I hope everyone is staying safe and healthy. I continue to remain opportunistic in my approach with a bottoms-up lens, but every time I share specific ideas, I end up meeting new people with similar interests. So, here’s a non-exhaustive list of ideas I’m currently researching and exploring.

• Programming software robots. Use cases in infrastructure orchestration and biology.

• Open source data protection and management. Focus on data migrations, replications, and disaster recovery. Even the new entrants in this old-school market (Rubrik and Clumio) have top-down strategies. Airbnb’s ReAir is interesting.

• How do metrics become a first-class citizen in an organization? Keep data analysts and analytics teams as the last line of defense, and put BI environments in operators hands. Sisu is cool.

• Automation tools for the help desk (IT, HR, customer service). Come at ServiceNow from the bottom up.

• Kubernetes security. One of the biggest holes in this emerging ecosystem. Isovalent and Tigera take a network-centric approach.

• What’s the economic complement to Ironclad? As more organizations use this digital contracting platform, what other opportunities open up in legal operations?

• Developer hubs and extensibility. Make documentation, developer on-boarding, serverless functionality, testing dead simple for your API. Sperandio has some thoughts.

• Linear for finance departments. Give startups ways to manage strategic planning with macros, templates, collaborative features, an intuitive interface & open platform.

• Observability / monitoring pipelines for data science. Shoutout to Paari. Ultimately, could be a feature within a platform like Deepnote.

• Fraud detection for marketplaces. They’re as complex as ever (B2B, cross-border, financial services integrated) — how can you give fraud teams maximum visibility into every transaction?

P.S. Stay on the lookout for a similar project in the near future I’m working on with my friend Mario Gabriele.