Monday, March 24, 2014

Breakthrough Technologies - Sam Altman

We’d like for Y Combinator to fund more breakthrough technology companies—companies that solve an important problem, have a very long time horizon, and are based on an underlying technological or scientific breakthrough.  Not many people try to start these companies, so starting a company that will require a huge amount of time and money is an automatic competitive advantage.  SpaceX and Tesla are great examples of what is possible.

Here is a list (we’ll add to it over time) of some areas we’re particularly interested in, but more generally, we’ll pay attention to any area where technology can make the world much better.
  • Food and water. At some point, we are going to have problems with food and water availability.  Technology can almost certainly improve this.  Great innovations are possible—we will need another advancement on the scale of what Norman Borlaug did.
  • Education. If we can fix education, we can eventually do everything else on this list.  The first attempts to use technology to fix education have focused on using the Internet to distribute traditional content to a wider audience.  This is good, but the Internet is a fundamentally different medium and capable of much more.
- Rest of Sam Altman's list here


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