If your take here is that I'm interested in "rich-white-guy" problems, I'd encourage you to re-read the list from the perspective of emerging and frontier markets. Most of what I have listed there is actually more important in those places than it is in Silicon Valley. For example -- receiver-centric package delivery is a far bigger deal in places that don't have addresses than it is in the US (and billions of people around the world don't have addresses!). Ditto with energy, waste management, etc... even an open web platform is a bigger deal in India than it is here.
Personally, I spend more time these days focused on those markets (especially Haiti and Africa) than I do on the US.
You also listed title insurance. That is a government problem, not a start-up problem. It has been fixed for many properties in Australia. There, the government's idea of property ownership is correct. Our trouble in the USA is that for purposes of legal ownership, the government doesn't even have that info. All the government has is a list of property tax payers and a sales transaction log, neither of which is legal evidence of ownership. (sales transactions do not provide this because you can't legitimately sell something you don't own, but that doesn't stop you from making a sales transaction) The solution here is to make government records definitive.
You mentioned air conditioning. If you'd like an efficiency gain, the Sandia Cooler may be what you are looking for:
https://www.energy.gov/articles/sandia-cooler-blows-traditio...
The key is having large scale services that the community store can manage. Deliver of large or expensive items as a service, like college movers. Instead of Amazon grocery delivery vs other grocery delivery, use the community store to manage the interaction -- they choose quality and price, or decide what combinations to offer. This is good for Amazon too: it lets them compete on the supply chain and outsource customer service.
Community stores wouldn't just have online prices, they could offer innovative things like local individual services (lawn mowing, computer repair) with local ratings and local trust. Clothing from online stores, where people try it on before buying, and the community store manages shipping and damage, etc.. in a relationship with the online retailer.
Creating open software that manages a market for the store/supplier B2B relationships would let the local stay-at-home person start small, a few neighbors, and grow into a larger service and eventually a community store.
I think that if you get into many of the BIG problems that sound really exciting, you'll find that they can't actually be solved. My first startup idea after striking out on my own was to fix unemployment, which was a big, impactful problem that disproportionately affects underprivileged people. As I researched the problem, though, I realized that it's not really something that can be fixed. Hiring is hard because it's fractally fucked up: it's a many-participant market where everybody rationally follows their incentives but the sum total of those incentives is a system that massively underutilizes human potential and makes everyone miserable. Now, you can fix individual problems within the space like finding job postings (Indeed), tracking applicants (Lever), giving coding tests (TripleByte), etc, but each of those just makes life better for the person giving you money, and arguably makes the system as a whole even more fucked up.
The same goes for many other hard problems. Political polarization in the U.S. is a huge problem, but there's no one solution that will fix it short of mind-controlling or eliminating everyone who disagrees with you. Alleviating poverty in the developing world is a huge problem, but countries that are poor today are usually poor for a constellation of different reasons, and unless you fix them all you're not going to make the country un-poor.
The author seems like he's deliberately avoiding any areas that are not product-fixable. That limits his list to fairly boring problems. It's likely hard-won experience as an entrepreneur, though: I know that I started the entrepreneurship journey thinking I was gonna solve everything and have a big positive impact on the world, and have since learned that unless you adjust your expectations, you are bound to be perpetually frustrated.
Yep -- note the title is "Startups I Want to Fund", not "Charities I Want to Donate To".
Note that I also try to tackle some of these non-product-solvable problems through philanthropy, but that's a subject for another blog post...
What about these guys?
So you think digging tens of millions of miles of fiber trenches to bring gigabit internet to everyone is a more capex efficient solution than a few hundred nano-satellites in LEO blanketing the earth with connectivity? It will be low bandwidth but enough for farmers (what most people in the world do) to check weather, crop yield predictions, and market spot prices, or do remote banking from their village, or check medical information.
Nothing in this list is a new idea. People have been trying and failing at open app stores for years. Same with touch OS. If "What does the internet-native version of the WSJ or The Economist look like?" constitutes a sleeper market, he may need to get out more.
How would you categorize the following as a "rich white guy problem"?
"Air conditioning – As more people in hot climates enter the middle class, and as climate change accelerates, the demand for air conditioning will explode. What innovation is possible here?"
The worst possible outcome of using more air conditioning is more pollution. Pollution (on a global scale) and the associated potential climate change are considered pretty first-world (rich white dude) problems. Pollution on a local scale is definitely more legitimate, but that's overwhelmingly due to combustion engines (cars) and not power generation, which doesn't typically happen in city centers.
An innovative "Air Conditioner" that could store the usually dumped heat for later use (Say in preheating water for a hot tap to lower costs of heating) would probably be extremely popular if it was a decent product otherwise (Cheap, durable, easy to install).
Effectively what is needed is a set of technologies that allow heat to be moved around and stored as easily as electricity and for a lower cost than generation.
If we had those then you'd have the best of both worlds, technologies that reduce climate change as well as allowing the non-first world to make life more comfortable in a warming world.
Similar to an AC unit, I would love to see two-part refrigerators. It always seemed dumb to me to cool the interior of your refrigerator by dumping heat into your home, which your AC has to then extract and dump outside. A refrigerator that had an external heat exchanger that could be placed outside, or shared with the AC heat exchanger, would be pretty spectacular.
It seems dumb in California, but in my much of the country (and much of the inhabited world, though there's a lot where this isn't true, too), you need heating of living space more than cooling, so pumping heat out of a fridge into the living space is a double win most of the year, and added complexity to avoid it is pure waste.
This doesn't strike me as dumb at all, unless the refrigerator's heat pump is more efficient [1] than the AC. Although it may be, it's not a foregone conclusion, and it stands to reason that a refrigerator would be designed to function better when pumping [2] heat into room temperatures than outdoor temperatures (as opposed to an AC).
Regardless, all heat pumps have to work harder (use more energy and/or run longer) when the temperature differential on either side is worse. You wouldn't be getting something for nothing by moving a fridge's hot side to a hotter outdoor location.
[1] Overall, including maintenance/replacement cost due to longer run-time
[2] or dumping, though "dump" suggest something more passive than what I believe is going on
Just one example source, this is pretty much consensus: http://www.worldbank.org/en/news/feature/2014/03/03/climate-...
[1] https://www.basf.com/en/company/news-and-media/magazine/reso...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermoacoustic_heat_engine
I'm actually disappointed that it is "new kind of ISP" that made the list rather than just plain "ISP/NSP -- whatever way IP is delivered is fine". Making $10/mo profit in being a dumb pipe with 10 million subscribers in the US is a profit of $100 million in a month while being a a dumb pipe.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/networking/comments/434bwz/how_much...
Edit: Been there - done that. Supplied IP over satellites. CapEx is a very solvable problem. OpEx would kill you.
Andrew - I hope you see my other, longer comment and maybe consider that you could approach brainstorming differently. There's a lot of opportunity to do really good things for the world and still make money at the same time, it just requires more risk and creativity.