Week 2: About ideas for new startups and teams

Finding a good idea for a startup is hard. In my experience, you get an idea and build a startup around it. This time is a bit different: we need to find the idea based in one of the patents and build an idea around it. Our team chose to present a patent last week called "Methods of decoding speech from brain activity data and devices" (US20150297106 A1) , which, practically, allows to decode what anyone is thinking and translate that to text.

We did a broad market research with lots of assumptions, but found a huge potential market. The power of being able to translate what you're thinking, and show the output in any device is very attractive. We found two potential markets for our product: in medicine and in normal use. We found that 7.5 millions in US have a speech disorder. From that, we assumed that 20% have serious speech disorder. For example, 1 million people in US have aphasia, 60,000 have Parkinson, etc. In total, 1.5 million. Additionally, there is also people with paralysis (5.5m), but we assumed a 10% of full or facial paralysis. In total, this means 2 million possible customers, which is a pretty huge SAM for a medical product. We didn't think that all of this are part of our capturable market, so we did a positive estimate of 50%. We also checked the cost of aid devices in the market. Hearing devices normally are close to $500, so did other devices. This meant that this potential product has 1M customers and pay $500 each, for a total of 500M dollars. We also thought about the smartphone market and did other assumptions for a total of $900M.

The problem we saw later in the patent is that, even if they have experimented with non-implanted devices (and it actually worked), most experiments were with implantations, something that could seriously diminish the market.

For another course we talked about the cochlear implants. This simple, non-intrusive implant could allows a lot of deaf people to hear. When parents started to put this implants in their children, the National Association of Deafness criticised it for killing a culture (it was a "cultural genocide" for them). The cochlear implants stopped being distributed. This shows that there could be lots of resistance if choosing this patent.

I also want to talk about the kind of team in which I would like to work. I've experience managing teams, and I would like to have a team in which I do not have to tell every person what they have to do. I'm really proactive, and so I would like to see proactive people. I get really excited for education related projects. Combining education and technology can be incredible.