my Pioneer builders’ list

entries will continue to be added to this list

Why the Pioneer list? Pioneer introduced me to the idea you can build anything you desire – a plugin, a bot, a chrome extension or an app for the multitude of b2b app stores. Not everything has to be a billion or even a trillion dollar business. That should hopefully make you liberated. Not only do I think this is achievable by most people, it is also a really good way to start something small that can conversely become really big. The kind of things do fit venture models.

I also have strong alignment on their selection criteria. This simply has to be the most succinct ways to picking ideas.

Given the advent of AI and cheaper faster automation systems, increasing attention deficit in humans and ZIRP days gone, its going to be easier building niche systems and a lot more difficult beating the incumbents who look a lot more like Facebook and a lot less like SAP. Things gotta change.

Take another perspective, the difference in a senior hire isn’t that they know ; technology changes are rapid and you’re likely relying on their ability to think laterally, consider tradeoffs and figure things out. And that’s the best insurance policy you can get. So the insurance policy to any new idea isn’t how broad you think, its’ your ability to build something, anything, get customers or some form of traction with limited resources.

Pioneer is the best example of doing just that with no strings attached. Not surprisingly the ability to pick up skills, including how to write code, no-code or glue code to resolve experiments is valuable to any business so it can double as your future resume in the event the experiment does fail. In fact, a number of projects we consider venture-backable were truly small changes build over a handful of weeks. Go build. If not for yourself, do it for your moms.

If you’re looking to build any of these, I’d love to speak with you or get you the right people. The caveat being some work has been done upfront or its just too many what ifs to consider. Send me a figma link!

1. A peer to peer network router system
A peer to peer network that abstracts away the payments into hardware via incentives backed into blockchain networks. Selecting the most valuable routes based on user rewards in the path of the most optimal routers. In fact, the Opensea founders had this planned. I would DM them to find out why this didn’t work before venturing here. ¹ Althea started years earlier and is still operating. The markets are completely different today but it’s clear a lot of consumers aren’t happy with their internet providers.

2. A ZK talent finder
An app that pulls your professional or social networks and with a click of a button publishes your request of new work you might be looking for or forwards your network looking for work with a tap of button. The protocol can automatically rewards both the hunter and forwarder of an accepted job offer routed though the chain. All participates in the middle can be programmatically rewarded. Finding the right talent continues to be a billion dollar business but the effort to make connections has more friction that is necessary. The more valuable the hire the higher the payment the requestor can make and more rewards can be streamed down the pipeline. The closest execution is Pallet but it doesn’t reward the intermediate network.

Hiring and job platforms are closed networks and don’t extend beyond this, are service based so go beyond the matching problems lots of users don’t want to pay for and don’t reward the complexity in degrees of the network. ZK brings enough anonymity with only the metadata or partial metadata revealed. “I’ve worked at Coinbase, studied at Syracuse and have 10 years of experience that can be validated and attested on chain.”

3. Soylent for women
More of personal use case but I would love to live in a world where eating nutrinally healthy food could be limited to convenience which boils down to social events or when I’m simply bored. Soylent was onto something but fueling my life with carbs is the road the highest resistance. Fasting is better. If anyone plans to invent alternates, I’d love to be introduced.

4. Drones as an API

5. Lidar as an API

6. Open Source Observability

7. Notifications Platform for web3
[insert loops]

8. Bartering on startup services onchain
[insert image]

1. No-code tool to enable restaurants to A/B test their menus to increase average per cover by Steph Smith

2. What’s your twitter diet? I often wonder what is the overall sentiment analysis of the type of my tweets, the overall social graph and category breakdowns for my followers’s followers. Could be an incredibly useful and intriguing social tool.

Btw, Pioneer has an excellent list as well if you’re curious to look at more ideas. My two cents is if any of these are remotely interesting, talk to 30+ people before building a first version but do design one. More cold calls and figma links. Less landing pages, pitch decks with flashy headlines please. I’m particularly a huge fan of the Cultural NPS in Chrome. Anyone built this yet?

To reiterate, another excellent post on how one generates ideas.