The funny thing is, organizations that are actually trying to make the world a better place by helping the homeless, poor, disadvantaged etc I've never even heard of.
The way I see it is that VC's are all about world changing and making the world a better place, so long as in this better world they can still milk a market for every last penny.
When it inevitably, eventually implodes, nothing of lasting value will be lost.
That about sums it up. If people suddenly became rich through farming, you'd see people flocking to the mid-west. A lot of people claim a higher calling or passion for tech, but it's mostly just dollar signs in their eyes.
So what do you do when you are a capable programmer who isn't rich enough to work on something challenging/interesting/meaningful like electric cars or rockets? Maximize expected value. That's not immoral. That's the shitty reality of being a person of average means.
AFAICT, tech was full of passionate people (at the very least about building something, if not changing the world), way back before it had the cultural cachet that it now does. As it became increasingly clear that there was a lot of money in tech, what I call (generically) "the finance crowd"[1] flooded in. By which I mean, the masses of more-or-less competent people across the country/world who really don't care too much what they study/work in, as long as it's profitable.
The beef I have with thinking like yours is that there are plenty of us still around who were here before working in tech went from being nerdy to (relatively) "cool", and we'll be here if and when it stops being the industry du jour. It kinda sucks when people like you make the leap from "most people these days are chasing dollars and paying lip service to passion" to "anyone who claims they love/believe in what they do is just chasing $$". To this day I know plenty of people who would be here even if it didn't happen to be the currently-booming industry.
To be fair, the oblivious author is far guiltier of this than you; he's a perfect example of what he's whining about hating, and if he bothered learning anything about the history of tech in the area, he wouldn't be so quick to assume that those who claim an affinity for it are completely hollow.
Though I have to say, getting here years before the rush provides the nice consolation of not having to compete in the ludicrous housing market that the boom + lack of construction has spawned.
[1] I may be guilty of making the same over-generalizing mistake about finance, but I know quite a few people who work in finance and have been legitimately passionate about finance as a concept and the technical challenges involved therein since they were pretty young. Every single one of them has had that passion beaten out of them by the industry itself and the people they're surrounded by. By contrast, I still know tons of people in tech turning down big paychecks to just work on stuff that they like working on (I quit my job last year and am taking about a 50% paycut for similar reasons).
Yes and no. As is often bandied about, the expected value of a career in startups is lower than in many other fields, and yet people do stay after seeing through the myth.
A large part of it, at least that I've observed, is the energy, speed of execution, rapid change, the excitement and adventure of the startup world. You willingly give up expected value in exchange for a more interesting life. The stress is part of the fun, the person it moulds you into is something that becomes part of your identity. If the personal risk wasn't real, it wouldn't be fun. The man in the arena etc.
Hence, "Lottery".
If you are lucky and became incredible reach you should give back to the world. And not just the 0.1% to have media coverage (like facebook did when their cheating got out)...
Apple once were the biggest company, yet i dont know anything that would shine any good light on that company... Their last notable act was that their blackmailed the EU..
Thats why i hope no company will overgrow the countries...
I have no idea what this refers to. Care to elaborate?
Take homelessness. I'm sure there's a technical way to build housing for cheap enough to get people back into houses. But, the government legislation makes it a complete non-starter. There are so many rules and regulations, a potential entrepreneur or existing Company couldn't even begin to dream of creating a solution. It's all Locked up. Homelessness is a problem that is illegal to solve, as so many things are.
Trust me, if it were legally possible to create housing that was profitable (low enough cost to cover expenses), I'm sure there would be dozens of builders lining up around the block to do it.
The regulations aren't hard. Simply put down your JavaScript framework of the week and go out to do real work that effects change. Prepare to work long days and not get rich, but make people's lives better.
But people won't, and that's SVs problem.
But yes, in many places (SF and SV), homelessness is at least caused in part by local zoning that mostly comes from entrenched interests (existing homeowners) and blocks most new building of housing. Local zoning in the US seems to be where democracy is at it's strongest, and capitalism at it's weakest, often to detriment of most people (renters).
In the case of Uber, the class of people that benefited economically were the kind that wield a fair amount of money and political influence. This means that 1) Uber had enough revenue (and promise of future revenue) that they had the resources to fight legal battles and 2) a reasonably politically influential class of people was likely to be on their side in any potential regulatory battle. As an aside, the perceived minimum reasonable amount of regulation required for housing is a good deal higher than that of transport. This makes forward movement without the co-operation of the regulatory regime much more difficult, since working outside of the regulatory framework exposes you to real problems involving sanitation, fire safety, infrastructure, etc[1].
The homeless unfortunately _don't_ wield these kind of resources or political influence, so efforts to route around housing regulation in a way that benefits the homeless has no economic incentive backing it (and much of the time and money currently dedicated to fighting homelessness generally doesn't think of housing regulation as a problem). This isn't even entirely hypothetical; the article I linked in this comment is about a guy in LA building mini-houses for the homeless that the city keeps tearing down. I'm not even saying that they're necessarily wrong to do so, just that "derp other companies in unrelated contexts weren't stopped by regulation" doesn't even close to approach a sensible response to "regulation might impede improvement of the housing problem".
[1] http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-tiny-houses-seiz...
An illustrative example is the shocking cost-effectiveness of trailer parks. The fact that the land beneath the trailer generally isn't owned means that they're technically free of a lot of the weird distortions of the regular property market, and thus people who would otherwise be homeless are able to avoid the impossible choice of a house they can't afford or living on the sidewalk.
[1] http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21647614-poor-land-use...
The reason they are able to make money is because they created value that people are voluntarily willing to hand over money for. It is not stealing.
If you don't think what they created has value, don't buy it.
If you want to work on big, meaningful problems, here are some compelling options.
Do you think our government is broken? Join Nava (a new type of government contractor working on helping the VA fix its backlog and helping CMS move our healthcare system toward value-based-care) or 18F (a new agency within the government).
Want to save lives? There's Syapse (precision medicine to cure cancer), Clover (building a Medicare Advantage health insurance company from scratch), Omada Health (diabetes prevention through behavior change), or Grail or Freenome (liquid biopsy).
Even well-known startups are helping to solve important problems: think about the impact of Uber and Lyft on drunk driving, or of Airbnb on foreclosures. It wasn't a coincidence Airbnb was founded in the middle of a housing crisis.
I don't know green tech well, but surely somebody here will have good suggestions on what technologists can do about the environment.
I've been at Clover since January. Cannot recommend enough.
If you want to learn why, I'm always open and willing to chat about it.
Hardware heavy companies include places like SolarCity (solar power) and Tesla (battery company with a car side business :)). These tend to be more direct in their impact by actively replacing "dirty" technology.
More on the software / data side include places like PlanetLabs (satellite imagery with data) and Aclima (dense sensor networks) which tend to be more indirect by helping people make informed decisions.
Full disclaimer and shameless plug: I work at Aclima and we are totally hiring :) https://boards.greenhouse.io/aclima
The Financial Solutions Lab has tons of startups interested in tackling large financial problems. Even works on income smoothing to make hourly and seasonal workers have steady paychecks. Digit helps with automated saving. Tala uses machine learning to create credit scores for people in Kenya, Tanzania, and other developing countries. Nova Credit helps immigrant gain better credit. There are dozens more that are all helping people get access to better/fairer financial products.
If you've always been wondering if you should join a company that is trying to help people, send me an email at vincent [at] omadahealth.com, we'll grab a coffee!
Like the article states, there are lots of "big" problems, like homelessness, healthcare, and inequality. These are usually the realms of government and non-profits. While some of these are startups or institutions with novel ideas / methods, I'm not sure that entrepreneurship solves everything.
I'm just not sure you can make a working business out of any problem. But I may just be a quitter.
Bottom line: people believe what they want to believe, most of the time.
But a government can grow, grow, grow while pretending to solve the problem, failing, and "correcting" for the problem that caused them to fail.
The moral counterargument is that people should be allowed to decide for themselves and for their own government what is and is not a problem. If, under those basic conditions, no policy can work, then those policies are still immoral.
And the moral hazard counterargument is that "qui bono" often fits both sides. In this problem, there is certainly merit to the argument that the IPCC, politicians and scientists involved, the governments, and ... stand to benefit as well. Increased budgets, more people, bigger organisations, more experiments, more things to manage, more power to tell others what to do. Worse, this money and power will come at the expense of the "bootstraps" folk.
Bottom line: usually people on both sides of an argument believe what they want to believe. Exceptions exist, but not nearly as much as I thought when I was 16 years old.
This is why science should work in the hard, provable only, way. That any result can be duplicated by anyone who wants to do so, and anyone should be given the tools to convince themselves any given theory works. Climate science is a bit lacking on this front, to put it mildly.
Reducing drug use to some significantly lower level is very possible, ending it is not. Going to Mars is easy, colonizing Mars is a pipe dream. Governments can solve a wide range of problems reasonably efficiently, but open ended goals without a clear stopping point become unbound problems.
This is empirically false. For example, voluntary contributions to a public good are not a Nash equilibrium, but we observe substantial contributions in experiments with real humans.
It's also weird to argue this and then argue against govt intervention. If you don't think non-Nash solutions to public goods problems such as global warming work, then what alternative is there but government intervention?
I think the problem is that a lot of the low hanging fruit has been picked. It’s pretty hard for a CS student out of college to tackle a healthcare problem with no experience in the matter..
I've heard that sentiment constantly for the last 40 years. I guarantee you that there's low hanging fruit dangling right in front of us, and there's a billion dollar company forming in a garage right now to pick it. It'll all be obvious in hindsight, and we'll kick ourselves for not seeing it.
A variant of this, start with a small chunk of a big problem then move with the users to the problem they identify.
Just take a company, hire lots of people that fit into the western "strategic genius" stereotype, create lots of hype, inflate the value by hiring lots of people and expanding, clone lots of technology that already exists, then when it's time to actually make revenue, sell it really expensively.
The value of something is relative. The entire idea is to inflate the value of a company as much as possible, then sell it, then repeat the cycle again and again.
Then, in some cases it might be fine to buy a company because of their intellectual property such as their patent portfolio, their franchises, branding, know-how... but if you buy a company because of its software, make sure you are not buying a communal pot of spaghetti. Send a tech person to make sure you are not getting scammed into a technical debt nightmare.
Facebook was a way to find people you met at parties at Harvard.
Apple was a company that made computers for hobbyists.
The idea is that you learn to become a good entrepreneur solving the smaller problems.
For that matter "Zero to One" also argues that people should aim high and do important things.
I'm kinda apprehensive of what would happen if SV got a hold of these problems and tried to "solve" them.
The solution is not startups. The solution is people organizing for better government policy (single payer healthcare, etc).
Full disclosure: I interviewed with the USDS but declined the job offer.
I've made at least a dozen posts explaining the Stagnation Hypothesis, there's a long list of people in Silicon Valley who take it seriously. The basic idea is that since '73 the rate of change has slowed down. This excludes computation of course. It is an explanation for present day economic stresses in the West that I believe hangs together far better than the mainstream theories that get news headlines.
You understand that this sounds like the insane ramblings of a mad man?
Why do you think our economic systems mains focus should be innovation? As opposed to stability, and constant flow or work and money?
And you want us to reevaluate ditching this system? Wow.
Financial technology is rapidly expanding in the city as well, and only the older players in that space have substantial ties to traditional Uber For _____ startup VC firms. Companies like Tally that are genuinely trying to change the relationship. Even big companies like Capital One (my employer) are moving into SF to recruit and acquire because it's where we can recruit the top talent away from people bored on working on Adtech.
There are LOTS of great places to work, not just in the Peninsula & Valley of California but all over the country. SF is just nice because it's a small city with a high density of tech jobs. But I hate to see it defined by the well-publicized caricature of the startup scene. Honestly, it bothers me enough to lead me to bad decision about it.
There aren't that many articles about biotechnology in Boston, for instance.
The software paradigm has captured a great deal of mindshare.
Genetic engineers will be the new software engineers and software engineers will be the new plumbers.
That said, I do agree with the general point of the article. I cringe whenever I talk with the latest would-be entrepreneur who is "solving" the current trendy non-problem.
Successful people in Silicon Valley are not concerned by these issues. They can afford to pay physicians without relying on public generosity, they can send their kids in private schools if they're not happy with public ones, they're neither homeless nor likely to become so (by hypothesis : they're successful), and they're not poor.
So basically, the subjects that are mentioned are really problems only for people who have a high sense of altruism.
Why are people not as altruistic as the author? I don't know, but it's probably just a fact.
do other countries and health care markets have lower costs and better results because they have better websites, apps, data sets and machine learning algorithms?
I think the problem is this guy is the only person I've met who describes his current venture as a stepping stone towards a grander vision. Most people just see the dollar signs right in front of them.
"Right now, entrepreneurs are trying to fix things that aren’t broken. And we can all name a lot of things that are broken: healthcare, education, homelessness and poverty, food waste, climate change…"
Damn right. Those are real problems.
But then the author praises Elon Musk for sending people to Mars. For prioritising space exploration over alleviating famine, poverty, illiteracy, whatnot.
The author's utter inability and unwillingness to distinguish between frivolous and meaningful is precisely the problem he's denouncing.
I don't personally subscribe to this belief, but many people do.
For example, consider that:
Sometimes people don't want to be helped (see: many homeless)
Sometimes leaders don't want their people to be helped, because they gain from keeping them down (see: African warlords / government leaders embezzling aid)
When faced with SOCIAL problems like these, it's no wonder that someone of a 'hacker' mindset like Elon instead prefers to devote his time to solving problems which instead have technological roadblocks (well, maybe not entirely applicable in the case of Tesla or SolarCity).
Sometimes, its all right to work on smaller problems until you are ready for the bigger ones.
It's important to be specific here that "technology" does not necessarily mean an app, or code, or even computers. It means taking advantage of the rich ecosystem of products, services, and talent at our disposal today and improving something.
"Disruption" should be a positive change: Removing the old and replacing it with something new that's better in every respect.
Sadly "disrupting" companies often replace the old with some new thing that's not as good, but is more convenient, or is exactly the same just minus the middle man. That's not innovation, that's just optimization.
So the end result is more fuel efficient cars, faster planes, etc.
I'm interested in startup idea patterns, Care isn't one I've seen or heard before. Are there any examples of startups using this pattern and succeeding?
Not dying.
Taxis existed before Uber.
Uber definitely changed the economics of dropping in to visit your grandkids or using a DD vs driving drunk vs ride sharing.
