Five Startup Ideas #002 | The Generalist

— Turner Novak, Partner at Gelt

Marketplace for buying and selling small businesses: SMBs make up 99% of US businesses. Right now, the current buying and selling methods are broken — they occur primarily offline (newspaper ads, posters, word of mouth) There are a few online competitors (a signal of demand), but they are outdated. The experience can be reimagined and automated. Li... See more

In just five years, Pinduoduo has attracted 585MM users and reached ~$140B in annual GMV. Much of the e-commerce platform's success has come from its "social buying" features, which encourage consumers to team up, order in bulk, and receive discounts. This premise could work well in the US. We're continuing to see a shift from thinking about supply... See more

APIs for differential privacy: While the transition is far from complete, privacy is slowly moving from a “save your ass against GDPR/CCPA ” to a feature set that consumers and enterprise users demand from applications. While some companies like Transcend and BigID help enterprises navigate existing PII and non-PII data, why collect it in the first... See more

In a world deluged by advertising, it's hard to know who to trust. Can you trust the products on marketplace or online stores? Most of these companies are advertising platforms now. To find a reliable product review, I usually have to do a huge amount of research myself. A dream of mine is to browse the internet and see product information embedded... See more

—Tina Jiang, Product Manager at Faire