66 ideas worth chasing.
Not all inclusive. You should apply with new innovations & ideas, too. These are just here to get you thinking about BIG visions of how to make our world radically better.
To state the obvious, none of these problems get solved overnight; the goal is to move the needle in the right direction. Bite off a chewable chunk, then ideally keep building afterwards, whether that means going through an accelerator, raising a seed round, or applying for more grants. Our mentors will be there to help.
Not everything has to be a company. Ideas marked “Media Brand” are TikTok accounts, YouTube channels, documentary series, and the like. They are fully considered, and you don't need to be technical to build one.
Make drug development 10× faster and 10× cheaper
AI-designed molecules, organoids, better disease models, computational toxicology, adaptive trials. The end state: disease discovered, treatment designed, validated, and manufactured in months, not decades.
Request: Why does developing a new medicine still take roughly a decade and enormous capital?
Media Brand: The Hidden Cost
Investigative documentaries exposing the unseen consequences of everyday products, industries, and decisions, from fast fashion and cheap electronics to ultra-processed food and single-use plastics. Think “Why Does the Same Medicine Cost So Much More in America?”, “Why Can’t Anyone Afford to Build a House?”, or “Why Is Your Medicine Out of Stock?” Impact: create public pressure for systemic change.
Request: Can investigative storytelling change what companies and governments are willing to get away with?
Reinvent animal agriculture without animals
Cell-cultivated meat and leather have serious backers, but nobody's broken through to commercial success yet. The prize touches food security, zoonotic disease, climate, and animal welfare all at once, and eventually, cheap protein for everyone on Earth. The environmental math alone is striking: livestock uses roughly 77% of the world's agricultural land while producing only about 18% of its calories, and is responsible for somewhere between 12% and 18% of global greenhouse gas emissions, depending whose estimate you use. Doing this well doesn't just spare animals; it frees up land, cuts emissions, and takes real pressure off oceans and freshwater systems too.
Request: Can we make raising and slaughtering animals economically obsolete?
Media Brand: The Breakthrough
Optimistic, accessible coverage of medical and scientific advances that explains which breakthroughs actually matter. Think a biotech-focused business news brand for normal people. Impact: build public excitement and funding for science.
Request: Can anyone understand why a scientific breakthrough matters the week it happens?
A doctor for everyone
Not "AI that helps doctors write notes." Continuous medical history, wearables, labs, imaging, and genetics feeding personalized prevention, triage, and eventually treatment, especially for the parts of the world serious medical expertise rarely reaches.
Request: Can everyone on Earth have access to medical expertise approaching the world's best physicians?
Understand and control biology like we control software
Today biology is mostly empirical: perturb something, see what happens. Imagine specification, biological design, simulation, manufacture, predictable outcome. This is the moonshot umbrella under a lot of what's below.
Request: Can biology become predictable enough to engineer?
Media Brand: The Future of Food
A food and entertainment brand focused on replacing animal agriculture without asking consumers to sacrifice taste, price, or convenience. Taste tests, chef competitions, factory tours, and coverage of cultivated meat, fermentation, and food startups. Impact: accelerate adoption of animal-free food.
Request: Can the most-watched food brand on the internet be the one that makes animal-free food normal?
Make energy too cheap to meter
Fusion. Fission. Geothermal. Solar. Storage. Something nobody's thought of. Don't pick the technology; pick the destination. At 1¢ electricity, desalination, synthetic fuels, AI compute, and carbon removal all change.
Request: Can we produce reliable clean energy for under 1¢/kWh?
Build the universal factory
AI design, raw materials, autonomous manufacturing, finished product. Imagine factories becoming software-defined: AWS for atoms.
Request: Can one machine manufacture almost anything?
Media Brand: The Builders
Make impact founders into celebrities. Follow ambitious young people as they build companies in biotech, energy, education, and health, with all the stakes, setbacks, and drama of a great reality series. Impact: make solving problems a high-status career.
Request: Can building something important become the most aspirational career for a teenager?
Make intelligence essentially free
Not another AI wrapper. Build the infrastructure and applications that turn abundant, cheap intelligence into abundant medicine, engineering, science, education, legal help, entrepreneurship, and government services. The giant company here may be built around deploying intelligence into an industry, not training another foundation model.
Request: What happens when expert-level intelligence costs pennies?
Detect every major disease before symptoms
Cancer, cardiovascular disease, metabolic disease, neurodegeneration: one cheap annual test built from blood proteins, cfDNA, and AI. Medicine moves from symptoms, diagnosis, treatment to measurement, prediction, prevention.
Request: Can one cheap annual test tell you what's beginning to go wrong in your body?
Media Brand: Science, Actually
Short, highly shareable science explainers that correct misconceptions about health, food, climate, and technology, built for YouTube Shorts, TikTok, Instagram, and classrooms. Impact: make accurate scientific understanding mainstream.
Request: Can the internet's default answer to a science question be the correct one?
Build civilization's immune system
Wastewater and air sensors, sequencing, AI, autonomous labs, and distributed manufacturing that turn "detect a threat" into "design and ship a countermeasure" in days instead of weeks.
Request: Can we detect a novel biological threat anywhere on Earth and design a countermeasure before it becomes a pandemic?
Cure Alzheimer's before symptoms begin
Detect the process ten to twenty years earlier, determine who's at risk, intervene, and monitor continuously. The broader vision: nobody born in 2030 should develop dementia.
Request: Can Alzheimer's become a preventable disease?
Media Brand: The Wild Mind
A nature and science brand about how animals actually think, feel, and live, from wildlife behavior to the lives of farm and companion animals, told with real science and real stakes. Impact: build the public understanding that moves people to care about animals and ecosystems.
Request: Can millions of people come to understand animals the way they understand each other?
Build the autonomous scientist
AI that forms a hypothesis, designs an experiment, operates the lab, observes the result, and updates itself, then deploy thousands of them at once. Instead of a PhD student running 50 experiments a year, an autonomous lab running 50,000.
Request: Can AI run experiments, learn from the results, and design the next experiment, 24/7?
Build a universal cancer vaccine
Shared tumor antigens, personalized vaccines, immune engineering, and early detection aimed at a periodic intervention that dramatically lowers lifetime cancer mortality.
Request: Can cancer become something we prevent rather than discover too late?
Media Brand: Human Stories
Emotional, intimate documentaries about people living with Alzheimer's, rare diseases, poverty, disability, and other challenges, paired with credible paths toward solutions. Impact: build empathy and motivate action.
Request: Can a story move people to act on a problem they have never personally faced?
Give every animal an AI veterinarian
Computer vision, wearables, medical history, and telemedicine that continuously monitor animals and catch disease before an owner or farmer notices, the same "detect before symptoms" logic already reshaping human healthcare, but for every animal on the planet. Start with pets, where willingness to pay is high, then expand into livestock. Today a dog in rural India gets nowhere near the diagnostic care a dog in Manhattan does; a phone camera, cheap diagnostics, and AI could make world-class veterinary expertise nearly free everywhere.
Request: Can AI make world-class veterinary care dramatically cheaper and available to every animal on Earth?
Explore new proteins that reduce our reliance on animal agriculture
Plant-based products and precision fermentation are a nearer-term complement to cultivated meat itself: engineered proteins, fats, and dairy that replicate the taste and texture people actually want, without the land, water, feed, and animal welfare costs of conventional livestock. Better plant-based and fermentation-derived products can shift real demand today, while cultivated meat continues to scale up.
Request: Can plant-based and precision-fermentation proteins match the taste and cost of the animal products they're replacing?
Media Brand: The Impact Challenge
A competition-based series where talented people receive a grant, resources, and a deadline to solve a real problem. Think “We Gave 10 Students $10,000 to Solve a Global Problem.” Impact: turn passive audiences into active builders.
Request: Can an audience become a pipeline of builders?
Future of personalized education
Don't just build another AI homework chatbot. Build something that knows a student for ten years: what they understand, how they learn, what motivates them, what's next.
Request: Can a child born anywhere receive an education better than today's $50,000-a-year private school?
Regrow the human body
Heart tissue, cartilage, nerves, spinal cords, retinas, teeth, skin, eventually organs and limbs. A company that cracks generalized regeneration could be one of the most valuable ever built.
Request: Why can't humans regrow damaged organs and limbs?
Media Brand: The Next Generation
Find brilliant, overlooked young people at colleges, community colleges, and outside traditional institutions, then give them challenges, mentorship, and opportunities, on camera. Impact: discover talent that otherwise never gets a shot.
Request: Can a media brand become the best talent scout in the world?
Give animals a voice
A wearable or camera that continuously reads a dog's state: likely pain, stomach distress, anxiety, an abnormal gait, before obvious symptoms appear. Think Apple Watch plus an AI doctor, for pets first and livestock eventually. A more ambitious version of the same idea: foundation models trained on vocalization, movement, social context, environment, and physiology, starting with whales, dolphins, elephants, primates, dogs, and farm animals, aimed at real two-way communication with another species, not just health monitoring.
Request: Can technology tell humans what an animal needs, and eventually let us actually communicate with them?
Build replacement organs on demand
Bioprinting, organoids, stem cells, and decellularized scaffolds aimed at ending organ waiting lists entirely.
Request: Can we manufacture a personalized replacement organ for anyone who needs one?
Media Brand: Can It Work?
Test ambitious solutions to major problems. Visit labs, interview skeptics, examine the economics, and see whether the technology actually delivers. Think “Can We Actually Remove CO₂ From the Air?” Impact: help separate genuine progress from hype.
Request: Can we build the most trusted source on whether big ideas actually work?
Give humans control over their own biology
Gene editing, cell therapy, delivery, and synthetic biology reliable enough to specify "repair this mutation" or "regenerate this tissue" and have it happen. Much bigger than "discover drugs faster."
Request: Can biology become programmable?
Industrialize space
Orbital manufacturing, pharmaceuticals, communications, energy, science, asteroid resources. Don't necessarily fund another rocket company; fund the companies that only make sense once launch is cheap.
Request: What becomes possible when putting a kilogram in orbit costs under $10?
Predict the Earth
Ingest trillions of sensor observations, model the planet, predict outcomes. Eventually: Google Maps, but for the future state of the physical planet.
Request: Can we build a real-time digital twin of Earth?
Defend Earth from asteroids
Detection, prediction, autonomous spacecraft, and deflection. A classic moonshot with a small chance of ever mattering and an enormous payoff if it does; the probability-weighted societal impact is hard to overstate.
Request: Can we guarantee that no detectable asteroid ever causes a mass-casualty event on Earth?
Preserve human knowledge for 10,000 years
Distributed physical and digital archives, ultra-durable storage, DNA storage, self-decoding formats. The near-term market is small, but the civilizational value of making our knowledge resilient to catastrophic loss is enormous.
Request: Can civilization become resilient to catastrophic knowledge loss?
Prevent species extinction before it becomes irreversible
Genomic biobanks, reproductive technologies, IVF, cloning, habitat modeling, and genetic rescue, aimed at catching a population collapse decades before conservationists usually notice, rather than reacting once a species is down to a few dozen individuals. The same civilizational instinct as preserving human knowledge: don't wait until something irreplaceable is gone before you start protecting it.
Request: Can extinction become predictable and preventable?
Eliminate genetic disease
Gene editing, embryo screening, reproductive medicine, and cheap sequencing: not one rare-disease biotech at a time, but the platform underneath all of them.
Request: Can we make thousands of inherited diseases disappear within a generation?
Make blindness optional
Gene therapy, retinal implants, stem cells, optogenetics, and neural interfaces. Not "manage macular degeneration": restore sight.
Request: Can we restore useful vision regardless of why someone lost it?
Restore hearing perfectly
Cochlear regeneration, hair-cell regeneration, gene therapy, and better implants aimed at a cure, not a slightly better hearing aid.
Request: Can we make deafness a solvable problem rather than a permanent one?
Aging
Not supplements marketed with dubious claims. New measurement platforms, biomarkers, organ regeneration, and cellular reprogramming: even five extra healthy years would be enormous.
Request: Can we meaningfully extend healthy human lifespan?
Make seafood without fishing
Cultivated fish, fermentation, algae-derived fats, and structured proteins, starting with salmon, tuna, and shrimp. This is as much an ocean-health play as a food-tech one: wild fisheries are already badly overstretched, and taking pressure off them helps rebuild fish populations, coral reefs, and the wider marine food web, not just the animals being caught directly. Long term, wild fish get to be wildlife again, rather than inventory.
Request: Can seafood become a manufactured product rather than something we hunt from the ocean?
Make pregnancy dramatically safer
Continuous fetal monitoring, an artificial placenta, preeclampsia prediction, and maternal diagnostics. The eventual moonshot: can extremely premature babies survive without lifelong consequences?
Request: Can pregnancy become predictable instead of medically opaque?
Reinvent fertility
Ovarian aging, egg maturation, sperm quality, and reproductive longevity, increasingly relevant as people have children later in life.
Request: Can biology decouple the ability to have healthy children from age?
Give humanity new senses
Novel sensors paired with AI that turn infrared, chemical signals, radiation, and disease biomarkers into something a human can actually perceive.
Request: Can technology let humans perceive things evolution never equipped us to sense?
Create perfect translation
Real-time speech, voice, emotion and context, sign language, and visual communication, destroying one of civilization's oldest barriers.
Request: Can any two humans communicate perfectly, regardless of language, literacy, or disability?
Kill the college credential monopoly
A continuously updated, verifiable map of what someone can actually do: coding, reasoning, writing, leadership, sales, so employers can hire off demonstrated ability instead of a resume.
Request: Can you build a better signal of human ability than a four-year college degree?
Build a non-invasive brain-computer interface
Communicate with the brain at high bandwidth without opening the skull. Treat paralysis, blindness, depression, and neurological disease first. The moonshot: Neuralink-level capabilities without brain surgery.
Request: Can we read from and write to the brain at high bandwidth without an implant?
Give every person an elite career coach
The billionaire's kid has parents, tutors, alumni networks, internships, and advisors. Build that network in software, for everyone else.
Request: Can someone's opportunities depend less on who their parents know?
Make mental healthcare radically more effective
Objective biomarkers, personalized treatment selection, continuous measurement, and new therapeutics, not "AI therapist" as the pitch.
Request: Why is mental-health treatment still so trial-and-error?
Make clean water effectively unlimited
Desalination without today's energy penalty, radically better membranes, atmospheric water, and wastewater recycling.
Request: Can safe drinking water become nearly free anywhere on Earth?
Drill anywhere on Earth
Millimeter-wave drilling, plasma drilling, autonomous drilling, new drill-bit materials. If deep geothermal heat becomes accessible almost anywhere, Earth itself becomes an enormous battery and power plant.
Request: Can we drill cheaply enough to access Earth's heat almost anywhere?
Invent room-temperature superconductors
Exactly the kind of request worth including even though the odds of success are tiny. If it works: grids, motors, fusion reactors, MRI machines, transportation, and computing all change. We want some ideas on this list where the probability of success is low but the payoff, if it hits, is absurd.
Request: Can electricity move with essentially zero resistance under practical conditions?
Engineer around climate change, not just measure it
Extreme-weather prediction, wildfire prevention, heat-resistant crops, cooling technology, flood protection, and carbon removal, not another generic emissions platform.
Request: If the planet gets 2°C warmer, what technologies make civilization radically more resilient?
Reinvent agriculture for a hotter planet
AI-designed crops, nitrogen fixation, precision fermentation, and salt- or drought-resistant crops, plants engineered to need less fertilizer, survive drought, capture more carbon, and manufacture medicines and novel materials directly. The most interesting ideas here might come from biology, not traditional AgTech; agriculture as biology-based manufacturing, not just farming.
Request: Can we feed 10 billion people using dramatically less land, water, fertilizer, and pesticides, from crops that double as manufacturing platforms?
Make atoms programmable
Instead of discovering materials by trial and error, specify what you want: lighter than aluminum, stronger than steel, biodegradable, conductive, transparent, self-healing. AI designs it, an automated lab makes it, a factory manufactures it. Could unlock materials we don't currently have names for.
Request: Can we manufacture materials molecule by molecule?
End mining as we know it
Biomining, recycling, seawater extraction, and precision separation aimed at a civilization-scale endpoint: nearly closed-loop materials, with far less need to tear open the ground for them.
Request: Can biology or chemistry extract and recycle critical materials without giant mines?
Control weather extremes
Cloud manipulation, hurricane weakening, and regional cooling. This obviously requires serious safety and governance work, but "hard and dangerous to study" isn't the same as "don't study it."
Request: Can humanity safely intervene when climate systems become catastrophic?
Make wildfire a controllable problem
Satellite constellations, drones, AI, and autonomous aircraft aimed at detection in seconds and response in minutes; eventually an autonomous fire-defense system.
Request: Can we detect and extinguish every dangerous wildfire before it becomes one?
Reinvent the electrical grid
Superconductors, HVDC, power electronics, grid-scale storage, and autonomous grid management, because generation breakthroughs matter less if transmission stays the bottleneck.
Request: Can electricity move as easily as information?
Eliminate traffic deaths
Autonomy, vehicle-to-vehicle communication, and infrastructure aimed at a destination that isn't "10% safer cars." It's zero road fatalities.
Request: Can transportation become incapable of killing people?
Supersonic travel for everyone
New propulsion, materials, fuels, and aircraft design aimed at making New York to London a routine two-hour trip, and eventually anywhere on Earth under four hours. Faster travel changes human geography in ways that compound for decades.
Request: Can long-haul flights become a routine couple of hours instead of most of a day?
Build robots cheaper than human labor
Not "robot bartender." A machine that learns construction, agriculture, elder care, manufacturing, logistics, and disaster response: the bridge if intelligence gets cheap before physical labor does.
Request: Can general-purpose physical labor become abundant?
Make housing radically cheaper to build
Robotics, prefab, new materials, automated permitting, and construction automation, for one of the biggest quality-of-life problems in rich countries. Don't prescribe the solution; let applicants surprise us.
Request: Can we cut the cost and time required to build housing by 50%?
Build the Starship of the ocean
The oceans cover about 70% of Earth, and we understand and economically use remarkably little of them. Cheap autonomous underwater robots, sensors, AI, and communications, with applications spanning climate, fishing, biodiversity, defense, mapping, shipping, disaster prediction, and science. Think planetary-scale ocean infrastructure.
Request: Can autonomous machines make the ocean continuously observable?
Reinvent pest control without suffering
Species-specific fertility control, pheromones, genetics, and AI detection that replace poison with precision. The commercial pitch isn't animal welfare; it's less resistance, less contamination, and a bigger market from agriculture, cities, and food storage combined.
Request: Can we control pests without poisoning billions of animals?
Create the animal healthspan company
We talk constantly about human longevity and almost nothing about animal longevity. Aging biology, diagnostics, drugs, nutrition, continuous monitoring, and regenerative medicine, starting with companion animals, where the emotional willingness to pay is extraordinary. Discoveries here could cross over into human longevity research too, which is exactly the kind of platform the infrastructure below would make easier to build.
Request: Can dogs live healthy lives for 20 to 25 years?
Build the universal animal cell factory
Universal growth media, immortalized cell lines, cheap growth factors, and modular bioreactors: the infrastructure that makes every future cultivated product economical, not just one company's salmon. Think TSMC for mammalian-cell manufacturing. The same infrastructure that makes cultivated meat cheap also makes cultivated cells for medicine cheap: regenerative therapies, lab-grown tissue, and the animal-longevity research above all depend on the same underlying ability to grow animal cells reliably and at scale. Nail the factory once, and food, healthcare, and longevity all get to use it.
Request: Can growing animal cells become as standardized and cheap as brewing beer?
Build biology models better than animal testing
Organoids, organs-on-chips, computational biology, virtual cells, and eventually a sufficiently accurate "virtual human," good enough to predict how a drug or treatment will behave before it's given to any living creature. The main pitch isn't "save lab animals": better models end up more predictive, faster, and cheaper than animal testing ever was, the same way flight simulators beat crashing real planes. Ending the reliance on animal testing is a real and meaningful benefit, but replacing a large share of preclinical drug development itself is the bigger prize.
Request: Can we build models of biology accurate enough to replace animal testing, not just reduce it?
None of these your idea? Even better.
These are starting points, not a checklist. If your work is genuinely solving something important and passes our test, could it become something enormous, and does the world get materially better as it succeeds, we want the ability to say yes. That includes research and media, not just companies.