The “Missing Link” Framework – How to Find Billion-Dollar Ideas in the Plumbing

I recently gave a talk to students from my alma mater, Indiana University. The room was full of Shoemaker Scholars and Cheng Wu Build Clinic students who were majoring in informatics, computer science, and intelligent systems engineering. These are smart kids, engineers and business minds blending code with capital.

As I prepared for the talk, I thought through my journey and my non-obvious pathway to get to where I got to. The key question that kept popping in my head to focus on was: “How do I find a good startup idea?” or “What even is a good startup idea?”

The standard Silicon Valley (and most college entrepreneurship courses) advice is to “scratch your own itch.” If you hate doing laundry, build a laundry app. If you hate traffic, build a navigation tool.

I told them that’s terrible advice for Hardtech.

I didn’t have dementia when I founded CareBand. I wasn’t 80 years old. If I had only looked in the mirror for problems to solve, I never would have built a company that protects seniors.

The biggest opportunities aren’t in your personal annoyances. They are in the “Missing Links” of massive value chains.

Here is the framework I shared with the students on how to find them.

1. Be an “Anti-Founder” (Observation > Experience)

The “Scratch Your Own Itch” model limits you to the problems of a 20-something computer literate male. That is a crowded market.

My “Anti-Founder” mindset says: Look for friction in experiences you haven’t had.

I watched my father, a geriatrician, struggle with the reality that his patients were wandering off and getting lost. The existing solutions were garbage because they were built by tech people, not care people.

• The Tech Guy thought: “Let’s build a smartwatch app.” (Seniors don’t have iPhones).
• The Telecom Guy thought: “Let’s use a GPS tracker.” (The battery dies in 12 hours).

The gap wasn’t “a better watch.” The gap was connectivity. The missing link was a way to track a person without a smartphone and without daily charging. That observation led us to long range low power wide area network technologies (LPWAN), like LoRaWAN, long before they were cool.

2. The “Value Chain Detective”

When a massive trend hits (like AI or EVs), everyone rushes to the front door. I want you to look at the plumbing.

I use a mental model called the Value Chain Detective. You ask: “If this trend succeeds, what physically breaks in the real world?”

Take Electric Vehicles (EVs). Everyone agrees they are the future. If I asked a room of students for startup ideas, they’d say:

• “Better batteries.”
• “A new car brand.”
• “A charging station app.”

Those are the “Front Door” ideas. They are crowded and capital-intensive.

Now, look at the plumbing. What breaks when 50% of cars are electric?

1. The Tires: EVs are 30% heavier and have instant torque. Standard tires wear out 2x faster and release more micro-plastics. The Opportunity: Reinforced, sensor-embedded tires or new biodegradable rubber compounds.
2. The Grid: Everyone plugs in at 6 PM. The local transformer on your street isn’t built for that load. It blows up. The Opportunity: Hardware load-balancers for neighborhood grids.
3. Safety: You can’t put out a lithium battery fire with water. Firefighters are currently helpless. The Opportunity: New chemical suppression delivery systems (drones/robots) for highway fires.

The money isn’t in the car. It’s in the consequences of the car.

3. Hardtech is the Only Real Moat

Software is often a race to the bottom. If you build a cool AI chatGPT wrapper tool today, a couple of grad students can clone it next weekend.

Hardtech is a fortress.

If your solution requires molding plastic, tuning antennas, sourcing silicon, and navigating FDA approvals, you have a natural defense against copycats.

But you have to lock it down. At CareBand, we didn’t just patent “a watch.” We patented the logic—the specific method of switching between short-range technologies (i.e. indoor Bluetooth) and long-range technologies (i.e. outdoor GPS) to save battery life (US Patent 10,168,430).

For the business students in the room, I explained: A patent isn’t a legal certificate. It is a monopoly right on a specific way of solving a problem. It turns your “project” into a tradeable asset.

The Challenge

I left the students with a worksheet (which you can download here) to run this exercise on today’s trends.

If you are looking for your next idea, stop looking at your own life. Look at:

• The Aging Population: What happens when there are more people over 80 than under 18? (Hint: It’s not just “more nurses.”)
• Data Centers: AI consumes massive amounts of water and power. What hardware fixes the heat?
• Supply Chains: As we move manufacturing back to the US, we lack the skilled labor. What robotics fill the gap?

Hardware is hard. It takes longer, costs more, and hurts more than software. But that is exactly why it’s worth doing.