Running list of light startup ideas or projects I’d like to work with friends with for fun or because I think they’d be good for the world on the side. Inspired by Dan Romero’s open startup idea list. I’d love to work on these as side projects so feel free to reach out if you’d love to pair.

“Sorting Hat” or “Impact” Graph”

It bums me out that social media companies have perfected ML to hack our generation’s attention and hook them on addicting but often unuseful content in exchange for ads. It’s also hard for people to identify the intersection of what’s meaningful to them + what’s useful for the world.

Inspired by Eugene Wei’s essay on TikTok creating the “interest” graph, I’d love to see an “impact” graph of curated entertaining and informative content and job opportunities vertically focused around things that are positively impactful for the world. Imagine something like 80,000 Hours which helps people navigate impactful world problems but less pessimistic and making use of better content, recommendation engines, and opportunities.

“Co-Live”: Living closer with friends and community

General problem statement of making it seamless to find or build housing together with your friends, family, and general community as means of reducing loneliness + improving happiness. I’ve had chats with a ton of friends that say they’d love to live near each other as we get older.

  • Easiest MVP could just be an opt-in “find my” type app to know address or general vicinity of where your close friends live to keep in mind.
  • Next up might be a group search, filter, and bookmarking experience layered on top of Google Maps, MLS data, and homebuilder data. Social alternative to Zillow + Streeteasy.
  • Very ambitious would be collaboratively finding land, sourcing developers and home designs, shopping leads to homebuilders, and building out sections of neighborhoods from scratch.
  • I guess the most ambitious version of this would be the physical implementation of Balajis’ The Network State and just straight up offer a service to build new cities from scratch 😂

“shipd”: Help matchmake your friends

Context: IMO the person you choose to be with is one of the, if not MOST, consequential decisions you’ll make in your life, so I think it’s extremely impactful to help people find love (which is why I’ve always found dating apps to be meaningful and interesting). Separately, it has always puzzled me that there’s no high-quality app that lets you help friends find love.

I’d love to help “ship” or matchmake my friends to other people in my extended network, even help swipe for them sometimes, and advocate for them by cosigning their best qualities on their dating profiles. I also suspect a ton of folks that are “off the market” would love to help matchmake friends since their own dating lives are over (just look at how addicted people are to reality TV…). I think some mashup of Hinge, Gas/TBH, and Subtle Asian Dating where matches could be formed via mutual connections, some light swiping, and friend endorsements could work while easing the burden of swiping off single folks, and let taken friends live vicariously through their single friends.

“SwarmCraft”: RTS-style agent orchestration

I used to play an insane amount of DotA, WarCraft, and StarCraft growing up and have always wished my work tools felt less like enterprise SaaS and more like real-time strategy games.

Inspired by Starcraft, SwarmCraft would be a gamified real-time canvas for orchestrating agents and managing resources (tokens, compute, money, etc). Build agents using different models, prompts, and MCP tools, deploy them to handle various tasks, review escalations in a unified inbox, then watch your dashboards and metrics update as agents get to work. Make it gamified with global leaderboards ranking the best agents and orchestrators by agents deployed, tasks completed, and revenue growth. Managing AI should feel less like n8n and Zapier and more like playing Factorio or StarCraft.

I wonder how far one could get by just creating a UI + harness around the Claude Agent SDK…

Personal Health Dashboard

I’d love a video game-like dashboard for my personal health. I have a lot of data sources like Apple Health, Oura Ring, Nike+, Withings, and others that give me a fragmented view on my health and activity data. I’d love having an integrated single source of truth for my health data paired with models like Med-PaLM to push light recommendations and forecasts on how to improve. I think it’d be super helpful even acknowleding there’d be a wide error bar on accuracy.