Hard Ideas I Want to Back in 2023
Photo by Greg Rakozy on Unsplash
Every January I share a post that highlights the areas I’d like to invest in over the coming 12 months. As I reread last year’s post I questioned if a problem-first lens is the wrong way to think about early stage investing. To be sure, solving a core problem for users / customers is critical for founders and company builders; by definition it is a requirement for problem / market fit. But from the investor seat, or at least my particular style and stage of investing, I see this mental model as lagging.
Rather than ask myself, What’s broken?, I need to be asking, What if? My strategy for 2023 is to try and be more introspective, imagine unrealistic futures, share these thoughts more publicly and hope that said thoughts resonate with some founder, somewhere. The recent buzz around Generative AI provides an ideal example of this thinking. After just 30 minutes of playing around with ChatGPT I was buzzing with ideas of how this could be used and none of them would have come via problem exploration. With that in mind I’m making this year’s list grounded in ideas. I want to spend the year walking the edge of where technology and magic meet. Or rather, where they could meet once the product is built. I’m still a pre-seed investor, after all.
Augmenting Engineering - What if you could use prompt-based design to engineer atoms, not bits? What new materials could be invented or chemicals synthesized? Could human + AI collaboration finally break the scale limits of bioengineering?
Encapsulating Knowledge - What if an individual could finally harness the full corpus of intelligence? This was the first flashpoint with ChatGPT, and while there are some ethical questions (RIP school essays), the societal unlock is undeniable. What happens to finance if everyone had an Analyst in-house? How do politics change when polls can be summarized without party lean or confirmation bias?
Building Defenses - Though the fear of Skynet is still very much alive, I do wonder what a white hat AI might look like. Cybersecurity, at both a corporate and national level, is becoming an increasingly complex, if not impossible, challenge. What’s preventing another FTX-like implosion when markets are global and without clear jurisdiction? How do we administer accountability and justice in a world of advanced deepfakes? What if we had our own Jarvis?
Bypassing Politics - One of the more prominent topics as of late has been the ethical tradeoffs of moderating content. This has been an area I’ve been interested in for years but have yet to find a compelling approach. What if we allowed platforms to recuse themselves of the entire moderation debate and instead users (or advertisers) had complete control over what they saw? Rather than impinge on someone’s freedom of speech, we could enhance someone’s freedom to not hear.
Changing Climates - Those words are forever associated with the negative road we’re headed down, but could we change the climate back? What would be required to return to pre-industrial climates within our lifetime? Could we tailor this reversal to certain regions? Would we place higher value on local vs. abroad carbon capture? Industrial-scale carbon capture, robust credit markets, and traceability systems would all be required parts of a collective infrastructure.
Expanding Frontiers - I think we’re decades away from space colonization, but in-orbit production seems within reach. What manufacturing process, whether biological, crystalline or otherwise, would benefit from a zero-gravity environment? Does it make sense to store data up there? Could we better harness the sun’s energy from space?
Re-establishing Sovereignty - Globalization is in retreat, and COVID revealed just how fragile a multi-national world can be. There’s already a lot of discussion of re-shoring critical industries (food production, energy, semiconductors, compute), and I’m intrigued to see how technology will accelerate or even leapfrog that.
Expanding Workforce - There’s a lot of concern of job elimination, but some skills we just don’t make enough of. Medical training is the typical example, as are some highly manual tasks (mining, agriculture), but I’m very interested in digital means of production. In other words, coding ability. Copilot has shown us that the future of software engineering does not look like the past.
Powering Alternativey - I’m neutral to bearish on my beleif that solar and wind are viable replacements for grid transition. The irregularity argument is obvious and a good chunk of the planet does not have the natural climate to support them anyway. I’m actively exploring alternative energy sources like nuclear (modular), tidal, hydrogen and battery storage. To be clear, this is a very capital intensive area so the devil is in the details.
Harnessing Complexity - This is a bit of a catch-all, but there are some challenges that we seem to be hopelessly behind on. Understanding neurodegenerative diseases and long-term weather predictions are ones I’ve thought about a lot, but I’m sure there are dozens.
This list is meant to be a beacon for early stage or even prospective entrepreneurs: if you’re working on, or dreaming of, any of these, please reach out.