BUSINESS IDEA | VENTURE STARTUP

Flexible Pay Platform 💰️

Your pay, your way

Available Domain: Comp Calibrate

1. Problem/Opportunity❓

The Problem/Opportunity: Sometimes big businesses create incredible internal products to help them function better. Like Google building their own internal prediction market to improve business decisions or Microsoft’s famous Windows 8 repair tool (if you know you know).

And recently we came across a video of Shopify explaining their internal “flex comp” tool and thought that could be a great idea for a software business. So let’s build exactly that.

Market Size: The global HR payroll software market was valued at $27bn in the year 2022

2. Solution ✅

The Idea: A platform which allows employees to customise their pay packages between cash, equity and bonuses

How it Works:

• When employees are being onboarded they decide on their compensation split between salary and equity, since different employees will have different needs and risk profiles

• At every pay review employees can alter their comp structure if they wish to

• Employees can also choose between different additional benefits they want as well, such as health and wellness benefits

• The platform handles the tax and legal implications of the employees decisions making it a seamless process

Go-to-market: Larger tech companies, likely post Series B, will be your early adopters here. You could also sell into HR software platforms directly so they can offer this feature

Business Model: Charge enterprises per employee

Startup Costs: This will be a highly complex build due to the technical nature of the product and the legal implications, so you’ll need to do a raise here to get the business going

3. How You’ll Get Rich 💰

Exit Strategy: Exit to one of the large payroll software platforms like Gusto or Rippling who could add this feature to their platforms

Exit Multiple: Private sector SaaS multiples for HR/payroll software soltuons range from 5.9x to 9.2x revenue

TOGETHER WITH BILL.COM

Take a demo, get a Blackstone Griddle

• Automate expense reports so you can focus on strategy

• Uncapped virtual corporate cards

• Access scalable credit lines from $500 to $15M

Request a demo

DRUNK BUSINESS IDEA

Pumpkin Spice Toothpaste

It’s spooky season, which means it’s a time for scary movies, warm jumpers and pumpkin spice everything. Ever since Starbucks invented the pumpkin spice latte in 2003 it’s been a cultural phenomenon. So why not expand it to other products?

Like pumpkin spice toothpaste.

Delicious.

JUST THE TIP

Trend 📈: Mindful Eating

Eating mindfully means that you are using all of your physical and emotional senses to experience and enjoy the food choices you make. It has been shown to promote weight loss, reduce binge eating, and help eaters feel more full. And it’s turning into kind of a big deal, which means we can build businesses out of it.

Business Ideas

• Mindful Eating App: Develop an app guiding users through mindfulness exercises while dining alone.

• Mindful Eating Toolkit: Produce and sell a set of tools (like specialized utensils, timers, or placemats) designed to encourage mindful eating habits.

• Mindful Eating Journal: Design and produce a specialized journal for tracking meals, emotions, and mindfulness practices around eating.

THE MONEYSHOT

Building a $5bn Company in 3 Months

Getting investors to write checks can be really hard, even for great products with great traction.

But this founder managed to raise $1bn for his pre-product startup just this week.

This is his story.

Ilya Sutskever was born in Russia during the height of the Soviet Union and at age 5 emigrated with his family to Israel, where he lived until age 15.

For college Ilya moved to Canada and attended the University of Toronto, getting a degree in mathematics, a master’s degree in computer science and became a PhD in computer science for good measure. Clearly a smart dude.

In 2012 Ilya joined DNNResearch, which was run by Geoffrey Hinton, who was Ilya’s doctoral supervisor and just one year later Google acquired DNNResearch, hiring Ilya as a research scientist at Google Brain in the process.

At Google Ilya worked on different areas like Tensorflow and sequence-to-sequence learning algorithms (whatever they are). He also worked on AlphaGo which famously bested the world’s best go player in an epic showdown. There’s a great documentary on YouTube about it (10/10 would recommend to a friend).

After 2 years at Google though Ilya decided to move on and became the cofounder and chief scientist of a tiny, humble non-profit that was just starting out.

OpenAI.

And since he joined Ilya’s time at OpenAI has been quite an adventure.

During his tenure the company has transformed from a non-profit focussed on AGI research to a tech giant making $3.4bn ARR which is now very much for-profit.

Ilya played a key role in the development of ChatGPT which kick started the AI revolution, but also played a pivotal role in the internal revolt against Sam Altman which led to his firing and sensational return, like a comeback straight out of a Rocky movie. The move seemed to be driven by something Ilya saw that spooked him, prompting him to take action against Sam. What he saw? We may never know. It could also have been something more harmless, like a simple disagreement in leadership and strategy. These things tend to come out over time though, so we’ll find out what really happened eventually.

But what we know for certain is that in in early 2024, Ilya announced he was leaving OpenAI. And for months the world waited with bated breath to see what his next move would be. And in June 2024…it was unveiled.

Ilya, Daniel Gross and Daniel Levy (2 heavyweights in the AI world) announced they had founded SSI Inc, a new safety-focused AI startup looking to create safe superintelligence.

And earlier this week the 10-person company raised $1bn at a reported $5bn valuation as their first found of funding. Not bad for a seed round.

That means the company went from $0 to a $5bn valuation in just 3 months, which must be a record. Is this valuation justified? Hard to tell, but ultimately in order to compete in the AI business you need ungodly amounts of money. And that’s exactly what this funding round achieved.

It will be fascinating to see where SSI sits in the broader AI landscape, but it’s hard to bet against this founding team.

But in the end this is a story that’s still being written, and we’re excited to see how it unfolds.

INFLUENCER IDEAS

#HalfBakedBizIdea

Ibragim looking to make us all polyglots

DM us or use #halfbakedbizidea on X/Twitter to get your idea featured in our newsletter.