Idealab’s Bill Gross is building infrastructure for AI-assisted startups

For decades, the entrepreneur and investor Bill Gross has been celebrated for shaping the way tech businesses get off the ground. Idealab, which he founded in 1996, is considered the industry’s longest-running tech incubator; the directory of companies it’s backed—including CitySearch, Coinbase, Picasa, and Twilio—doubles as a museum of ever-shifting trends in logo design. Over the years, he’s also founded businesses in fields ranging from internet advertising to clean energy. “My whole life, I’ve been looking at the world, seeing problems, and trying to start companies to solve them,” Gross says. And for him, finding problems in search of a solution has typically involved extensive reading, including most of the major finance and tech publications. Recently, while reading an article about copper shortages, Gross reflected on how much of what he reads contains some sort of implicit problem statement and wondered how artificial intelligence might fare at generating business ideas based on news reporting. In an initial test, Gross supplied Anthropic’s Claude with about 7,000 articles he had recently read, along with material he had put together about coming up with business ideas. “…

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