Y Combinator (that hip investment firm started by a computer programmer that you may have heard about) came out yesterday with their list of 30 ideas they'd like to fund. While these sorts of lists do seem to be a dime a dozen, we don't shy away from them because there's a chance it could help you tweak your concept or pitch enough to get a VC interested in your start-up. While not every great idea (Hello, Magic Binder!) is on the list (and they're all fairly tech-y), these handy little guides can give you a general sense of what is hot in VC right now. We've got Y Combinator's top five from their list below. What do you guys think about what they say they want to fund?
A cure for the disease of which the RIAA is a symptom.
No, we have no idea what this means either. But here's how Y Combinator explains it: the recording and movie industries are broken. Sony and Universal are suing kids - which obviously isn't a long term solution to the revenues they're bleeding because of pirating, etc. Find a way to fix it, and you get a check for start-up capital.
Simplified browsing.
When we read this, we wondered how the Internet could get any more simple? It's basically point and click, people. But Y Combinator puts it well: "There are a lot of cases where you'd trade some of the power of a web browser for greater simplicity. Grandparents and small children don't want the full web; they want to communicate and share pictures and look things up. What viable ideas lie undiscovered in the space between a digital photo frame and a computer running Firefox?"
New news.
Here's the quick and dirty: newspapers are dying for multiple reasons (structural flaws, time to press, decline in classified advertising, etc.). Newshounds want up-to-the-second information on what's going - and are increasingly turning to the web. Gossip sites like Gawker and Perez are just the beginning.
Outsourced IT.
We'll leave this description to Y Combinator: "In most companies the IT department is an expensive bottleneck. Getting them to make you a simple web form could take months. Enter [a company like] Wufoo. Now if the marketing department wants to put a form on the web, they can do it themselves in 5 minutes. You can take practically anything users still depend on IT departments for and base a startup on it, and you will have the enormous force of their present dissatisfaction pushing you forward."
Enterprise software 2.0.
Ditto this one: "Enterprise software companies sell bad software for huge amounts of money. They get away with it for a variety of reasons that link together to form a sort of protective wall." Focus on finding niches that can be picked off in this field, and on making products for smaller companies.
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