Ideas - requests for startups, from this forecast#
Contents
Y Combinator's Requests for Startups is a standing tradition: name a problem that is newly solvable, sketch what a company could be, and invite founders to build it. This page does the same job through the lens of this corpus. The filter is stricter than "cool AI product." Every idea below is something the rest of the document implies is undersupplied relative to how much the equilibrium needs it - usually a scarce complement (Game 3, compressed version), not another layer of free cognition.
You do not need to build these exact companies. If one of them is wrong, the wrongness is informative: it means a claim elsewhere in the corpus is wrong too.
How each idea is written#
YC's format is: why the world shifted, what to ship, why you. Ours adds the economic spine so founders do not confuse a demo with a firm:
| Field | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Why now | The substrate or institutional change that makes this newly buildable or newly valuable |
| Build this | The concrete product or service - not a category slogan |
| Own this | The inelastic complement the company must hold (data, license, distribution, atoms, balance sheet, trust) |
| Not this | The Red Queen version - what dies when models improve |
| Dead if | The falsifier; if this happens, skip the idea |
An idea that cannot name Own this in one sentence is not ready. Re-read selection.
The meta-request#
Build companies that make verification, liability, physical capacity, or durable distribution cheaper - not companies that only make generation cheaper.
Generation is already on a cost curve that will not leave margin (inference economics). Verification, permits, powered land, licensed accountability, and human trust are not. The compressed version says the same thing in five bullets; the catalogs below turn those bullets into company shapes.
What not to start (anti-RFS)#
These recur in every batch deck and almost never clear the selection map:
- ChatGPT for X with no exclusive data, license, or channel - a feature with a landing page
- Another coding agent without owning eval data, enterprise context, or the review bottleneck
- Generic "AI employees" sold as seats into competitive industries - pure Red Queen for the buyer, pure churn for the vendor
- Thin wrappers on a single frontier API - the model vendor's roadmap is your product plan
- Vertical SaaS that only embeds workflow with no data rights - rebuild cost is falling under the customer (software)
If your idea is one of these, either find the complement or expect a fast cheap death (exits).
Catalogs#
| Theme | Through-line | |
|---|---|---|
| Verification & trust | Provenance, human presence, review, evals, accountability | Making ground truth and trust cheap where generation flooded the channel |
| Atoms & substrate | Energy, robotics data, field ops, logistics, labs, aging | Physical clocks and rights that software cannot mint |
| Institutions | Insurance, compliance, apprenticeship, law, education | Where deployment is gated by licenses, balance sheets, and formation of experts |
How this differs from a typical RFS list#
YC optimizes for "we would like to fund this." This list optimizes for "this forecast says value and social need concentrate here." Overlap is large (trust layers, physical-world OS, defense, compliance, education) because the same scarcities are visible from both seats. Divergence: we de-weight pure consumer AI apps and model-adjacent wrappers unless they capture a complement, and we up-weight insurance, apprenticeship, and verification infrastructure that look boring in a demo day and decisive in 2032.
Failure mode for the whole list#
If learned verification retires the master asymmetry, half the verification catalog softens. If complement erosion runs fast, the atoms and license ideas lose half-lives. If platforms intermediate all demand, distribution-native ideas win and independent complement owners become tenants. Score the list against those three pages, not against whether a given demo looks good this quarter.
Related: Selection · Formation · Compressed · Game 3 · YC RFS (external format reference)