So one of my favourite essays is by Paul Graham, the Y Combinator founder. It’s called Frighteningly Amibitious Startup Ideas — you might have read it. It’s fascinating, because slowly the 7 things on this list are coming true. Let’s take a look at this, point-by-point.

The company that Paul Graham founded, Y Combinator, incubates many startups with scary, frightening ideas

A New Search Engine

This hasn’t happened yet, but I see no reason why it couldn’t. I mean yes Google are impossibly big — 100 billion searches a month — but as Graham says, if you could make a search engine which hackers used and had 10,000 users in that area, it would be immensely powerful going forward. Food for thought.

EDIT: DuckDuckGo are actually well on their way to achieving this — if you look at their traffic, you’ll see the number of searches has been rising tremendously over the last five years. It’s got unique features Google doesn’t have, too — such as bangs. And it’s simple and fast. While Google are slowing down and focusing on the Knowledge Graph and AI, DuckDuckGo and still playing it simple. And simple, as we know, is good.

Replace Email

Graham says that “This is one of those ideas that’s like an irresistible force meeting an immovable object.” It’s so true for email, possibly more than anything else. If 1.55bn people use Facebook and over 1bn every day, how many do you think use email? I’d be willing to bet it’s over 3bn. The issue is there’s no real stats on email usage (number of users, number of email sent per day/week/month/year etc) because it’s a protocol and not a service.

This is both good and bad — good in that your playing field is absolutely incomprehendably large, but bad in that you’ve got the “chicken and the egg” problem Graham mentions.

Possibly the most inspiring one of all, because it’s something most of us can at least somehow relate to. Slack’s made a dent on email, but only a very small one, and it’s hardly noticable to the billions of people that use and get frustrated by email every day.

Replace Universities

I guess this has sort of happened, what with KhanAcademy and other things, but it’s not something that will happen overnight. It’ll take months and months to actually, genuinely take place. Universities are such an age-old idea that they’re even more entrenched than email is. Plus, most people don’t see the issue with how we currently learn, both in school and higher education, so there’s no incentive there in that respect.

Internet Drama

Think we can all say this one has definitively happened. I’ve just finished the fourth season of Netflix’s House of Cards (wow!). With Amazon jumping in on the action too, having signed the former Top Gear boys, I think we can safely say Internet Drama is here to stay.

The Next Steve Jobs

This is the one I feel may be a little…far out. At least at the moment, still relatively soon after Steve’s death. I agree with Graham’s assessment that “the company that creates the next wave of hardware is probably going to have to be a startup” — that could be a company like Xiaomi, or Nextbit, or it could be a company we haven’t heard of yet. I don’t think the company who does this will be American, or from the West. Issue is these two companies don’t have, at the moment, a Jobs figure. Maybe they don’t need one though.

EDIT: I would actually say they’d be an AI company, like DeepMind, but they’re all getting snapped up faster than we can say Go. Hm.

Bring Back Moore’s Law

I only understand this on a basic, surface level as I’m not a programmer. I wish I could understand it, but my brain just isn’t sufficently wired for programming and coding. :( but I will say that, from my research, this seems quite far off — no real progress has been made with sufficiently smart compliers. It sinks even lower when you read about Moore’s Law not applying any more (there was a more recent post about Moore’s Law slowing down, but I can’t find it. Grr).

Ongoing Diagnosis

I think we’re close with this one. There are so many efforts into monitoring glucose levels using sensors, and I think it’s only a matter of time until we see immune system sensors and other futuristic tech like that. Admittedly, this progress is not entirely being conducted by startups — Alphabet’s Verily is developing a glucose monitor that is also a contact lens — but progress is progress.

AI could be a massive, massive boon for ongoing diagnosis — imagine if AI could be used to tell whether a tumour was cancerous or benign, or whether a person needs medication because of their behaviour or brain functions. I was reading a report on too many children being mis-diagnosed as ADHD today on the Telegraph website, when actually they’re just immature and haven’t developed a long enough attention span yet. Could AI help with this? I think so.

A mockup of what Verily’s glucose contact lens could look like

In conclusion: one of these will probably come to fruition in the next four years or so. Because they’re so huge, it’s likely that the idea in question will affect many millions. While I’m not 100% sure of which idea will be the one, I’d put my money on ongoing diagnosis. A lot of progress is being made there; it’s an area that is likely to explode is we get more and more concious of our health and well-being.