Bill Gross's Idealab offers aspiring founders 1.2 million startup ideas

Bill Gross has spent decades helping founders build startups. Now he’s imparted some of that knowledge to an AI platform.

The serial entrepreneur and founder of the long-running Idealab incubator is rolling out a new platform containing 1.2 million AI-generated business ideas. The platform draws on 17 million sources, including expired patents, science writing, and news articles, as well as Gross’s “31 different methods of taking problems and technologies and working them together to find a business idea.”

“My whole goal is to cause more entrepreneurship to happen around the world, to lower the bar for entrepreneurship, and to help entrepreneurs be successful at tackling world problems,” Gross told us.

The 1.2 million free business ideas, winnowed down from an original 36 million concepts, come with white space for the market, applicable geography, tech differentiation, and required skills. That allows a user to input their own background, resources, and interests and get matched with a relevant idea to build a business around. It also includes tools to help founders expand that idea like a “periodic table” of “all the functions that a company might ever need to do.”

So where does the human founder come in? “Every business decision is still made by the human,” Gross said. “Think of the human as the master operator, decision-maker of the whole business, but think of what we’re building for you: our tools to make the mechanics work without you having to know those details.”

Army of entrepreneurs: Gross thinks that AI is going to significantly change the business landscape, with more solo entrepreneurs and smaller companies tackling problems they care about. They might be localized to specific markets, he said, like a small startup working on traffic in Cairo or healthcare in Venezuela.

“I think the future of business is more startups. I really feel like AI enables that,” Gross said. “It used to be, to tackle something important, you needed 100 people, and now one person with the power of AI can do much, much more.”

Revolutions past: Gross started Idealab in 1996 and has steered it through plenty of technological change, from the rise of the internet to the mobile revolution. But the AI era is happening much faster, giving founders more reach.

“The internet revolution was a 20-year revolution. The mobile revolution was a 10-year revolution. This is like a one-year, two-year, three-year revolution. It’s really, really fast,” Gross said. “AI gives you the reach of the whole planet. So your chance to have an impact is so great because you can use targeting to find the people for whom your solution matters.”

AI’s the limit: That said, AI cannot run your entire startup for you—at least not yet, Gross said. He compared it to the progression of autonomous vehicles, where human judgment is still very much required.

“There’ll always be a human element of setting the direction and setting the boundaries and setting the budgets. So I think AI is not going to be able to make those decisions—or at least for a while,” Gross said. “So if people are thinking, ‘Oh, I can just make AI run my whole business and do everything and walk away and make money,’ we’re not anywhere near there yet.”

Biggest startup pitfalls: Some things haven’t changed, though, and among them are the biggest mistakes that Gross sees founders make time and time again.

“The biggest pitfall at first is choosing an idea that is not solving a real problem,” Gross said. “A lot of times, people choose an idea that they just care about, but they are not solving someone else’s real problem. So if you’re not solving a real pain point, that’s going to cause a very difficult time to make a success out of it.”

Timing is key: Another common pitfall is timing, which Gross has often said is more important than either the business idea or the execution of it. For instance, Idealab’s platform comes with a “timing technology model score” that attempts to measure whether the world is ready for the idea based on news content.

“You’ve got a great idea; it’s important; it solves a real problem, but the timing isn’t right. The world isn’t ready for it yet, or the technology isn’t ready for it yet. And I have many examples of that in my own career,” Gross said.

But in an AI-fueled news landscape that seems to change by the week, nailing timing can be easier said than done.

“It’s definitely more difficult because obviously the world is changing so fast, but you can still take a look at the graph of progress, of demand in a given category,” Gross said. “Since the world is changing so fast, you need to be adaptive. You need to start with a given idea, but then adapt to what the market demands are over time. And in fact, I think that’s the number one factor in success for a business: Can they be adaptive to the changes in the marketplace?”