Very good advice. People are more willing to have a 30 minute conversation about how to improve their business rather than a 30 minute conversation figuring out why to not hire someone.
The idea of creating leads is a very fine line. For someone to head up business development, why not? What's the worst thing that can happen?
eBay is relatively easy. Create a fraud detection algorithm (can work on either side of the business) or a better reliabity metric than pure % approval.
Intel is harder as I don't know it as well. Is there enough public info on the chips to write something on top of them to speed up software written for them? Perhaps some kind of compiler optimization?
In both cases the result is important, but just demonstrating effort would go a long way.
The idea of creating leads is a very fine line. For someone to head up business development, why not? What's the worst thing that can happen?