Solving Difficult Technical Problems
Solving Difficult Technical Problems
The above picture is the south face of Annapurna in the Himalayas. It has the highest fatality ratio of all fourteen peaks above 8,000 meters. This is due to the extreme technical nature of the climb. Solving difficult technical problems is somewhat similar. Very few attempt to solve these. Of those who do succeed, the solution hasn't scaled. Widespread adoption remains the holy grail.
Pre-Existing History & Building Blocks
A lot of these problems don't need solutions from scratch. There is much history that is worth studying. Core building blocks are available often that reduce years of development time. As a founder, one needs to take these pieces further. Re-imagine a product that will gain mass adoption. The classic case involves both Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. Both took the Graphical User Interface idea out of Xerox PARC. And created Windows and Macintosh that gained mass adoption.
Avenues for Ideas
My upbringing was in a defense background. This has led me to contrast Armed Forces and civilian lifestyles. Defense labs have created the perfect precursor to technology with high usefulness. GPS is one such example of closely-held defense technology. It was later opened up to the general public. University research labs are another great source.
Understanding Issues Beforehand
Difficult technical startups share some common patterns. Expensive prototyping cost, longer development time, and an involved sales cycle. Most investors like quick liquidity and will shy away from funding these startups. Only some have a genuine desire to see these difficult technical problems solved. They understand that exit timelines could be a decade or longer. Aspinity, Boom Supersonic and IAM Robotics are a few of my investments in this category.
Problems to Solve
Below is a tiny subset of the long list that I would like to explore further:
Maker Culture excites me. Learning is enriching. Experimentation to create new and better things from learning. Making money from these things. And evolving this into a continuous process. My interests are also varied. Software, hardware, cosmetics, food, psychology, longevity, materials, medicines, and more. It seems like an infinite list. After all, so many things around us don't function well. We need to make them better and make new things. If you are working on creating something meaningful, I'd love to know more.
Pre-Existing History & Building Blocks
A lot of these problems don't need solutions from scratch. There is much history that is worth studying. Core building blocks are available often that reduce years of development time. As a founder, one needs to take these pieces further. Re-imagine a product that will gain mass adoption. The classic case involves both Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. Both took the Graphical User Interface idea out of Xerox PARC. And created Windows and Macintosh that gained mass adoption.
Avenues for Ideas
My upbringing was in a defense background. This has led me to contrast Armed Forces and civilian lifestyles. Defense labs have created the perfect precursor to technology with high usefulness. GPS is one such example of closely-held defense technology. It was later opened up to the general public. University research labs are another great source.
Understanding Issues Beforehand
Difficult technical startups share some common patterns. Expensive prototyping cost, longer development time, and an involved sales cycle. Most investors like quick liquidity and will shy away from funding these startups. Only some have a genuine desire to see these difficult technical problems solved. They understand that exit timelines could be a decade or longer. Aspinity, Boom Supersonic and IAM Robotics are a few of my investments in this category.
Problems to Solve
Below is a tiny subset of the long list that I would like to explore further:
- Fast-Tracking Learnability:
- One of my Carnegie Mellon classmates joined Facebook in a senior engineering role. Major crib was how long it took to get comfortable with the new product codebase. The comparison point was the previous company. It was a startup that went public and then had a billion-dollar acquisition. My classmate was an initial employee and grew through the ranks. Knowing code threads across the codebases gave a lot of confidence.
- Culture is another thing that takes time to learn. Human mobility across cities and countries has increased in a significant way. Culture still seems glued to a geographical location.
- Many more examples. New customs, methods of working, relationship nuances, different laws, regulations & taxation. We can bring the power back to the individual and rely less on middle-persons.
- Platform Portability: Once achieved, it can marginalize operating systems specific software. This could create a whole new slew of applications and use-cases. Imagine a cleaner and simpler way to carry our information and environment. Between home, work, play, shopping, vacations and public places.
- Better Materials: As humans, we spend most of our time in a few places. Homes, offices, factories, transit vehicles and buildings. Better materials in all these environments can reduce energy usage by a wide margin.
- Continuous Marker Monitoring: Problematic symptoms need detection before they become visible. Real-time marker monitoring across our body can help enable this. We could have better health and prevent early deaths.
- Actionable Information Retrieval: The Internet is one medium of information. Human experience is another. Extracting human information is an old challenge. Organizing it in a situation-specific manner is another. Accomplishing both would be nirvana.
- Omnipresent Robotics: Microsoft Excel changed human productivity. We still spend a lot of hours doing repetitive tasks across industries and in our daily lives. Software and hardware robots could replicate a high percentage of these tasks. Humans can focus on tasks that need brains and emotional intelligence.
- Intelligent Signal Processing: Signals are all around us. Motion, sound, temperature, video & images, acidity, biological and membrane potentials. A ton more is possible in the world of signal processing.
- Low-Cost Goods Transport: We consume a ton of tangible products in our daily lives. Most have a source hundreds or thousands of miles away. Figuring out a way to reduce costs in this industry would have an immediate effect on end-user prices. It will also open up new sources of goods.
- Harnessing Natural Elements: Earth, water, fire, air and space. Five fundamental elements of nature. We still haven't figured meaningful ways to harness these. Rather than trying to create, we can harvest what we have.
- Human Behavioral Maps: Human actions are situation-specific. This is in contrast to our static professional and personal profiles. Codification of our behavior produces an actionable template. This can be the basis to deduce future actions.
- Access: This one is a combination of technology applied to specific use-cases. Be it voting, healthcare, education, investing, and work. Access results in short-term upheaval for the privileged. The long-term benefits of access and mass inclusion are more. It creates a competitive and transparent environment. This results in an immediate tangible benefit for our personal, work and social lives.
- Embedded Sensing: Most industries and our daily consumer lives have sensors. The problem is that they are still used for rudimentary things. More and better sensing is the need. It can free up tremendous human capital, prevent damage, and allow us to focus on improvements.
Maker Culture excites me. Learning is enriching. Experimentation to create new and better things from learning. Making money from these things. And evolving this into a continuous process. My interests are also varied. Software, hardware, cosmetics, food, psychology, longevity, materials, medicines, and more. It seems like an infinite list. After all, so many things around us don't function well. We need to make them better and make new things. If you are working on creating something meaningful, I'd love to know more.
Let's Talk: If you have a true experience that resonates, please send me an email.
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