Areas I am excited about, pt 1
A bit of a different post
I decided to try an experiment where I share ideas for things to build and problems that are top of mind for me. Let's go!
Self-documenting code: Please, just please. Someone make this easier. No one likes writing documentation, very few people are even remotely good at it, let’s just stop the charade. I know LLMs can help here. What if getting documentation for your projects were as easy as opening a PR and letting an agent go to work creating documentation? It doesn’t even have to involve an agent, it just needs to work. This sounds quite tractable, with a large market for a strong execution (though I have trouble imagining a moat here). Is anyone working on it?
More opinionated data tools: Benn Stancil mentioned this recently so he gets the credit, with “BI tools could be bolder in telling us how to think about our business.”1
An opinionated tool like Xmrit keeps data teams from being stuck in a war room2 every week, by bringing common sense to metrics/business reviews, for example. If I had to imagine others, I could see tools that:
Make it easy for teams to identify— and not look away from— leaky buckets, and also put those buckets into perspective to identify where to allocate resources/experimentation. This work is time-consuming but is just mental models, up and down. There’s a lot of opportunity on the data viz side here.
Accurately record big product and marketing moments. I don’t know how many times I’ve tried to overlay these onto metrics graphs, but it’s always a pita, mostly bc there’s no system of record. If someone can find a way to easily capture these events, they should be a toggle on every metric graph you make.
I don’t think these require anything close to venture-scale businesses, but that doesn’t make them any less exciting or necessary. They are actually strong examples of products that can be built open source, or in-house and closed-source and can be, to my mind, promo-worthy.
Tools for marketers and sales teams to self-serve data requests and move data from a to b: I love working w cross-functional partners, but they're so often blocked by my time. I've had a lot of success at Replit in building them apps in Hex which are basically backed by {{templated}} queries that they can use to self-serve common data requests. However, I still have to build the app for them in the first place, which limits scale.
What if there were a way for partners to set up ‘flows’, or choose from pre-set ones, which mimic the work I’d do for them: acquiring data, validating it, transforming it in some way, and then sending it where they need it? This would look like a souped up Zapier, but w/ way more magic.
Unbundled consumer search. I used to think “the end of Google” was over-predicted, but I am so tired of tab-opening link after link of not-exactly relevant content, day after day. I’ve already outsourced all of my coding questions to ChatGPT, ReplitAI and Perplexity, so the first question for me is what sector of search will be unbundled next? And how personalized can the model that underlies it become? This is going to be a fun space to watch because when search works well it feels like magic; we’re far from that right now.
I’d like to chat with my dead brother: One of my brothers had a birthday a few days ago. He would have been 35. He killed himself just over 10 years ago, and while I am still angry about that sometimes, I still wish I could talk to him. We’ve got hard drives of his music, letters, social media posts, etc. This seems very possible today given LLMs, even if it’s creepy. (Speaking of which, we need way more nuance when it comes to how we understand grief. Most people are terrified of it, which is usually a sign that we need more of something, not less.)
I really don't want an app for this, and I don't need video. This should be a text bot, clean and simple. Meet me where I am, where my brother and I left off.
A cure for alcoholism: An extended family member has been in the throws of this for nearly 2 decades and it’s one of the most terrible things I’ve ever seen. Maybe I’m lacking in imagination (or understanding), but i don’t think this can be solved by traditional medicine, hence:
Alternative therapies: Psilocybin, ketamine, who knows what else. Brains can get very stuck; that doesn’t mean they need to stay that way. We need deserve radical solutions for intransigent challenges like addiction (and trauma), and these seem promising. I am intrigued by Mindbloom; I am sure there are countless others.
Connection: This needs to be built piece-by-piece, from the ground up, within and across communities. We absolutely need to get off of and stop hiding behind our phones. We need to get outside of ourselves, and commit to things outside of ourselves as a rule, not an exception. I hate that this sounds moralizing. There are of course a ton of pressures that make this unreasonably hard, but I am pretty convinced Democracy depends on it.3
Know people working in any of the areas I mentioned? I'd love to hear more!
Funnily enough, when I was starting out as a Data Scientist at Airbnb I turned to templates from Mode (um, Ben’s BI Tool) to learn how to measure the business, and in the process I picked up a set of mental models that taught me how to think about the business. Thank you Ben, I know these work!
I hate this terminology so much. It's super insulting and lazy. Just call it a “we won't invest in the right tools” room.
Read Tocqueville’s Democracy in America.