Alphabet Chairman Eric Schmidt finds himself in a high position in one of the world’s most valuable companies, a company that started from nothing; a startup. As such, it’s only natural to think that he would know a thing or two about startup companies, despite not having been one of Google’s founders. With Alphabet’s core focus across all of its companies these days being the cloud, it’s natural to think he may know a thing or two about that subject as well. Both assumptions seem to be correct, if his input at a recent Startup Grind conference in Europe is any indication.
Speaking to the crowd of wide-eyed entrepreneurs in the making, Schmidt decided to cover his idea of the “perfect startup”, a company that’s almost literally failure proof, would take minimal capital and resources to start up, and, of course, would most likely end up making unreal amounts of money. Stepping out of his tech-centered comfort zone a bit, the ideal firm he described dealt with dermatology, as an example. First and foremost, he stated that crowdsourced data would be at the forefront of a good startup in this day and age. He went on to give more specific examples, saying that such a company could provide an extremely accurate A.I.-based skin ailment diagnosis tool by crowdsourcing input from actual dermatologists and utilizing machine learning. In his example, dermatologists are each paid $1 for some quick input on the diagnosis process for a specific ailment and their experience with it.
Using that data, an A.I. could be built, through machine learning, that would be able to recognize issues by analyzing skin cells or even just looking at pictures. While such a low pay scale for the dermatologists involved and the wildly vast scope of machine learning that would be necessary seem prohibitive, such a company is entirely possible to build these days, or one like it in just about any field. According to Schmidt, such a company would also make use of Android and iOS, and would be quite likely to hit the $100 billion mark, if the founders played their cards right.