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Future startup ideas excavated from science fiction
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Future startup ideas excavated from science fiction
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A research archive of 6,222 fictional inventions mined from old science fiction and translated into present-day startup opportunities.
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Startup Archaeology
Science fiction writers imagined thousands of technologies before the world was ready to build them.
Startup Archaeology deliberately mines old science fiction. The archive currently spans 1818–1965. The distance matters: the older the source, the more clearly we can see which imagined futures became ordinary infrastructure, which remain impossible, and which have only now crossed into technical possibility.
We collect fictional inventions, document their origins, classify what has already been built and what may suddenly be possible now, then translate the most promising excavations into Startup Opportunity Cards: modern equivalents, technical unlocks, first customers, MVPs, validation paths, risks and founder notes.
The unicorns have already lived.
Startup culture treats the unicorn as something that must be invented: a rare company waiting to be created. Startup Archaeology proposes a more literal possibility. Perhaps the unicorns are already in the historical record, buried in fiction and waiting to be excavated.
If a viable company can be excavated from a book written decades or even a century ago, the project is not simply forecasting the future. It is asking how long a future can remain buried before the world becomes ready for it.
The archive takes that proposition seriously enough to become real: thousands of fictional inventions are catalogued, connected, scored and translated into possible companies.
The future has already been written. The question is which part is ready to become a company.
They do not need to be invented. They need to be excavated.