Ideas

Somewhere to publicly write the ideas I get. If you have any feedback, if you feel we can work together to make any of these happen, or if you have an idea you think we can build together, let’s talk!

🎓 Project-Based Higher Learning

On my mind since Jan 2024, added to site Sept 2024

This year I’ve been obsessing over the pitfalls of higher education. I can see plainly that the traditional university model is not working for most students, and yet it’s the only option for many.

Higher education is…

There is an amazing write-up by Emerge, an EdTech fund, on the problems with traditional higher education and how one may solve them here.

I think a better model would be to have short, intense learning experiences that are project-based and that prepare students for the real labor market. Instead of spending 4 years and visiting a real-world problem once or twice (true story, this is the case for most Engineering programs), you could have non-stop projects that force the student to learn and apply concepts in a real-world context. You could even have companies and projects sponsor projects and students based on the skills they need the market to have, having direct input on what the students are trained to do. See for example Dyson Institute or projects like this.

You could do away with the current governance structure of Universities that makes them so slow to adapt. You could do away with research and papers, which pull incentives and resources away from teaching skills. You could do away with academics and full-time teachers, and instead hire industry experts that are on the ground and know what’s happening in the market. You could have a rolling intake every couple of months, and a constant flow of students graduating and entering the labor market. You could have companies and projects sponsor projects and students based on the skills they need the market to have, having direct input on what the students are trained to do.

Importantly, I believe fully-online programs are not the way to go. The impact of physical interactions (particularly with a powerful and unique student experience) is necessary to make this model work, and online programs are incapable of providing that. This isn’t my invention. It’s already being done in one way or another in institutions like TEDI, Olin, NMITE and Minerva, but incumbent universities are incapable or too slow to adapt.

This model fits itself particularly well for engineering, where you must create things. A program where you are designing, coding, soldering, building and creating non-stop with real tools and equipment used in the industry would be the best way to learn. Where you are taught not the theory but the practice, where you are taught how to design your solutions for your users instead of for passing the course, where you are taught on how to learn, not just what to learn.

You can create a new type of engineer, one that is more practical, user-centered and multidisciplinary. More of a Maker. Why is it that in other economies like the US you get kids that can do stuff like this and this and this? With this model, Colombia and LatAm could be producing amazing talent capable of such things.

I’ve already talked to a few people in the sector about this and the reception is mixed-to-hopeful. Some people think it’s a great idea for the country and the region, but others keep telling me it is extremely hard to create a new institution due to the regulatory environment, and even harder to compete with the prestige of a regular university. But I still can’t get the idea out of my mind. Is it worth doing hard things? I think so.

PD: This ties with my idea of helping disadvantaged youth get an education. What if you could get the brightest minds from disadvantaged backgrounds to study a high-earning-potential career and find them a corresponding high-paying job? This is a way of creating social change as well. A percentage of students could be subsidized.

📖 Used Book Subscription + Free Bookstore

Added to site August 19, 2024

While in Chicago I saw 2 bookstores that were really extraordinary: Books4Cause and OpenBooks.

They both have similar models: They are sustained by monetizing a portion of books donated to them. The rest of the books they give away in one way or another.

I found this model fascinating. Books4Cause in particular is not a non-profit, and it’s profitable. A free bookstore that is profitable. Amazing 🤯

I think I could build something similar in Colombia or Latin America. I believe I could have a subscription-based model for access to a set amount of books monthly while getting donations in order to get a better total catalogue and give away a portion as free books to the community.

🧑‍🎓 ISA Student Loans for Disadvantaged Youth

Idea started Oct 2022. Added to site April 23rd, 2024

This was the company I was going to build right after selling Finco, but the macro environment just wasn’t favorable due to extremely high interest rates.

In Latin America and developing countries in general, many promising young people from disadvantaged backgrounds never achieve their true potential due to factors external to them. Compared to their more affluent peers, their mothers had worse nutrition during pregnancy, they had a worse diet themselves, they have less stimulation growing up, and have a higher chance of dropping out of school for many different factors.. More importantly, many young people who do reach the end of high school still don’t go to the next step in their educational path because of economic, societal or other problems.

What if you could find the students who managed to beat the odds, and who not only finished high school but excelled above their peers? What if you could give them a chance to study a high-earning-potential career and find them a corresponding high-paying job? you would be changing not only their lives but that of their families and future offspring as well. True social mobility would be achieved, their potential not lost to inequality but rather realized thanks to grit and perseverance. Something like Makers with a more social focus.

I think you could offer these students an opportunity to study these careers through an Income-Share-Agreement loan. You would have every incentive to help them get the best possible career and job offer to maximize gains on the loan, while they would have every incentive to keep excelling to change their lives.

It would be important to also aid in adjusting to an alien academic setting, mental health, living costs and other important factors that may determine their chances of realizing their dream. Also, programs wouldn’t necessarily need to be 4 year long programs. Why not 1 or 2-year-long courses on current demanded skills in the tech economy? This would lower costs, lower time to graduation, lower time to revenue, and lower drop-out rates.

This has been my dream company for a couple of years now. Maybe soon I’ll get it done.

🔃 Repitis.com

Added April 23rd, 2024

Together with my wife, we bought the domain www.repitis.com a couple of years ago. We totally suffer from domain-name shopping addiction. Another one of our other great acquisitions was www.bigassants.com (to sell this Colombian delicacy).

“Repitis” means “to repeat something soon or immediately” in Colombian parlance. Typically used when doing something fun like a board game or pleasurable like sweet food, or more commonly, sex. Our initial idea since we just had the babies was to put up a circular economy website for baby clothing and items that get discarded as the kids grow out of them.

We quickly realized that was kind of a logistical nightmare (baby items get dangerously close to biohazard waste status ☣️), but the domain name is so fucking good we just need to use it on something.

We thought about a board game import company, but the margins were too low to make it lucrative and we would compete vs. Amazon delivery. Now, we just don’t know what to use it for! My latest ideas hover towards a dedicated place to sell old videogames and consoles.

Do you have some idea of what we might use repitis.com for? Let me know!

📚 No-bullshit Book Publisher

Added April 23rd, 2024

In a recent chat with a colleague at R5, he opened my eyes to an undeniable truth: Most instructional books could tell you all you need to know and be over in 50 pages or less. The rest of the content is just fluff.

Now, I’ve been reading a lot lately and I couldn’t agree more. I loved Atomic Habits but James Clear really goes overboard with the examples. He even has a 1-page summary of the book which could replace the whole thing easily.

Maybe you could build a publisher that admonishes and embraces this fact, and instead of going for length, values conciseness. You could even sell “compilations” of several books, which together make up the typical length of a more typical, bullshit-fluff-literary piece.

⏩ Express Video Interviews

Added March 5th, 2024

In my experience, the most bothersome part of recruiting someone new into your team is the first round of disqualifications. You go, make a nice post on LinkedIn, and suddenly you have 20+ applicants you want to interview. Now, talking to all of them will take at least 30 mins each or 20 hours total, so in practice, you end up shortlisting only 5 or so and hope for the best.

What if you could lower that initial time from 30 minutes to only 5? The idea is to make a small service that lets you input a set of screening questions to be answered in less than 1 minute each. Candidates would record themselves answering them on the website and whatever came out, came out. No second takes!

Bonus function: have Whisper make a transcript of the answers and then automatically use GPT-4’s API to rate candidates based on your expected answers.

👗🕶️ Boutique Brand Marketplace

Added March 5th, 2024

Colombia and Latin America have a ton of cool boutique consumer-goods brands that could sell for a good margin in the US and Europe while maintaining a decent margin due to the lowish cost of manufacturing in LatAm.

Because of how the economics work out, these brands sell for what would be considered a premium price in their local market, limiting their market reach. Many of these are also bootstrapped businesses with low financing available, with founding teams that are not knowledgeable on how to scale up a good product or how to reach international markets.

You could group a bunch of these businesses under the same website/storefront, advertising them to US and EU customers as zany, Latino-owned, up-and-coming brands. This already happens physically in Colombia to some success as there are a ton of “multi-brand local entrepreneur stores” all around. The idea would be to take that concept, amp it up to 11 and bring it to a larger, more affluent market.

👷‍♂️ Mid-sized Mall Renovation

Added March 5th, 2024

There are 2 malls very near to my place in Bogotá, which is located in a reasonably affluent part of the city. One has the most expensive square-meter-rent-price in the country. The other is just ~2 blocks away but has 1/10th the rent price because of how run down it is.

The second one is also extremely well located. It’s at the intersection of 2 main roads, the sunday Ciclovia passes right in front of it and has several restaurants and bars nearby. It simply wasn’t maintained over time and now is an eyesore in an otherwise great zone.

The idea would be to buy this place, renovate it and rent the commercial space out for somewhere around 5 to 8 times the current price, leveling it to the zone average.

I LOVE this idea. The only bad part is that mortgage interest rates have skyrocketed in Colombia (currently around ~13% yearly) so the lease would probably be too expensive at the moment. Maybe there is some other way to finance the project that is less vulnerable to interest rates…