Areas of Interest

I have worked in many different areas – kids and family, media, fashion, music, and a few other oddities. But instead of looking backwards to show my interests, I’d like to share some ideas, questions, and concepts I have been thinking about. Family tech and media are still interesting to me, but this is looking outside of the obvious.

If you are working on projects in these areas – please get in touch. It could be for project work, a venture, an investment, or a board position.

Here are some concepts that currently interest me:

  • Taste as a counter-trend to AI.
    I’m interested in digital areas that are difficult to entirely automate through machine learning. Art, fashion, all sorts of personal curation would fall into this area. It may augment it – like StitchFix – but likely not replace it entirely. I think taste is going to be hard to automate, and would like to be involved in things that are based on that thesis.

  • Augmented bodies and brains.
    Similar to StitchFix, I’m interested in how you can augment human capacity. Exoskeletons does this for bodies. You could argue that Muse and Roam does parts of this for your brain. It could be the death of memory, for mundane things that could easily be stored and accessed elsewhere.

  • Branding boring things.
    I think there’s huge opportunity in carefully building category brands in areas that people generally look at as boring. They need to be important, but are likely as far away from areas like lifestyle and entertainment. Anker with their cables and adapters is a good example of this. Or it could be pure digital play.

  • Individualized medicine and diagnostics.
    Sometimes I think about things that will absurd to explain to my kids when they are older. One of these things is how blunt and generic first line health advice is for most people. Headache? Take an aspirin. Everyone will get the same advice, regardless of their specific health situation. Also interesting is the challenge of individualizing this to a higher degree – where would the continuous samples come from? One interesting idea is that it could be from your toilet.

  • Competing by breaking common convention.
    I like the idea of competing in a market – or for talent – by changing seemingly small things that people haven’t questioned for a while. It could be things like working a four day week. Or decreasing prices slightly, year over year. You can compete and position yourself very easily by simply breaking some simple conventions. Buffer is the obvious example here, but there’s much more to be done here.

  • Super-serving the niche.
    Fan culture can appear in the strangest of places, and around odd phenomenon. I think there’s huge value to be unlocked by identifying these niches and audiences, and serving up disproportionately good experiences to them. I’m not into fishing myself, but Fishbrain has clearly found something there. I’d prefer something even slimmer and more niche than that, though.

  • The weird and delightful side of the internet.
    I miss the flying toasters part of the web. The absurd, the odd, the artful. The part that looks at the internet as a culture, and not just a distributor. MSCHF does this wonderfully.

If you are working on concepts or ideas related to this – please reach out and let me know.