Startup Ideas We'd Like to Fund (2008)
My take (just the first five):<p><i>1. A cure for the disease of which the RIAA is a symptom.</i><p>Spotify & Apple Music. Pay $10/mo for unlimited access to most music. Took the wind out of music piracy. (TV & film are undergoing a similar transition to subscription models, more slowly.)<p><i>2. Simplified browsing...Grandparents and small children don't want the full web...</i><p>Apps. Remember this list is from just one year after the iPhone launched, so everything was still "the web". It was almost unthinkable that native, installed apps would have such a resurgence. But the iPad is exactly this, a simplified computer that young kids and grandparents love to use.<p><i>3. New news.</i><p>Still in flux. Nobody has figured out a business model. Over the past century consumers were trained to expect free, ad-supported news. Surprisingly, online ads have not worked out well for publishers.<p><i>4. Outsourced IT. & 5. Enterprise software 2.0.</i><p>AWS. There's a lot of higher-level SaaS packaged services too and it sounds like that's what pg was envisioning. But the real hero here is AWS and its "primitives"-based, bottom-up approach to outsourcing all computing.