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Ask HN: If you had 100 talented people for 100 days, what would you work on?

57 points by yaronhadad ↗ HN
Imagine Jeff Bezos offered you 100 of his top people (engineers, designers, product ...) for 100 days and told you that you could work on whatever you wanted. The only condition is that at the end of the 100 days you need to start paying salaries in order to retain these people.

What would you work on?

92 comments

[ 5.4 ms ] story [ 170 ms ] thread
trcollinson
As a theoretical experiment it’s interesting. But it would never ever work. You’d literally spend a year or more trying to prepare for that 100 days and I’m still not convinced you’d get anything out of it.

Now, if you were going to give me 6 people that would be a different story. With 6 people I have a number of startup ideas that I would love to work on and I think I could get a working mvp out of in 100 days.

As of today it would be around health care billing for small to medium sized US based medical practices encompassing ehr, billing, office management, and cash flow management. Not exciting but it’s what I’d be doing.

posix_compliant
You could make 16 teams of 6 and give each one a different startup idea. You could then create some metric for success and then choose to continue to work on the one with the most success.
pro_zac
That's great! You could secretly give some teams the same idea and compare approaches and results afterward.
trcollinson
I could. I’ve run very large development groups. It takes a lot of time and effort to get it right and with 16 groups of 6 it would be the same overhead, if not more. It just wouldn’t be for me, that’s all. I think I’d be much more successful with one strategic team of 6. If you can manage 16 teams working on projects for 100 days, by all means go for it.
arthev
Agreed. I have no idea how to manage 100 people, nor how to utilize 100 people in any effective way.

I guess I would be hacking the challenge by holding some clumsy event on the first day or two where we sorted into 5 to 20 different teams, and then got to work on a lot of things in parallel. And then people could switch around between teams as interested or as they might use their skills.

theossuary
I think it's a fair assumption to say one of those hundred would have the experience to manage the other 99, and allow you to play stakeholder, not project director. That said, hard to imagine getting a lot done in 3 months with a 100 person program.
trcollinson
That’s exactly it. It’s more the 100 day part that is restrictive. It takes a lot of time and effort to get 100 people working effectively.
twunde
If you're actually interested there are a few companies taking this on such as Athenahealth and DrChrono, both EHRs for small to mid-sized companies. Or if you want to focus on healthcare billing, you should check out Cedar, which focuses on large systems.
agravier
An Amazon competitor. Either in a few underserved niche markets, or in an area where Amazon is not very present.
songzme
I would have them train 2 people (each) in their field to be as good (if not better) than they are. At the end of 100 days, I'll have 200 people trained by Jeff Bezo's top people. These 200 people will be tasked with building a learning system / school that teaches these skills to underprivileged communities for free. Each school would be named after each of the original 100 top people.

I'll keep tabs on each of the 100 top people and ask them for donations every year to keep their schools alive. If they don't (and we ran out of money), we'll close down the schools.

[dead] toomuchtodo
Supporting progressive candidates with tech for Congressional midterms. Huge ROI if effective, and they’d only be needed for 100 days.

http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-sanders-campaign-technol...

doctorless
Same could be said for conservative candidates. You’re making the assumption the userbase of HN is politically homogenous, when it is not.
[dead] toomuchtodo
It’s pretty clear conservative policies are a train wreck and are slowly eating the country alive (tax cuts for businesses solely for shareholder gain, erosion of social services, infrastructure neglect, an illogical trade war with everyone, etc).

Forget social agenda, I’m just asking for some sane fiscal policy at this point. Stop wasting scarce resources. Stop corruption. Stop passing the buck to my kids to clean up. That’s my desire and my goal.

So yeah, give me 100 tech workers for 100 days and I’ll show you phenomenal return on investment through public policy surrogates who support policy that’ll improve quality of life drastically while saving the country tens of billions of dollars.

rustler
Many argue the leftist policies of San Francisco's government have been a train wreck too.
toomuchtodo
I don’t live in SF, so I can’t speak to their public policy effectiveness (or their public policy in general, to be honest). Would you have citations you could link to where I could familiarize myself with its failings and how it relates to “leftist”/progressive policies? I’d rather not get too much into it here for fear of attracting a thread detachment.
seiferteric
He's doing no such thing. The question was what YOU would do with 100 people, and he answered straightforwardly.
doctorless
Making the assumption in the sense that this opinion would be viewed universally favorably on HN and not a flamepost provocation.
toomuchtodo
I wasn’t aware that my suggestion had to agree with the hive mind to be posted.

I don’t post to provoke, ever; life is too short, and moderator time is a scarce resource.

harlanji
Have them turn on my youtube engineering vlog and work on something interesting. Self organize onto teams using a compatible approach. I’ve just a few months of lectures recorded, but I’d have them give me enough money to keep supplying them with vision.
pro_zac
I recently watched a video of Kevin Horton discussing creation of the Super NT, SNES on an FPGA. He mentions doing the same for the N64 would be extremely difficult. It's not gonna change the world, but it would be a fun challenge to throw some resources at.
itomato
Youre entitled to your own wishes, but really? Out of anything at all, you'd put 100 (talented) people to work for 100 days to implement an obsolete console in FPGA?

Think big.

ericjang
Auction the team as a resource to the highest bidder. I'm not positioned to deploy this resource effectively, so I'm likely to benefit most by trading it to a buyer who can't convert money into talent fast enough.

The team is much more valuable to someone who can afford to pay long-term salaries and needs this talent resource quickly on an up-front basis (Tesla, Uber, a startup trying to crush their competitor, etc.)

gitgud
It seems selfish on the surface, but to me this is one of the best answers to the question.

Why waste valuable resources, when someone more capable could utilize them.

ericjang
Let someone else waste the valuable resource :)
chipuni
The people, by themselves, wouldn't be enough. Let's assume we have the people AND the kind of resources 100 people working at Amazon would have.

Then I would have them work on a multi-pronged project to get a higher percent of people in the US voting.

One team would be campaigning in all states against laws that make it hard to vote.

Another team would be finding the most cost-effective ways to register voters, educate voters accurately about what each candidate represents and has done, and get them to the polls.

r00fus
Of course there are going to be folks who claim that it's too political. There is one party that seems to benefit from preventing voting participation and fairness...
phendrenad2
I would split them into small teams and call it a consultancy.
anoncoward111
Instead of worrying about the practicality of this, I'll answer your question directly.

I would aim to create as many blueprints as possible for tools that can help more people live and work remotely and sustainably.

There is no greater threat to human health, human happiness, and human productivity, than there is in meaningless desk work and commuting.

rustler
I would focus on patterns for remote collaboration (structured and searchable chat, VR hangouts) combined with old-fashioned face time (monthly or quarterly in-person activities).
stevekemp
You think the ability to work remotely is a more significant health-benefit than tackling water-shortages, obesity, drugs, and climate change?

It is OK to have a niche, and to use hyperbole, but when it comes to human health and happiness I'm certain there are more significant issues which are real, and growing, than where somebody works (if they can, must, or even do have a job).

anoncoward111
The problems you have listed would immediately cease if US and Chinese corporations had any ethics whatsoever.

Obesity is caused by stress eating, cheap junk food, marketing, and a sedentary lifestyle due to a desk job. 2 billion people in South/East/SouthEast Asia live long lives because they are outside the influence of the Western diet.

When you say drugs, I dont know if you mean medicine or heroin. Most medicine is cheap. Pharmaceutical companies and insurance companies hold a cartel over its pricing. As for illegal drugs, decriminalize it like portugal and your problems will cease.

Climate change should be obvious. If everyone stopped consuming the wasteful products US corps market as disposable (gas, cars, meat, etc), we would cut our greenhouse emissions overnight.

All of these problems would end if corporations were somehow forced to stop. I doubt anyone will ever acquire the political momentum to do that.

ghosterrific
Yes.

The problems you describe above would be greatly reduced.

- Less fuel consumption means less water use, less pollution

- Less wasted time commuting means more time to relax and less stress eating, more time to prepare better food and better sleep

The ability and effectiveness of working from home will have compound improvements to the other specific problems you listed.

Imagine if every worker had a couple extra hours to sleep better, eat better and time with family to solve the problems above.

newman8r
I'd probably have them work on finding as many zero-day vulnerabilities as possible - after the 100 days I'd probably keep the top 5-10 performers on salary if I was able to make enough money from the research.
matte_black
Assuming everyone knows each other and is ready to work, I would introduce myself and my idea: A dating social network that uses genetics data as one of the criteria for matching people.

I will select the top managers in the group, assign each a responsibility, and then have them go into the crowd and build out their team to help accomplish that. I would have the best pitchmen go out and try to raise money from investors.

Everyone goes to work while I sit back in my chair and tent my fingers.

newman8r
Are you actually working on that? Sounds cool.
calciphus
Sounds like eugenics
theeeerob
Setting aside the fact that more diverse genes generally result in healthier offspring...
newman8r
Not necessarily. It could just take a lot of data on compatibility and see if it could correlate it to genetics. Whether or not there is any correlation would be the question though.
matte_black
Nothing wrong with letting people find the most optimal mate with which to produce offspring.
berbec
<reductio ad hitlerum>Didn't they try that in 1930s Germany?</reductio ad hitlerum>
rustler
A portable personal Internet server that runs as a turnkey no-user-maintenance image on AWS, Digital Ocean, and OpenStack. It hosts your email, federated social networking and chat, file sharing and ad-blocking web proxy. The user experience is pure Internet with no ads, surveillance or vendor lock-in, all for $6/mo (hosting + DNS).
ttul
Oh yes please. Seconded.
l0b0
This is an idea I've been toying with several times, but it never gets beyond the thinking stage because of the obstacles interacting with the rest of the world: getting at least two cloud provider accounts (one for regular operations and one for secure off-site backups, ideally with a different provider), estimating costs (because good luck actually calculating them), buying a domain and transferring it to the cloud provider, the intricacies of configuring email to not be black-holed immediately by other providers (something I only know from rumours), and I'm sure a host of others. Even an effort to make some of these things slightly easier would be most welcome, but I don't think 10,000 work days is enough to get something like this to a "turnkey" level. It would be absolutely the best to be proven wrong, though!
rustler
Maybe we could get it "mostly" turnkey just for email, and charge $10/mo to fund 2-3 full-time devops to maintain and extend it.
peterwwillis
Oh, that's easy.

Develop a non profit program to bring tech skills to disadvantaged communities so they can get basic remote work jobs and put food on the table. Key word: 'bring'.

It wouldn't make any money at all, but it might change some lives.

oceanghost
Build educational tools. Bring the cost of learning as low as possible.
raverbashing
I would have them prototype a new computer language + ide for it

This language would have usability in mind as well as throwing out established assumptions. For example, that source code should be ascii text. Or that anyone should decide between tabs/spaces.

adamnemecek
Not enough people. Languages are hard as well as bad for making money. 100 days is too few.
milkytron
There's the possibility that money isn't his top priority.
frozenport
Assuming that syntax is the hardest part of programming?
DanielBMarkham
I'd let them go. Keep the best 5. Or have a contest where you narrow the field down to 5.

100 people fresh for 100 days is a disaster. If you're lucky they'd all ignore one another, group into small teams, and find their own way to do cool stuff.

3-people teams can grow into 100-people teams that do some awesome things. 100-people teams dropped in from the sky are trouble. I've seen it done. It's rarely productive.

singularity2001
It's all a question of management. As someone said: build 20 teams of 5.
DanielBMarkham
Yes, it might work great as 20 teams of 5. No, not probably the way most people would do it.

It's not a matter of management, it's a matter of self-organization. People are not fungible like money. They are also not robots. So you just can't "manage" them or slice them into various groups and expect it to work well. You also can't take one giant problem and create 20 teams and expect them all to decompose it and solve it optimally without a lot of guidance. The things that work are counter-intuitive and the things that seem like they should work actually create a lot of friction and waste.

Put differently, there are a ton of startups that never made the leap from a 5-person team to a 100-person small dev shop. There are really good reasons for that -- and those are people who have been working together for years.

crb002
Affordable fresh meal kits in urban food deserts that other retailers can franchise from from Amazon/Wholefoods.
neals
I would take them away from what they have known and done for years and years. I would finally take their skill and ambition seriously. They will work on a goal that is beyond what they could even imagine when they learned and studied and improved their knowledge while others partied and explored sex and drugs .

Bacause for me, they would be figuring out how to have more people click on my ads.

zaphirplane
Subtleties are lost in the unwashed masses, too funny.
westoncb
First off, I'm crossing my fingers it was actually a drunk Jeff Bezos who posted this :D

I hit on a new general scheme for structuring programming tools and languages that doesn't use parsing, and I'd love to try building a language and editor on it. I've seen other people working on these syntax-free, no parsing schemes, but I've yet to see one whose fundamental structure is simple enough to be captured by a simple diagram, or just a few sentences; and that's what I'm lookin' at here, which leaves me endlessly curious about the potential significance of this thing (including the potential for its significance to be nothing!)—but I haven't had a chance yet to give it a real test.

So if I had the resources I'd do a bunch of iterations on it—likely with ~10 teams working on parallel iterations if I had 100 people. Actually, I'd start with just one team of 10 working on it, and if it continued looking promising after the first iteration, and add more teams in proportion to the perceived promise. Meanwhile, I've got plenty other (over)ambitious projects I'd like to have help with :)

warent
Ask all 100 of them the same question, but they get 4 people instead of 100, collect the top 20 best results, give those 20 folks leadership over a team of 4 people, making a total of 20 teams of 5.

Statistically at least one or two of those teams is likely to come up with a highly profitable idea.

pvinis
I see only one flaw. Who choses these top 20 results? Maybe he cannot imaging how something could be profitable. I'm kidding but it's an interesting thought. Thanks for that.