix this problem?

Quality childcare. There is a significant childcare gap in US and it is costing the country billions of dollars. Many markets don’t have any childcare resources

Exchange fund for founders. Founders swap equity with other founders to mitigate all or nothing outcomes.

Pipe.com for gaming and app businesses. Right now only a handful of competitors like sanlo.io. (I have been talking to gaming founders and they like this idea).

A better yelp for food built for a delivery-first world

An ultra simple car (think 1955 Studebaker), incredibly durable and economical for populations lacking access to transportation in the most challenging environments / societies. Access to reliable, durable transportation = opportunity.

Individuals maintain their own self generated data / privacy when going-online and the ability to sell this directly to buyers who can monetize it.

Closed loop hydrogen electrolytic storage (electricity in - electricity out). Hydrogen stored as solid hydride (as energy storage). Please contact if interested to discuss more

Scout Program for Platform Studio

Global Remote HR APIs (Empowering anyone to build for a remote first work environment) - Payroll, Accounting, Taxes, Background checks, Benefits, Remote HR analytics

Stripe for Taxes - Context - Yesterday I was talking to an XGoogler who is now a senior software engineer at Faire and he mentioned his company is struggling with this and they couldn't find any dev friendly platform. Since I am not from the states, I am not aware about any recent chnages to corporate/startup taxation, but he did mention something.

Center of Excellence Discovery – Often the best, most driven, energetic technical talent can be found working in the periphery of the limelight of well-established academics and founders. For deep tech start-ups especially; finding and recruiting early career talent before they hit the job market could mean the difference between success and failure. Desired is a 'Center of Excellence Reconnaissance' tool to enable venture builders to map the topology of a technical domain in order to discover burgeoning talent.

Financial product (benefits, insurance, taxes) for remote employees/companies (https://level.com/ + local insurance + benefits driving employee engagement). Anyone doing it yet? Context: Working for a startup remotely, and not entitled to receive any benefits/insurance, etc.

Food delivery is a critical piece of infrastructure for local restaurants, but Uber/Doordash/etc are taking a disproportionate amount of the revenue from meals to subsidize expanding into other markets, lobby national gov, and to line shareholder pockets (in theory). Some local restaurants have started forming Co-ops to run these services as a non-profit. I think there is an unmet need to build technology to help facilitate this local pushback against big tech.

How many missed opportunities have there been because someone doesn't have a degree, primarily a Ph.D.? There are not enough Innovation Centers or Think Tank opportunities for individuals who want to brainstorm and create products, opinions, or solutions on different subjects. People want to be a part of something, both young and old, and bring their experience and ideas to a solution that can help their communities, countries, or globally. For example, an idea or thesis is created on this platform, and five people like it or comment. There is an opportunity to bring those five individuals into a Think Tank team and spend two to four works creating a solution and creating a white paper for publishing with some guidance from the organization. Their input could make the next start-up or provide a new direction that researchers haven't considered. With the online tools we have today, more collaboration is easy, just underutilized.

Quantum Computing delivery varies across H/W implementations IBM, Rigetti, Psi Quantum, Xanadu, D-Wave, all have disparate hardwares. Each H/W vendor has their own way implementing standard gates. Consequently, IBM may implement some gates in a way suited to their hardware, and Rigetti has another gate set. This leads to developers being tied down to a H/W stack. If there was an API that was the interface across all the various hardwares. This API could hide the gate choices of various H/W vendors, which could be a great tool for developers. It could be the easier way to develop Quantum apps, and prototype for Quantum Computers. Apps which use Quantum Machine Learning(QML), Drug discovery, Image recognition, and Chemistry all use the same consistent API hiding the hardware implementations. "One (Quantum)API to rule them all and entangle apps and bind them..".

A subscription-based service that maintains (cleans/deep maintenance) smart house cleaning buddies like Roomba, Dyson, etc. Train the talent, contact-less front-door pickup & delivery, schedule ahead services. Market it to the $100k+ households, partner with Nordstrom/Bloomies at point of sale. Test it on a zip code (like 94549). And "humanize" the cleaning gadgets like they had feelings and treat them the way we treat or think of our cars (some even name their cars).

YNAB for startup budgeting. Everything I've seen/used is for reporting, which is great to know where you're money has gone. YNAB (You Need a Budget), a service for personal budgeting, makes you assign dollars you have to various expense categories, including non-monthly expenses you may incur down the road. It's subtle shift from backward looking reporting to forward looking proactive assignment of dollars. Would be great if it also had device and subscription management so you knew which subscriptions you had, what was being renewed and when.

Developing more robust, functional relationships

Mental Health Marketplace

Insurance for egg-freezing services that are independent of employer and job status. Egg-freezing is seen as an elective procedure and rarely covered by insurance. It is also not a cheap process. Could we create a service and/or product to further empower women in their reproductive choices, especially in the current climate where our reproductive rights and autonomy are being attacked ?

Turning Mortgage Payments into Rewards

An accessible marketplace for the neuro-sensitive, offering curated products that protect your vision, hearing and nervous system from stress. Migraine, ADHD, Autism and other neurological disorders present real challenges for accessing the world. There is a growing vertical of custom products (Allay lamps, Theraspecs, Sleep headphones, etc.) yet no place to easy source them. I'm tinkering with a new platform (Refuge) that offers a dark-mode, accessible shopping experience for just this reason.

Sensor/AI based product for Menopause. I did a deep dive into Femtech and found a bunch of startups for both fertility and a surprising number for PCOS. Have not found anything tech forward around menopause (there are plenty of sites for menopause related supplements and so on, but nothing iOT related.)

Venture capital - not equity but hybrid debt instruments that have equity like features - for 501c3 Charitable entities to take on big challenges that government can’t seem to deal with and where private extraction of profits seems inappropriate considering the public interest involved - ie water systems, storm water management, pharmaceuticals, prisons, police, hospitals, daycare, etc etc etc!

Product Lifespan Awareness - Consumerism has continued to thrive as product costs have become cheaper. Pushing consumers from short lifespan products to longer lifespan products can make an enormous impact on carbon emissions and waste (among other things). Oversimplified math, but if a product lifespan is doubled, emissions and waste could be halved.

In the food startup world, the most difficult aspect of commercializing a product is finding a contract manufacturing facility to produce our product. If there were a way to connect plant sales managers to startups in a way that the startups could see the plants capabilities, MOQ, and general capacity, then all parties could have significantly more productive conversations

Identify Theft Protection Updates: About 15 years ago, my mom had her personal information stolen for the first time. Someone used her information to try to open multiple loans, credit cards, etc. She was self-employed at the time, and eventually, they were able to use this personal info to do the same thing through her business. She's got idnetify theft protection through all major credit companies (LifeLock Platinum or whatever it's called). My dad has had issues in the past two years as well. As technology has advanced, I can't help but think- why do companies like LifeLock need to exist on the back end, after the breach and attempt to open accounts has already happened? Why can't people have a tech "lock" on their account like a retina scan, fingerprint, or even now a Non-Fungible token or their own cryptocurrency that is tied to the individual to verify that it is really the person taking the action. I'm thinking of it as a power-charged two-factor authentication. Even those can get hacked as people link their imessages to cloud and mail accounts. There has to be a way to do up-front authentication.

#HRTech #Recruitment: The screening & interviewing process for senior Product, Technical, Strategy roles in specialized industries is tough, time-consuming, and expensive. What if the process of vetting, screening, interviewing is crowd-sourced to a pool of subject matter experts? Candidates are then scored by SME based on criteria set by potential employers via recorded and transcribed interviews. At the same time, SME can also provide candidates with feedback on how they can better their professional skills to match industry best practices utilizing resources such as books, online courses, 1 on 1 session, and podcasts.

Can local small business restaurants "unionize" to collectively bargain for better terms from Uber Eats and Doordash? It doesn't take that many restaurants in an area to achieve critical mass. https://www.cnn.com/2022/02/23/business/restaurant-delivery/index.html

Even with all the amazing innovation in Healthcare, cost of Healthcare continues to rise driven by chronic illnesses. The industry is focused on solving for the symptoms and not focus on the root cause (an imbalance in your core physiological) that is causing the health issues. With the recent pandemic there is heightened focus on wellness and preventative health (a $200Bn market expected to grow to $500Bn by 2026). Hospitals systems like Cleveland Clinic, Fenton Health, etc.. are turning to Functional Medicine which can make a huge impact in managing and avoiding chronic illnesses. Mechanism Wellness is one of the first of it kind digital, personalized corporate/individual Wellness program that is rooted in Functional Medicine. Since our recent launch (late 2021) nine progressive employers including PepsiCo have signed up to offer Mechanism Wellness program to their employees. This solution can be further extended to people who are chronically ill. Functional Medicine expected to become the centerpiece of medicine going forward. This is important space where we can help a lot of people.

#GamingNFTs - Gaming is a unique niche that consists of gamers, game developers and game reviewers and as of the year 2022, they are 2.96 billion strong. These highly motivated, resilient and engaged group of people create valuable content in form of gaming videos, game demo videos and game review videos and their content has three core inherent values, namely: cultural value, educational value and entertainment value. But sadly, gamers are left out of the NFT scheme of things because NFT marketplaces are too generic to enable gamers to realize and maximize the three core values inherent in their content. I propose a curated, social NFT marketplace exclusively for gamers with the following features: 1. Mint, buy & sell game demo videos, gaming videos & game review videos as NFTs. 2. Send and receive tips on NFTs. 3. Curate NFTs by upvoting them to the homepage. 4. Comment & reply to comments. 5. Share NFTs to social media platforms. 6. Follow and unfollow anyone. 7. Set and receive royalties on NFTs. 8. Send and receive message requests. 9. Extended profile pages. 10. Native token for sending and receiving tips.

Bridge-building app to foster empathy, understanding, workable solutions to counter the FB effect of hyper polarization?

Upgrading the 911 system

Unmet Need: collaboration and data sharing among healthcare organizations around provider credentialing & directory information. Payers and health systems must maintain timely and accurate directory and credential information on all contracted healthcare professionals (i.e., providers). Today, each organization independently manages and verifies this information for each provider. This represents ~$10B of duplicated costs, delays the ability of providers to deliver care to patients, and creates a burden on providers who have to respond to credentialing and directory info requests from each of the many HCOs with which they contract. A blockchain-based data management platform which allowed entities to leverage provider data, verified by trusted and accredited peer organizations in a permissioned network, would enable HCOs to collaborate to eliminate duplicative effort and expense, accelerate provider data management workflows, and improve provider data quality -- reducing administrative burden for healthcare professionals and enhancing member/patient experience.

#bazaar: an NFT marketplace for startups corporate branding material (logos). It can give consumers access to investing in startups and NFTs at the same time. The Market will focus on low transaction cost with high volume. Part of the fees will go to the startups as an option to fundraising. This is a passing thought in the back of my mind, but I think this could be a really great way to correlate true value and logic to NFT's. .

A platform that connects people with dietary conditions (Diabetes, Celiac . . . . .) to tailored meal plans and support communities. Currently there are isolated online forums one one side and standalone meal providers on the other, nobody does both.

1. Entrepreneurs use spreadsheets all the time, but most are not good at it. The process of building a financial model, much less having decision-ready data once the business is up and running, is tedious. 2. Product managers in medium enterprises must present financials to management and show the potential ROI to win approval for new products. Putting together these financials is a tedious spreadsheet process. Each product manager formats their financials differently. The abundance of non-uniform financials leads to chaotic collaborations. 3. Small businesses (e.g. bakeries) fret over the capital resources to get off the ground and run smoothly. After hours in the spreadsheet, confirming where investment is needed most for growth hinges on questioning the same assumptions repeatedly. Imagine a software platform where a user inputs data and gets beautiful reports/charts instantly. Such reports/charts can be of the breakeven point, burn rate, and capital requirements. Further, the software compares inputted financials to the industry and projects realistic scenarios. In other words, the software makes decision-ready financials available. In addition, collaboration can be seamless across organizational layers. Imagine a software platform where a user connects their bank account/customer data sources and gets recommendations for marketing, sales, and product spends instantly. Such recommendations are based on years of financial data from publicly traded companies, giving the powers of fortune 500 companies for SMB scale.

Connecting children from single-parent households - particularly fatherless children - with resources to help them tackle the unique challenges posed to them. Over 18 million children in the U.S. grow up without their father in the home; studies have universally shown that this fatherlessness is an indicator of an increased likelihood for future poverty, crime, etc. Using a combination of smart technology and human mentors I believe we can work directly with parishes, schools, and other organizations to access the children most in need.

Mainstreet America is struggling as more of us shop online. There needs to be a way to unify commercial corridor online to allow locals to easily support local businesses! Window shop your downtown, mall or art & crafts festival.

Crypto Philanthropy Network. Connect Crypto Whales to each other and to causes where they can make a transformational difference.

Deep-fake detection

trucking/freight optimization

Augmented Reality for Restaurant Menus

#SocialGraph3.0 - There is a scenario where a new ecosystem emerges, providing technology companies an opportunity to create products with significant value. The general concept is described here by Musk: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1588081971221053440. What he is alluding is the Social Graph. For about a decade, the social graph has been locked behind "walled gardens". A shift in policy that opens up the entire Social Graph to developers, would create an entirely new developer ecosystem, resulting in an entirely new set of capabilities, and an entirely new class of technology products, based on Social Graph inference. One way this may happen is new ownership at Twitter renews interest in supporting 3rd party developers, and offering the Social Graph to the public (e.g. Firehose).

unsolicited emails - they are distracting and a waste of time and resources - keep my inbox OFF limit

Spatial intelligence

Medical device reprocessing - computer vision to ensure sterilization of surgery equipment using hyperspectral cameras and ML models. Use cases include hospitals, war, medical NGOs, medical schools.