Brainstorming Session

Summary of Brainstorming Session

January 20, 2024

Introduction

Our team recently had an ideas brainstorming session where we talked about initial ideas. The raw document with our ideas can be found here, but this document will serve to provide a bit more understanding/segmentation of the ideas neatly.

Approach

Outside of the usual team bonding/warm-up activities (i.e., O'Brien did a great job of running 20 questions), we focused a lot on thinking about problems as opposed to solutions. One thing that we feel is a big trap is the notion of thinking about emerging technologies and trying to apply those to problems, rather than working backwards from what irritated us. Furthermore, we tried to be as diverse as possible during idea generation. As the document and this page will detail, naturally, a lot of the ideas do relate back to our shared experiences in ML and Systems. Nonetheless, we tried to think about all aspects of our life, from our interests in sports to daily events.

Themes

Below is a non-exhaustive list of themes that we came up, in addition to some added notes about elements such as the size of the opportunity, founder-market fit, etc.

AI Agents

LLMs have been all the rage in the last couple of months, and there has been extensive effort in building a lot of tooling for them (i.e., vector databases, observability tools, prompt management) as well as large-scale research teams building them from the ground up (i.e., OpenAI, Anthropic, Mistral). The natural progression of a lot of this is shifting from language to multimodality, as well as allowing the model to actually interact and perform actions in the environment. These are AI agents.

There's a lot of working being done in this field, from companies striving to build these agents (i.e., Adept, MultiOn) to academic contributions on how to make these agents emulate humans (i.e., Generative Agents, which O'Brien was a co-author of). While the technical challenge might be difficult, we think there may be some opportunities to build some specialized agents that can be adapted for a specific workflow:

• AI law assistant –- find law cases? Patents? See Casetext.
• AI Teachers -- AI music teachers, video game teachers, Leetcode, etc.
• ML model showing you how to do tricks in video games -- “Video game tutor” – data from good players, no marketplace, aligns with v-tuber/terminally online thesis
• Gen agents for A/B testing -- Programmatic A/B testing – showcase ideas to try out based on user data
• AI-powered gardening helper
• Terms and Conditions Summarizer

Developer Tooling

As folks who have worked on a variety of coding projects within industry, academia, and our classes, we've had our fair share of annoyances. For us, we feel as though this could be a good place to play since we can offer a fresh experience to developers while also having the flexibility to easily test our product ourselves.

• GitHub is complicated, and it’s hard to use it
• Easier way to manage/install dependencies
• Hard to install CUDA/NVIDIA libraries
• A better “Google Docs” for code? See Replit

Video Game Creators

Given the large total addressable market (TAM) for gaming in general, and given how many of us love gaming, we think it would be great if we could easily build custom games for the worlds we love.

• Fortnite game creator
• Company that makes Minecraft games/servers
• Company that makes simple Roblox games -- no-code platform for Roblox games?

Big Data Software

Similar to our thesis for agents -- lots of problems to be solved in the MLOps/LLM space, and we have good experience in ML. A lot of these would be either open-source ideas or API companies.

• Synthetic data
• Sparsification library for neural networks
• On-prem data management
• Data pipelining for medical systems

Enterprise Software

All over the place, but a lot of these ideas are based on issues we foresee as consumers.

• Where are the best places to put a restaurant (for a franchisee)
• Employee productivity tracker for mid-level restaurants
• Restaurant tv channel finder
• Software to help with small-scale house flippers? Home maintenance software for home-owners, in general?
• Restaurant operations
• Real-time Yelp!
• Drowning detector for public pools and water parks

Moonshots

Separate category for ideas where we're a bit unexperienced but willing and eager to learn more.

• Supply chain optimization
• (Vague) agricultural problem finding

Productivity

Includes some general tools for thought (Chris has a lot of experience in this space) as well as better learning experiences, in general.

• Try to use phone less often
• Easier way to learn based on timestamps/areas of learning (over lectures)
• Better version of Leetcode? AI Leetcode

E-Commerce

Consumer play, related to our experiences as people who need to buy things.

• Sometimes it’s hard to find what types of items are available (i.e., Google Shopping Killer)
• Something to do with buying cars/car parts/ auto-related?

Beauty

• App that shows you different haircuts

Next Steps

As a next step, we will continue benchmarking our ideas and choose a couple to float out and needfind for. From there, we can be ready for our SGM/first meeting with liaisons to talk about the opportunities.

Update

As of 1/30, we've consolidated our ideas to the following themes:

AI-Powered Patent Search Data Extraction + Management for Construction Supply Chain Marketplace for Wine Ideas in healthcare (scribe assistant, transaction verifier)