I have many ambitions, and I'm the type of person who doesn't mind spending hours with one customer to figure out their problems and I would love to take my existing projects and turn them into healthy, sustainable businesses. But just the thought that I'll have to sacrifice a lot of my core values to achieve anything at the scale required by big VCs make me sick to my stomach.
So, if you are not applying (today is the last day!) because you think that your idea is worthy "only" a few million bucks, what would that idea be, and what would have to change for you to think that the application would be worth it?
The software was very expensive and you had to deal with Cisco's licensing. The open source world has a replacement for Cisco Process Orchestrator, it is called Stackstorm and it is an excellent piece of software. I have deployed it at many companies I have worked for.
However there has not been an open source replacement for Cisco Prime Service Catalog. I have come across some portal solutions, but they are the source of truth for the lifecycle data about the service like PSC does. This replacement is what I am working on.
I want to keep it open source, so I don't want to take on VC investment. We have seen too many VC open source tools that end up with a run pull after a few years. My "business plan" is sell consulting and support services around it. I don't want to build a billion dollar business. I just want to earn enough to support my self and few other developers.
Right now I am working on building the MVP as I know a few companies that could use it. It is slow going because I am a devops guy not a full stack developer. So there is a lot to learn along the way.
* Hire a bunch of people with psychological background, who then spend 3-4 years going around colleges and companies across the world, interviewing the outliers of society (i.e career criminals, smart people that have made contributions to technology or science, serial killers, hermits, brilliant mathematicians, neurodivergent people, charismatic leaders, and so on). Would also need a good dataset of "normal" people in society.
* Figure out how to encode all the data in deterministic ways. The domain of that data should be able do sufficiently encompass a persons life on Earth with a good degree of accuracy. This is the hard part, but the domain is finite, so its just busy work.
* Train a neural network to predict a multi-dimentional impact on society.
* Reverse the neural network.
* Short term, build a dating app for immediate monetization.
* Long term, refine the data set, build out a test that people can take that lets you determine their "eventual aptitude" for technology - i.e doesn't have to be up front knowledge or skill, just the ability to be trained to be a great problem solver. Now you can simply find people to hire across the world, spin off a department, get those people trained up on modern tech, and point them at a problem.
The idea is improving on uptime monitoring/status pages. It's a slow business to build, but it works.
I have friends doing the same for email platforms, web analytics, and more. Just be slightly better.
Sounds like you want a different approach as well. I'd say don't fret over YC/VC, and instead go forth to bootstrap and enjoy a more sustainable pace to life. Don't "go big or go home" -- instead "go small and stay home."
I once worked at a really cool company that had robots that could do handwriting. I thought it would be cool to get the robots to draw pictures of people, and after a little hacking I had a prototype UI that could convert bitmaps to traceable vector paths.
Since then I have worked on automating the process. I have a half-built machine that will be able to do pen plotter stuff, without any connection to the internet. I am currently using a Cricut machine to render plotter art which ties me to the useless bored mom cloud. Also I can't use the machine without internet... NOT OK!
The biggest problem with the Cricut cloud is the process is so clunky and painful that I cannot do "realtime" drawings. The process of bouncing between my UI and the awful cricut cloud makes the process too labor intensive for me to talk to people and do the P.T. Barnum thing while I also execute the art. I would love to have an assistant but I cannot afford it.
So I have a machine, eventually I will be able to run a server process on a raspi listening for requests, and when it gets one it will execute some gcode to do some drawing.
I also have figured out how to use a DSLR library to control cameras.
The end goal is for camera to fire, automated tracing to run, and then the robot should kick out a sketch in 3 mins or less
It's called "Robot Draws You!" because people couldn't understand what "facetrace" meant and I also found existing companies using that wordmark / term.
I have been dragging this project behind my failing career for about 6-7 years now. I hope to get back to it.... I'm not giving up. I love making vector pen plotter artwork but unfortunately I am a shining example of the starving artist stereotype.
https://www.instagram.com/robotdrawsyou/
On one hand I feel bad for holding onto this project and not being able to give up. On the other hand, it's too cool and enjoyable for me to let go of. If I can get a MVP demo working, I'll be able to bring it to parties and hopefully get paid to do "photo booth" style events. I also would like to use the project as an educational tool to teach people the difference between bitmap and vector graphics.
If anybody wants to join me in this project or is interested in funding me send an email to mat at vtapi dot co
Take a simple FPGA fabric, and rip out all of the routing hardware, and specialized modules. This gets you down to a cartesian array of Look Up Tables. (Simulator for one LUT/Cell here[2])
Add a delay after each one, so that you can use the magic of graph coloring to clock them in 2 phases, and eliminate all race conditions. This simultaneously makes it a horrible FPGA, in terms of latency, and the easiest FPGA ever, in terms of general purpose, secure, computing.
Most computing problems can be broken down to a directed graph of bitwise operations. Executing all of the graph in lockstep means that you can simply flow data through it. You could get FFTs that window data, then output results at the same rate as the input. For Radar processing, this might be useful.
Ideally, you could flow GPT4 tokens through, the latency for a given stream would be horrible, but you could have millions of parallel streams.
To do this, you have to map the directed graph to hardware. In an FPGA this can take days because of the special modules, etc. This makes programming a nightmare. With a BitGrid, you can just use a greedy mapping algorithm, and Bob's your Uncle.
Because every cell is essentially the worlds smallest Excel Sheet cell, it's easy to know all of the dependencies for any given cell. You can move cells, rotate them, flip and mirror them if you need to maximize the utilization of hardware, or want to wall off a given graph inside walls for isolation.
Until recently, I've always thought of it as a chip, but recently I've come to see that you could just as well take a farm of RP2040 chips and have them all running slow simulators of a fairly huge BitGrid chips, and network them through their I/O pins to make an arbitrary size array, cheap!
The BitGrid topology thus becomes a universal computing solvent. Scaling anything that can be expressed as the directed graph can be run very slowly on a CPU with a lot of RAM/Disk, or quickly on silicon, with identical results. I think this could scale to PetaFlops quite cheaply (a few runs through TinyTapeOut then scaling up)
[1] https://github.com/mikewarot/Bitgrid