Idealab's Bill Gross is giving away 1.2 million AI-generated business ideas

Bill Gross wants to turn AI into an engine for starting companies, not just laying people off. The Idealab founder and ProRata CEO has put 1.2 million AI-generated business ideas online for free, and he says the point is to make entrepreneurship easier for anyone who can use it.

Idealab has been around since 1996 and has helped spawn about 175 companies. Gross says he spent years building 31 “methodologies” for generating ideas, then fed them into an AI model along with roughly 17 million source documents: news stories, research reports, expired patents, public filings and discussion-board threads. The result was a giant idea dump, built from prompts he groups into opportunities, enablers and shifts.

The site lets people search those ideas by industry, skills, interests and geography. A resume or LinkedIn profile can be uploaded to get suggestions tailored to a person’s background. Existing companies and universities can also point the system at their own patent portfolios and look for spin-outs or new business units hiding inside assets that are otherwise sitting idle.

Gross argues that a lot of intellectual property is effectively trapped inside big organizations. He says Caltech’s 9,978 patents could generate about 3,450 new businesses, while 3M’s 21,000 patents could yield 1,549 ideas. That’s the pitch: AI as a way to surface value that already exists but isn’t being used.

The platform is not just a pile of concepts. Idealab says it can also generate rollout plans, and Gross says the incubator may invest in startups that emerge from the system. He is also building an agentic AI setup around what he calls a “Periodic Table of Business Functions,” covering about 118 jobs from customer discovery to sales, operations and legal. The ideas are free; those services are supposed to launch in 2027, and he says Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince has donated $100,000 in Cloudflare credits for startups built on the platform.

Gross’s bigger bet is almost absurd in scale: 1 million new businesses and 100 million new jobs. He thinks the job picture from AI is less bleak than people fear, and he points to Census Bureau data showing U.S. new business formation near all-time highs, up about 11% since the pandemic ended in 2022. If AI is going to reshape work anyway, his answer is simple: make it easier for people to start more of it.