Since selling Urban Mapping in 2015, I have bounced around, poked at new ideas and explored a few opportunities. The time spent picking apart, researching and diving into ‘the next thing’ makes me realize more than ever that ideas are a dime a dozen, great ideas are a hundred dollars a dozen and execution is priceless. Aphorisms aside, I thought it would be helpful for me, and (hopefully) instructive for the reader to understand my process/journey in identifying, exploring and vetting new business ideas.
From roughly November 2016 through June 2017 I poked at a few ideas, each outlined below. While I (naturally) believe they are all great opportunities, my gut told me getting any of these (further) off the ground wasn’t where I wanted to spend my time.
Cloud Computing Calculator – Leadgen for cloud infrastructure
Quantifying Municipal Growth – Do cities grow predictably? The Santa Fe Institute got me thinking about this one.
Ground Truth Aggregation – Machine learning needs to learn from somewhere
Exogenous Event Database – How to explain anomalous behavior in geo-temporal data
Air Rights – Automate research and create a trading platform for highly opaque and high transaction-cost asset category
Post-employment 