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We’re not chasing after startup money these days, but we love to make things and solve problems. That’s why I’m filing this list of startup ideas from Paul Graham under inspirado. It’s hard for me to look at it and stop the ol’ creative wheels from spinning.

Some excerpts:

12. Fix advertising. Advertising could be made much better if it tried to please its audience, instead of treating them like victims who deserve x amount of abuse in return for whatever free site they’re getting. It doesn’t work anyway; audiences learn to tune out boring ads, no matter how loud they shout.

What we have now is basically print and TV advertising translated to the web. The right answer will probably look very different. It might not even seem like advertising, by current standards. So the way to approach this problem is probably to start over from scratch: to think what the goal of advertising is, and ask how to do that using the new ingredients technology gives us. Probably the new answers exist already, in some early form that will only later be recognized as the replacement for traditional advertising.

Bonus points if you can invent new forms of advertising whose effects are measurable, above all in sales.

More provocatively, because it cuts close to where we live (both as designers and users):

16. A form of search that depends on design. Google doesn’t have a lot of weaknesses. One of the biggest is that they have no sense of design. They do the next best thing, which is to keep things sparse. But if there were a kind of search that depended a lot on design, a startup might actually be able to beat Google at search. I don’t know if there is, but if you do, we’d love to hear from you.

Of course, these are only jumping-off points, but I agree with Graham that these are problems I’d pay to have solved. Just remember us when you hit that IPO.