Bill Gross is building an AI factory for startups
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Bill Gross has spent 30 years turning problems, technologies and market shifts into companies — and now he is trying to turn that process into a machine.
Why it matters: In a moment when AI is mostly framed as a force that eliminates jobs, Gross is betting it can help create entrepreneurs and companies.
The big picture: Gross is launching Idealab.ai, a platform that has analyzed more than 17 million sources and generated 1.2 million potential businesses.
- He plans to give all the ideas away — and even help with financing.
How it works: Idealab.ai lets individuals sort through the ideas and narrow them based on what matters to them.
- They can filter by field of interest, geography, size of market opportunity, required capital, team size, degree of automation and other metrics.
- A solo founder looking for a local business can search differently from a university looking to commercialize research or a company exploring new uses for its patents.
- Each idea comes with a business brief, potential customers, competitors, first steps and reasons it might fail.
Catch up quick: Gross says the idea began with an article about a global copper shortage.
- His insight was that almost every source of information contains either a problem worth solving or an emerging capability that could help solve it.
- Those include news stories, research papers, patents, company filings and community discussions.
- Gross built a "Periodic Table of Business Functions," covering 118 jobs involved in running a company.
- "My methodology is to divide everything into a possible problem or a possible enabler to solve a problem," Gross told me.
Between the lines: In many ways, this is Gross trying to turn his life's work into an automated process.
- Gross founded Idealab in the 1990s and says Idealab and Idealab Studio have launched more than 175 companies, including GoTo.com, Citysearch and Tickets.com.
Yes, but: Gross says AI shouldn't make every decision, especially strategic choices, such as how much risk to take.
- "AI is not going to make that one for you," he said.
The intrigue: Idealab.ai will be a real-world experiment in how much success comes from the idea — versus the entrepreneur's zeal, execution and personal network.
- A strong concept may still go nowhere if the founder cannot sell it, recruit people, raise money or get an introduction to the right customer.
- And a mediocre idea may work if the person pursuing it has unusual persistence and access.
Zoom out: Gross wants Idealab.ai to become an ecosystem, not just a database.
- He is courting universities, incubators and accelerators, as well as businesses that can provide the tools and services founders need to build companies.
- Cloudflare is the first announced partner, offering $100,000 in credits to companies started through the platform. Gross hopes it will be the first of many such partnerships.
The bottom line: Gross, who remains CEO of licensing and revenue sharing system ProRata.ai, says he is done starting companies himself.
- Idealab let him start 12 companies at once. His ambition now is to help support 12,000.
- "I'll put everything into this because this is more leverage," he said.
