Augmented reality is probably the next item for that list.
Here's the current YC batch.[1] Too much crypto crap. Lots of "Salesforce for X". Lots of "Payment thing for Outer Nowhere". An asteroid mining company. I can see throwing $500K at a lot of things to see what sticks, but little on that list matters.
Those things were newer then. By now, most of the easy and highly profitable things you can start doing for $500K have been tried.
The Web opened up a big range of possibilities. Most of them have been done. Smartphones opened up more. Most of them have been done. These little startups mostly rode on the coattails of the previous New Big Thing.
But there is no current New Big Thing ecosystem. The last four or so attempts have flopped.
Now, there are big expensive things to do. Electric car manufacturing. Rare earth mining. Wind farms. Vaccine development. Wafer fabs. But those all have a big price of entry and established entrants.
The next big thing?
- 2016 was the year of self-driving cars.
- 2017 was the year of 3D TV
- 2019 was the year of VR
- 2021 was the year of NFTs.
Augmented reality is probably the next item for that list.
Here's the current YC batch.[1] Too much crypto crap. Lots of "Salesforce for X". Lots of "Payment thing for Outer Nowhere". An asteroid mining company. I can see throwing $500K at a lot of things to see what sticks, but little on that list matters.
[1] https://www.ycombinator.com/companies?batch=W22