“My whole life has been coming up with ideas myself, and now AI can do that better than me.” — Bill Gross
Bill Gross has been Mr Ideas Man since 1996 when he founded Idealab in Pasadena and started the hand production of startups. Today, he launches Idealab AI where the hand production of startup ideas is replaced by the algorithm. He fed seventeen million documents — news stories, expired patents, SEC filings, complaints on Reddit — through a thirty-thousand-token prompt built around the thirty-one methods he has used all his life, and out popped 1.2 million business ideas. The first batch cost a thousand dollars in tokens and produced thirty-two thousand ideas in an hour. He is giving all of them away.
“Holy shit, my life is over,” he thought.
Then he decided it was a superpower instead. Mr Ideas Man had come up with his greatest (and final?) idea.
His showcase algorithm-produced idea is a five-dollar-a-month app that locks in today’s gas price by hedging the pooled subscriptions on the New York Mercantile Exchange. Bill’s own system scored it 8.9 out of 10 against 32,000 rivals.
The business model inverts the usual one. Entrepreneurs pay nothing. Corporates with large R&D budgets and fat patent portfolios license the platform to mine their own IP, and they fund the giveaway. Universities are next. Bill is talking to one that would pay students fifty thousand dollars to come and build a company, rather than charging them fifty thousand to study one. As Chris Marquis argued in yesterday’s New York Times, business school as we once imagined it is over.
So where does the hope machine come in? I asked Bill whether the MAGA crowd might object to an American giving away his best ideas to the rest of the world. He was unmoved. Idealab AI is defiantly global from day one, and he is most excited about its power in Africa, the Middle East and South America, where young people and ideas are abundant.
“Bill, this is a hope machine,” thus exclaimed Ahmed El Alfi, the founder of the Flat6Labs accelerator in Cairo, having come to Pasadena to get a sneak preview.
I asked Bill what the machine can’t do. “Judgment,” he said. Which means mentors, advisors and investors matter more now, not less. But what about questions from interviewers? Hmmm. Holy shit, my life is over. Maybe Uncle Bill can build me a question machine.
FIVE TAKEAWAYS
1. Why this works now and did not a year ago: a model holding problems, technologies and expired patents in one context can collide a decades-old financial instrument with a two-week-old crisis. The origin was a WSJ piece on the copper shortage. He is emphatic that none of this was possible twelve months ago.
2. Nobody tested the best idea the machine made. The $5-a-month gas-hedging app is clever — airline hedging is old, consumer access is not. But a guaranteed future price for a fixed premium is insurance, $5 a month does not fund unbounded upside, and his system ranked it first out of 32,000 without flagging any of it.
3. He insists he has no moat and seems to mean it. He wants to be copied, and counts the thousand startup studios that copied Idealab after 1996 as the win. He wants the consultancies to resell it and the VCs to run their portfolios through it.
4. He wants the frontier labs to pay publishers a revenue share, which is the purpose of his other company, ProRata. Idealab AI is built on Claude. Pressed on it, he says he only uses freely usable content. It is the thinnest answer of the hour.
5. The policy idea nobody is discussing: unemployment insurance keeps paying while you look for a job and stops the day you start a company. He thinks founders should get more, not less, and that cities and colleges should take small equity stakes in their own people, Y Combinator style.
LINKS
Idealab — https://www.idealab.com/
Bill Gross’s TED talk on timing — https://www.ted.com/talks/bill_gross_the_single_biggest_reason_why_start_ups_succeed
ProRata.ai — https://axios.com/2025/09/05/prorata-ai-search-tool-publishers
ABOUT KEEN ON AMERICA
Keen On America is a daily conversation about the ideas, books and arguments shaping the United States, hosted by Andrew Keen, author of The Internet Is Not the Answer and How to Fix the Future. New episodes every day.
CHAPTERS
00:00 — Intro
00:52 — Idealab AI, and 1.2 million ideas given away
01:29 — The copper shortage, and the problem inside every article
02:40 — “My life is over”
03:30 — Locking in the price of gasoline
04:48 — Why not just ask Claude yourself?
09:30 — Is this the dot-com boom again?
13:31 — Too good to be true: what is the business model?
17:18 — Is this an IP play? Will people sue?
18:58 — But you are surfing off Claude
20:41 — Paying students $50,000 to come
22:44 — “Bill, this is a hope machine”
23:57 — One in ten, one in four, two in three
27:27 — Judgment, and why mentors matter more
30:28 — Why unemployment insurance stops when you start a company
43:05 — Closing