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Stupid Apps and Changing the World

118 points by jimsojim 11y ago

LargeCompanies 11y ago
So, in 2007 I invented the first social alarm clock(sleep.fm) and wow people hated it. I always took a lot of flack for it ... even would come to read Hacker News back in the day and stumble upon others here ripping it apart randomly. It hasn't gone mainstream just yet, but since it's invention 100s of developers, huge pop stars and Fortune 50/500 companies have created social alarm clocks.
- LargeCompanies 11y ago
  Still getting downvoted years later or was it something else I wrote there?
  - mratzloff 11y ago
    What does your comment have to do with the topic at hand?
    - LargeCompanies 11y ago
      The author speaks of ideas that look stupid and are ridiculed when they are first published on the web, as mine was. Nowadays there isn't any ridicule seen in the headlines, press and comments from users/prospective users after so many have been created. It still hasn't hit the big time, but maybe it will. It just needs to be done properly so it truly makes the sound of your alarm clock ALWAYS wake you up with a smile or giggle or something informative/more useful then just your regular lame loud alarm tone.
nostrademons 11y ago
I've been thinking a bunch about why it's the trivial projects (Altair, the WWW, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, AirBnB) that change the world, and the change-the-world projects (Xanadu, WebTV, Chandler, WebVan) end up becoming trivial. I think it's because of a quirk of human psychology. The value of a product to us, as a user, is about how well it fits into our daily lives. "Fits into" is the operative phrase: to get adopted, a product needs to be nearly invisible, and fit into what we're already doing so well that it's just a seamless augmentation of our own capabilities. Such products naturally seem trivial. By contrast, we judge the importance of a project by a combination of a.) how difficult it was to do and b.) how many people it affects. Both of these are anticorrelated with how likely it is to fit into our lives. Difficult projects are usually complex; that complexity tends to spill over into the user interface and make it harder for us to make sense of how we would use the product. (Indeed, when moonshots like Google or Tesla succeed, it's usually because they manage to put a complex problem behind a really simple & familiar interface.) And aiming to please a large audience means handling a lot of corner cases, which again bloats the user interface and makes it harder for any one person to adopt it. Once you've got lots of happy people adopting the product, they can serve as teachers and evangelists to bring a little more complexity to the wider world. But if you build something designed to change the world from the start, it tends to "bounce off" of the world, as it doesn't actually fit into the daily needs of any one person.
- petra 11y ago
  This sounds somewhat like the "worse is better" philosophy - optimizing for virality/simplicity over quality and completeness.
  - sidi 11y ago
    Reminds of Atwood's law: http://blog.codinghorror.com/the-principle-of-least-power/ http://blog.codinghorror.com/the-principle-of-least-power/
- notahacker 11y ago
  > I've been thinking a bunch about why it's the trivial projects (Altair, the WWW, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, AirBnB) that change the world, and the change-the-world projects (Xanadu, WebTV, Chandler, WebVan) end up becoming trivial. Selection bias, mostly. I mean, "change the world" projects also includes the likes of Apple Computer, Amazon, Edison's laboratory at Menlo Park and the World Health Organization. All of these have changed the world more than Reddit ever will. And whilst what Tim Berners Lee and Zuckerberg started off might have looked trivial, I'm pretty sure they were motivated by a belief that they could change the way people communicated, and not simply develop X for Y. scale. profit. There's nothing wrong with doing the latter of course, and a business that revolutionises the world... of analysis of social media sentiments for digital marketers might well deliver far more radical improvements to the lives of its employees and early investors than companies with loftier and less well-defined aims. But the argument that this talent might have actually improved the world more by doing something as mundane and often-criticized as helping a fund pick stocks remains.
  - nostrademons 11y ago
    Apple Computer was also trivial when it started - it was a circuit board without a case, that hobbyists had to assemble itself, and needed an external TV to display any output. Amazon had big ambitions, but they started selling books via Perl script. I remember when it first started attracting media attention in 1996, I wondered why the hell people could get so excited about selling books. If a similar startup launched today - say, call it book.ly - would you consider it a "change the world" company? Edison's laboratory isn't a fair comparison: at the time it was established, Edison had already been inventing things for a decade. It would be like looking at Google in 2005 instead of 1995. (Google, along with Elon Musk's companies and Pixar, actually are the exception that the article talks about, where they seem crazily ambitious from the beginning.) Edison's first patent was for an electric vote recorder, which a.) sounds a lot less impressive and b.) didn't exactly change the world. The WHO is an entirely different beast: it's an arm of an international organization, established under the umbrella of the United Nations. I would say it qualifies, though - it's under the "do something crazily ambitious" clause in Sam Altman's article. Indeed, even then it took 25 years to go from founding to the eradication of smallpox. To find examples that actually contradict the point, you need to find companies that a.) appeared to outsiders, not just their founders, as crazily ambitious b.) at the time of their founding and c.) actually did change the world. There are relatively few of these; there are some, but it's a definite minority. Most of the time, if you think of an invention as having changed the world from the beginning, it's because your "beginning" was actually several years into its development, and your perception of its importance is colored by events & adoption that have already happened.
credo 11y ago
The first piece of advice "don’t claim you’re changing the world until you’ve changed it" makes sense. A tiny minority of founders really work on products that change the world. Many just hope that their company is acquired and that is how most "successful" startups "exit". The so-called "exit" is a badge of honor (even if the company had been through a fire-sale or acqui-hire) There are other good points in the column, but I think Sam is a bit too defensive when he says "ignore the haters and work on whatever you find interesting. The internet commenters and journalists that say you’re working on something that doesn’t matter are probably not building anything at all themselves." If someone is a "hater", does it really matter if they are building anything else ? Tesla has its critics, social-networking-for-cats will also have its critics. Both companies may assert that they are changing the world. However, I don't think it makes sense for the latter to use the former as an example of why its critics are all "haters". Of course, I don't mean to suggest that the latter deserves its critics. I'm just saying that there is no need to circle the wagons against these so-called "haters". If you think your startup is worth it, just work on it. Most startups don't change the world in a big way, but that shouldn't stop you from trying.
- girvo 11y ago
  > If you think your startup is worth it, just work on it. Isn't that exactly what Sam is saying?
blizkreeg 11y ago
I tweeted about this yesterday and I firmly believe the conversation around this would be a lot more fruitful if startups & founders would evaluate and focus their companies on _helping the world_ & stop with this "changing the world" bullshit. The latter is arrogant, presumptuous, and often not true; the former is a genuine desire and wish. Few people and companies, in the history of our existence, arguably, truly change the world (i.e., make history and alter our lives for better). And none of them claim to be changing the world while they're doing so. Everyone else and every other company is a footnote but that doesn't mean it cannot help people and our world at large in some way while alive.
- joelrunyon 11y ago
  The main underlying difference between the two is: Helping the world = focus on customers. Change the world = focus on the company. Part of the problem is the innate need of companies in SV to pitch themselves to VCs and in order to do that - they need to hyperbolize their mission - hence why you get a lot more "WE'RE GOING TO CHANGE THE WORLD" blathering.
  - LoSboccacc 11y ago
    "the uber of x" "trainers hate him" "you wont believe what happened next" Those are all consequences of the current internet culture where everyhing is a product. Some are really pitching to VCs, some are maybe good idea, most are just following the trends that works to generate interest. The catch is curiosity doesn't mean conversions and while views generated by clickbaiting may seem good in a pitch value is mostly in the actual returning customers. This had been know from ages, but today it is only the last bullet point of 'growth hackers', known today under minimise churn rate. As the weight moved to virality and marketing views to revenue plummeted and at the current advertising cost per click to fuel the gtowth of apps with a 0.1% conversion or less you really need millions. And here we get back to the main point: those millions to drive views to lure VCs for more millions to build more views are not actually making the product any better. Are making for big headlines at most. And the fun part is, they call whose whom suceed unicorn because in this system of advertisement fueled growth means they're mostly pumping millions in ads on whatever, without any confirmation on the actual product sustenaibility beyond the growth spiral, and having to have a million user before discovering if the product is actually useful is a plan so retarded that it doesn't faze me chances of one of this suceeding are as good as winning the lottery.
Detrus 11y ago
Facebook, Twitter, reddit, the Internet itself, the iPhone, and on and on and on—most people dismissed these things as incremental or trivial when they first came out. I would say Twitter and Facebook in particular are still are incremental and trivial as billion dollar companies and always will be. The web is a dumbed down version of older hypertext systems and hasn't shaken that legacy in 25 years. The real problem with the pace of innovation is these things weren't trivial to build, that's why the best we can do is incrementalism. And that comes from the foundation systems we use. When something near the bottom of a technology stack/pyramid offloads complexity to the top, it becomes a nightmare to get anything done. For example, we don't have a natural language command line for regular/stupid users. Instead we have point and grunt GUIs. That means apps have to be monolithic. Apps can't work seamlessly with one another even if the underlying tech allows it. And from that small bit of complexity we get billion dollar walled gardens. More detailed read http://pchiusano.github.io/2013-05-22/future-of-software.html http://pchiusano.github.io/2013-05-22/future-of-software.htm... Instead of a simple standard interface for users to access various services we have http://static3.businessinsider.com/image/4dd4d1cf4bd7c8c90f000000-1200-924/craigslist%20andrew%20parker.png http://static3.businessinsider.com/image/4dd4d1cf4bd7c8c90f0... which kills discoverability and creates a constant drag on people to learn a million UIs. And then we hope to fix all that with another layer of AI http://whoo.ps/2015/02/23/futures-of-text http://whoo.ps/2015/02/23/futures-of-text You can fool yourself about worse is better while making a few bucks. You can wall yourself off from the naysayers. But the real impact on the economy and humanity from eBay, AirBB and FaceTwitter is low.
- beambot 11y ago
  Please give us some examples of companies you feel have "real impact on the economy and humanity"...? Edit: Also, successful companies that started out with those ambitions?
  - eliteraspberrie 11y ago
    To single one out, the Full Belly Project is a great example. Their Universal Nut Sheller has had a real, measurable impact on economies. In general terms, several industries have had a real, measurable impact on economies. The scooter, the diesel truck, the steel hulled boat, the washing machine, the cell phone... There are many successful companies in these industries that have a real impact on humanity and make a profit too. I find it astonishing that you couldn't think of examples of businesses that have had a bigger impact on humanity than Twitter and Facebook.
deleted 11y ago
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rajacombinator 11y ago
Good advice although somewhat contrary to YC's push to take on "world changing" projects! (Ahem fusion reactors ...)
deleted 11y ago
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gs7 11y ago
Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8149162 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8149162
codingdave 11y ago
I would take Sam's final words of advice one step farther - don't claim you are changing the world just because you are changing one business industry. There is more to the world than that.
vas1 11y ago
I think the key here is that as long as your building something and are enjoying doing it in the process, who cares if its useful. Tinker long enough and you might fall onto something revolutionary.
whatwha 11y ago
I have yet to see a working definition for "change the world." And if there is one, who creates this definition? VC? Journalists? Once I see a workable definition, my next question is why "change the world" is a metric, a goal, or whatever it is. Given your answer, what does that imply? Maybe the phrase should be more truthful... something like "make a meaningful contribution". Maybe this is just an American buzz phrase and I am not getting it? To be honest, I am getting a little tired of it. There's that Woodstock generation song from the 60's with the chorus: "I'd love to change the world, but I don't know what to do..." I guess software VC and tech journalists have now solved that issue? Funny, but "changing the world" (in the idelistic sense of the song) today seems a much more daunting task than it did back then, even with the addition of cable TV and now another communication medium being offered by the telcos and cable companies. The world is better entertained and possibly better informed. The "change" it led to is some ridiculously strong monopolies that like to maintain status quo.
- effie 11y ago
  In Czech/Slovak Republic, it would sound quite preposterous and pathetic if someone claimed "and this will change the world" or "this will make the world a better place", so thankfully we do not usually get this nonsense, although generally the pathetic PR-speak continues to creep in into public communications. I recall there is a nice Czech song by the old group Nedvědi+Brontosauři with a verse going "...I wished to rebuild the world, yeah that happens, so many of us did and still nothing...".
  - prodmerc 11y ago
    And that's why you never will (change the world). Or the people who can will move elsewhere. If someone in CZ would invent a new battery and claim it will change the world, they'd be ridiculed even if they can prove it works. But not in major tech hubs, most of which are still in the US. They'd get money. In a world where exaggeration is the norm, it's hard to break through with understatements and even normal statements (like stating pure facts and refraining from saying preposterous things like "world changing"). "Aim for the stars and you'll land on the Moon" holds true for most businesses imo...
tajano 11y ago
If you're accused of working on stupid, trivial things, and Facebook and Twitter are your best counterexamples, it's a little pathetic. It's very easy to conflate making a lot of money with doing something that matters. At the end of the day, they're ad-serving time-sucks that delivers CandyCrush and advertisements and an endless stream of selfies from our most annoying, narcissistic acquaintances. Almost every founder, engineer, Stanford grad, and VC has been chanting "We're changing the world!" for the last eight years. Stop it. It's trite and annoying and it pisses people off. It doesn't piss people off because your current batch of products are half-baked and stupid. It pisses people off because your very best products of the last decade are, at the end of the day, stupid and trivial and really haven't changed the world in a very positive way. It pisses people off because it doesn't hold water outside the myopic Silicon Valley bubble, where everyone tells each other "We're changing the world" often enough that they actually buy into it.
- joelrunyon 11y ago
  > At the end of the day, they're ad-serving time-sucks I can understand how you could say this about FB, but Twitter seems much more useful as a protocol. Maybe it's not the best example of a great VC business, but you can't deny that it's changed how people communicate & especially how we get news.
  - rtpg 11y ago
    I'd also like to point out that FB has served a great purpose for me and pretty much all my social circle. It lets me keep up with people I would _otherwise not bother to talk with_ by seeing what's happening in their lives. It lets me organize events and coordinate with ease. It lets me share things like photos and video (both privately and publicly) super easily Sure, technically, it's "incremental improvements" on blogs + RSS + email, but only in the same sense that C is an incremental improvement on Brainfuck. It's made a lot of these concepts easy to use for non-nerds on a large scale. Dismissing Facebook ignores the social impact it's had on a huge amount of people.
- cgriswald 11y ago
  That's a rather blithe and shallow criticism of Facebook and Twitter. I could easily complain about email because of spam, but it would totally disregard its usefulness and impact. (As for Candy Crush invites and annoying selfies, Facebook actually provides tools to deal with those problems. RTFM?) Facebook in particular has allowed me to keep in touch with a much larger social circle. It has made it easier to meet people, establish friendships, maintain distance relationships, and keep in touch with more of my extended family. It allows me to plan events quickly and on short notice, and get quick feed back on who will be attending. It helps me learn about new events or activities that I otherwise might have missed.
amandahugnkiss9 11y ago
"The internet commenters and journalists that say you’re working on something that doesn’t matter are probably not building anything at all themselves." Mic dropped... exit stage left.
nattaggart 11y ago
It seems that there is a much higher threshold of "changing the world" applied to the private sector than to government or non-profits. I routinely hear people in relatively less influential organizations of the latter make such claims without coming off as arrogant. This makes me think that people in Silicon Valley aren't arrogant as much as they tend to break an unstated social rule: One can't claim to be doing good while making a profit (even if what you're doing is in fact net-good).
- x5n1 11y ago
  The world is already changing. It changes every day.
- idlewords 11y ago
  This social rule has been elegantly hacked by no longer bothering to make a profit.
  - TheOtherHobbes 11y ago
    Or doing any real good. Part of the problem is that markets don't distinguish between "screw the little guy (or the clueless VC) and make a quick buck" returns, and "have customers flocking to you because your product is awesome and it makes them awesome too" returns. As far as markets are concerned, there's only money. Accountants and auditors know nothing about social value, and care less. How can you measure social value when there are no accepted metrics?
titzer 11y ago
The language people use is just a function of the funding environment. With VC cash in the billions for the taking, the loudest, most arrogant and most self-deluded have a leg up on those that are quietly building something solid. So no wonder that environment tends to produce louder, more obnoxious people.
- seiji 11y ago
  Great point. The most important VCs want to fund the most important companies, so everybody has to ego-inflate themselves into being the best in the world at everything or else nobody will even look at you.
jwr 11y ago
The most important sentence in that article is the very last one: > The internet commenters and journalists that say you’re working on something that doesn’t matter are probably not building anything at all themselves. I live by this approach. If you build something, you will encounter lots of critics. Most of them do not do anything meaningful and produce no value. Do not listen to those. Only take to heart what you hear from people that actually built something. Actually, the most extreme example are todays "journalists & bloggers" — very few provide value. So if you get criticized by Ars Technica, you should think about what they said carefully. But pay no attention to what yet another news-regurgitating site wrote.
- rtpg 11y ago
  I don't think that's the best example of dismissing criticism (basically an ad hominem). Just like a car critic doesn't need to build cars, the Times doesn't need to build an Uber clone to comment on the fact that in the long term, Uber will likely lower taxi driver income.
  - jwr 11y ago
    So what is a „car critic”? Why would I value his/her opinion? In order for me to value someone's opinion, that someone needs to earn my respect. People who have built something (anything!) get that respect automatically. And if you want to write about cars, you don't necessarily have to build cars — you just have to have built something. There is too much criticism from people who built nothing, and provide little or no value. All they can do is criticize.
kriro 11y ago
Warning, the following only relates to small remark from the article... I really like the remark "noone understands hyperexponential growth". I've always wondered if it's possible to learn understanding this better. I'd like to think that most things can be learned and improved on at least to some degree so it might be worthwhile to investigate this. I used to play online poker for a living and I feel it improved my intuitive understanding of limited chance events quite a bit (and taught me to think a lot more in expected value than in actual results which is very valuable imo). My hypothesis would be that a pool of (good) poker players understand something like every day variance better than a comparable sample with no poker background. There's some counter evidence that may be related (econ students routinely know very little about basic econ concepts) but these examples tend to be about theoretical and not practical knowledge. Not sure what other groups one could include, statisticians or people who use statistics regularly (data scientists, data centric QM, investment bankers maybe) Constructing an instrument (questionnaire?) to measure intuitive understanding of statistics is probably non-trivial. +I'm already having nightmares of endless Frequentist vs. Bayesian debates. Afterwards, the interesting thing would be to construct creative (I'm thinking games due to my background but it could be anything) learning environments where an improved understanding of (hyper)exponential growth is developed.
kriro 11y ago
I like the advice to not claim to change the world but it also seems that by and large to get VC you kind of have to claim exactly this (at least implicitly). Hypergrowth potential or go home. While this isn't the official mantra of VC it's probably a lot harder to get funding for a humble idea that you also pitch humbly. Maybe a sub-YC with the explicit idea of "pitch your startup with no hypergrowth potential" would be an interesting experiment. Ironically I think YC is probably the best about not looking too much at hypergrowth potential and focusing more on execution potential but they are also the most likely to try a sub batch like this (based on the recent "superearlystage pitches only" and including non-profits etc.)
netcan 11y ago
'Most of the “intermediate” companies, although it would take a separate long post to explain why, end up not having a big impact' This is something I can't quite accept at face value, though I'm open to convincing. It kind of depends on the terms you're think in, anyway. Sounds worthy of a long post. I mean, how do we class twitter or whatsapp? World Changers. On one hand, they have that hyperexponential growth in users usefulness. They have had "political scale" implications. On the other hand, we can speculate that had these specific services not been started, other would have. Do they count as toys or hyperambitious endeavours at the start? Being network effect apps, they have that need/implication for lots of users. They are also "toys" in the sense that they are relatively simple apps. I'd like to hear about the terms he's thinking in, basically. Regarding the SV hate, I think this is more about (1) not understanding low probability, high risk than exponential growth and (2) the arrogance of saying you are going to change the world while being cashed up. IE, when investors pay $100k for a 1% of a company that may be worth $10bn at some point, that's assuming an awful lot of companies that failed to become worth $10bn. People see hundreds of companies reported on (or in person). Even if they're good at picking out potential, they see that effectively all of these companies are ridiculously unlikely to ever reach anything like that. Yet, they are talking in these grandiose terms. Sounds delusional and arrogant.
bambax 11y ago
The point with changing the world is you should change it for the better. It's very arguable that Facebook and Uber, for example, are changing the world for the worse.
- br_smartass 11y ago
  Honestly, I can barely stand HN and the startup world anymore, why not be up front about it already and say it's all about being rich and escaping the common folk disgusting lifes? How is Facebook an example of "changing the world" in any relevant way? How is Apple any different of other big corporation of yesterday like IBM, GE, Ford? To me this is startup gospel with zero substance("ohhhhh network effects! It's like special effects!"). This is mainstream culture, but I guess the "idealist hacker maker underdog" myth is just too good to let go.
noobie 11y ago
I am reading this with a grain of salt given that Ycombinator backed this "world changing" idea. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10032671 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10032671
- hugh4 11y ago
  My generous assumption is that the ridiculous home-delivery business model is designed to get people talking ahead of a fully intended pivot to selling the condoms in stores. Or something. Otherwise it's a ridiculously terrible idea. The number of people needing condoms, yet wanting to wait an hour instead of popping down to the convenience store, is not something you can build a business around.
- zamalek 11y ago
  One way to look at it as world-changing is a reduction in STD spread and a reduction in unwanted conception. Condoms are world-changers and this brings them closer to people who could make bad decisions because a condom is out-of-reach. It's like Uber: taxi in an app. Think about all the lives saved because of the convenience of Uber when drinking. I was taxying about before Uber and it wasn't a pleasant experience: you always had to have cash on hand and 2AM calls were expensive. Now it's super convenient, no cash, no problems, no excuses and it saves lives - it just wasn't obvious at the outset that this is where it would lead to. There is definitely some shit that won't make a difference, though. Condoms on demand is not one of those things that won't make a difference; whether that startup fails or succeeds comes down to delivery (specifically: how fast).
CPLX 11y ago
"One, don’t claim you’re changing the world until you’ve changed it." Indeed. I daresay that would solve a good chunk of the perceived arrogance problem in one fell swoop.
joeyspn 11y ago
Not a single app that sprouts from intelectual curiosity is "stupid". It's the use stereotypical marketing wording like "change the world" or "join the revolution" what makes a product (and its founders) look stupid.
jpeterson 11y ago
These apps "change the world" only if your "world" is the silicon valley echo chamber. The real world is only moderately impacted, and only for a limited time, even by an anomaly like Facebook. Seriously, to all the silicon valley startups and investors: get over yourself. You are not changing the world. *EDIT: There are a lot of interesting and cool things going on in silicon valley, perhaps more than in any other place in the world. To that, I agree. The whole "changing the world" thing is a bit much, though, and I believe anyone who claims this is either overestimating their startup or underestimating the world (or both).
- 3pt14159 11y ago
  A third of divorce filings in the United States contain the word Facebook. People are writing whole books (or incite revolutions) on iPhones while they're on the bus. I'm not saying that Facebook is as important as genetically modified rice on a worldwide scale, but it's up there.
  - mratzloff 11y ago
    I suspect that any marriage that was destroyed by Facebook was probably not long for this world to begin with.
    - reagency 11y ago
      Marriages, cars, houses, computer programs and businesses all take work, are subject to rot, and can be rebuilt. If every bump in marriage doomed it, nearly no marriage would survive. The viability is a combination of all the negative and positive pressures.
  - forgotpwtomain 11y ago
    > iPhones while they're on the bus Writing books on iphones? Seriously, that's neither beneficial nor effective -- smartphones might be changing the world but certainly not because it's helping people write books. > A third of divorce filings in the United States contain the word Facebook. Do you have a link for this statistic? Do 90% of divorce filings also contain the word `cheated`? And would they have contained `journal` or `letter` 70 years ago in as much as they cite email or cellphones? The medium of expression is changing but that's not the same as `world-changing` not to say they aren't linked, but surely divorce is a terrible example.
curiousjorge 11y ago
Send me a 'Yo' if you think this article is cool
alexandercrohde 11y ago
What's hyper-exponential growth supposed to mean? "User base doubles every month" (so 2^x) but then "the value is the square of the number nodes" which yields 2^2x, which still has the same properties as 2^x. Mix a dash of math, a pinch halo effect from fame, and suddenly something meaningless sounds meaningful.

118 points by jimsojim 11y ago

So, in 2007 I invented the first social alarm clock(sleep.fm) and wow people hated it. I always took a lot of flack for it ... even would come to read Hacker News back in the day and stumble upon others here ripping it apart randomly. It hasn't gone mainstream just yet, but since it's invention 100s of developers, huge pop stars and Fortune 50/500 companies have created social alarm clocks.

LargeCompanies 11y ago
Still getting downvoted years later or was it something else I wrote there?
- mratzloff 11y ago
  What does your comment have to do with the topic at hand?
  - LargeCompanies 11y ago
    The author speaks of ideas that look stupid and are ridiculed when they are first published on the web, as mine was. Nowadays there isn't any ridicule seen in the headlines, press and comments from users/prospective users after so many have been created. It still hasn't hit the big time, but maybe it will. It just needs to be done properly so it truly makes the sound of your alarm clock ALWAYS wake you up with a smile or giggle or something informative/more useful then just your regular lame loud alarm tone.

nostrademons 11y ago

I've been thinking a bunch about why it's the trivial projects (Altair, the WWW, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, AirBnB) that change the world, and the change-the-world projects (Xanadu, WebTV, Chandler, WebVan) end up becoming trivial. I think it's because of a quirk of human psychology. The value of a product to us, as a user, is about how well it fits into our daily lives. "Fits into" is the operative phrase: to get adopted, a product needs to be nearly invisible, and fit into what we're already doing so well that it's just a seamless augmentation of our own capabilities. Such products naturally seem trivial. By contrast, we judge the importance of a project by a combination of a.) how difficult it was to do and b.) how many people it affects. Both of these are anticorrelated with how likely it is to fit into our lives. Difficult projects are usually complex; that complexity tends to spill over into the user interface and make it harder for us to make sense of how we would use the product. (Indeed, when moonshots like Google or Tesla succeed, it's usually because they manage to put a complex problem behind a really simple & familiar interface.) And aiming to please a large audience means handling a lot of corner cases, which again bloats the user interface and makes it harder for any one person to adopt it. Once you've got lots of happy people adopting the product, they can serve as teachers and evangelists to bring a little more complexity to the wider world. But if you build something designed to change the world from the start, it tends to "bounce off" of the world, as it doesn't actually fit into the daily needs of any one person.

petra 11y ago
This sounds somewhat like the "worse is better" philosophy - optimizing for virality/simplicity over quality and completeness.
- sidi 11y ago
  Reminds of Atwood's law: http://blog.codinghorror.com/the-principle-of-least-power/ http://blog.codinghorror.com/the-principle-of-least-power/
notahacker 11y ago
> I've been thinking a bunch about why it's the trivial projects (Altair, the WWW, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, AirBnB) that change the world, and the change-the-world projects (Xanadu, WebTV, Chandler, WebVan) end up becoming trivial. Selection bias, mostly. I mean, "change the world" projects also includes the likes of Apple Computer, Amazon, Edison's laboratory at Menlo Park and the World Health Organization. All of these have changed the world more than Reddit ever will. And whilst what Tim Berners Lee and Zuckerberg started off might have looked trivial, I'm pretty sure they were motivated by a belief that they could change the way people communicated, and not simply develop X for Y. scale. profit. There's nothing wrong with doing the latter of course, and a business that revolutionises the world... of analysis of social media sentiments for digital marketers might well deliver far more radical improvements to the lives of its employees and early investors than companies with loftier and less well-defined aims. But the argument that this talent might have actually improved the world more by doing something as mundane and often-criticized as helping a fund pick stocks remains.
- nostrademons 11y ago
  Apple Computer was also trivial when it started - it was a circuit board without a case, that hobbyists had to assemble itself, and needed an external TV to display any output. Amazon had big ambitions, but they started selling books via Perl script. I remember when it first started attracting media attention in 1996, I wondered why the hell people could get so excited about selling books. If a similar startup launched today - say, call it book.ly - would you consider it a "change the world" company? Edison's laboratory isn't a fair comparison: at the time it was established, Edison had already been inventing things for a decade. It would be like looking at Google in 2005 instead of 1995. (Google, along with Elon Musk's companies and Pixar, actually are the exception that the article talks about, where they seem crazily ambitious from the beginning.) Edison's first patent was for an electric vote recorder, which a.) sounds a lot less impressive and b.) didn't exactly change the world. The WHO is an entirely different beast: it's an arm of an international organization, established under the umbrella of the United Nations. I would say it qualifies, though - it's under the "do something crazily ambitious" clause in Sam Altman's article. Indeed, even then it took 25 years to go from founding to the eradication of smallpox. To find examples that actually contradict the point, you need to find companies that a.) appeared to outsiders, not just their founders, as crazily ambitious b.) at the time of their founding and c.) actually did change the world. There are relatively few of these; there are some, but it's a definite minority. Most of the time, if you think of an invention as having changed the world from the beginning, it's because your "beginning" was actually several years into its development, and your perception of its importance is colored by events & adoption that have already happened.

credo 11y ago

The first piece of advice "don’t claim you’re changing the world until you’ve changed it" makes sense. A tiny minority of founders really work on products that change the world. Many just hope that their company is acquired and that is how most "successful" startups "exit". The so-called "exit" is a badge of honor (even if the company had been through a fire-sale or acqui-hire) There are other good points in the column, but I think Sam is a bit too defensive when he says "ignore the haters and work on whatever you find interesting. The internet commenters and journalists that say you’re working on something that doesn’t matter are probably not building anything at all themselves." If someone is a "hater", does it really matter if they are building anything else ? Tesla has its critics, social-networking-for-cats will also have its critics. Both companies may assert that they are changing the world. However, I don't think it makes sense for the latter to use the former as an example of why its critics are all "haters". Of course, I don't mean to suggest that the latter deserves its critics. I'm just saying that there is no need to circle the wagons against these so-called "haters". If you think your startup is worth it, just work on it. Most startups don't change the world in a big way, but that shouldn't stop you from trying.

girvo 11y ago
> If you think your startup is worth it, just work on it. Isn't that exactly what Sam is saying?

blizkreeg 11y ago

I tweeted about this yesterday and I firmly believe the conversation around this would be a lot more fruitful if startups & founders would evaluate and focus their companies on _helping the world_ & stop with this "changing the world" bullshit. The latter is arrogant, presumptuous, and often not true; the former is a genuine desire and wish. Few people and companies, in the history of our existence, arguably, truly change the world (i.e., make history and alter our lives for better). And none of them claim to be changing the world while they're doing so. Everyone else and every other company is a footnote but that doesn't mean it cannot help people and our world at large in some way while alive.

joelrunyon 11y ago
The main underlying difference between the two is: Helping the world = focus on customers. Change the world = focus on the company. Part of the problem is the innate need of companies in SV to pitch themselves to VCs and in order to do that - they need to hyperbolize their mission - hence why you get a lot more "WE'RE GOING TO CHANGE THE WORLD" blathering.
- LoSboccacc 11y ago
  "the uber of x" "trainers hate him" "you wont believe what happened next" Those are all consequences of the current internet culture where everyhing is a product. Some are really pitching to VCs, some are maybe good idea, most are just following the trends that works to generate interest. The catch is curiosity doesn't mean conversions and while views generated by clickbaiting may seem good in a pitch value is mostly in the actual returning customers. This had been know from ages, but today it is only the last bullet point of 'growth hackers', known today under minimise churn rate. As the weight moved to virality and marketing views to revenue plummeted and at the current advertising cost per click to fuel the gtowth of apps with a 0.1% conversion or less you really need millions. And here we get back to the main point: those millions to drive views to lure VCs for more millions to build more views are not actually making the product any better. Are making for big headlines at most. And the fun part is, they call whose whom suceed unicorn because in this system of advertisement fueled growth means they're mostly pumping millions in ads on whatever, without any confirmation on the actual product sustenaibility beyond the growth spiral, and having to have a million user before discovering if the product is actually useful is a plan so retarded that it doesn't faze me chances of one of this suceeding are as good as winning the lottery.

Detrus 11y ago

Facebook, Twitter, reddit, the Internet itself, the iPhone, and on and on and on—most people dismissed these things as incremental or trivial when they first came out. I would say Twitter and Facebook in particular are still are incremental and trivial as billion dollar companies and always will be. The web is a dumbed down version of older hypertext systems and hasn't shaken that legacy in 25 years. The real problem with the pace of innovation is these things weren't trivial to build, that's why the best we can do is incrementalism. And that comes from the foundation systems we use. When something near the bottom of a technology stack/pyramid offloads complexity to the top, it becomes a nightmare to get anything done. For example, we don't have a natural language command line for regular/stupid users. Instead we have point and grunt GUIs. That means apps have to be monolithic. Apps can't work seamlessly with one another even if the underlying tech allows it. And from that small bit of complexity we get billion dollar walled gardens. More detailed read http://pchiusano.github.io/2013-05-22/future-of-software.html http://pchiusano.github.io/2013-05-22/future-of-software.htm... Instead of a simple standard interface for users to access various services we have http://static3.businessinsider.com/image/4dd4d1cf4bd7c8c90f000000-1200-924/craigslist%20andrew%20parker.png http://static3.businessinsider.com/image/4dd4d1cf4bd7c8c90f0... which kills discoverability and creates a constant drag on people to learn a million UIs. And then we hope to fix all that with another layer of AI http://whoo.ps/2015/02/23/futures-of-text http://whoo.ps/2015/02/23/futures-of-text You can fool yourself about worse is better while making a few bucks. You can wall yourself off from the naysayers. But the real impact on the economy and humanity from eBay, AirBB and FaceTwitter is low.

beambot 11y ago
Please give us some examples of companies you feel have "real impact on the economy and humanity"...? Edit: Also, successful companies that started out with those ambitions?
- eliteraspberrie 11y ago
  To single one out, the Full Belly Project is a great example. Their Universal Nut Sheller has had a real, measurable impact on economies. In general terms, several industries have had a real, measurable impact on economies. The scooter, the diesel truck, the steel hulled boat, the washing machine, the cell phone... There are many successful companies in these industries that have a real impact on humanity and make a profit too. I find it astonishing that you couldn't think of examples of businesses that have had a bigger impact on humanity than Twitter and Facebook.

deleted 11y ago

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rajacombinator 11y ago

Good advice although somewhat contrary to YC's push to take on "world changing" projects! (Ahem fusion reactors ...)

deleted 11y ago

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gs7 11y ago

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8149162 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8149162

codingdave 11y ago

I would take Sam's final words of advice one step farther - don't claim you are changing the world just because you are changing one business industry. There is more to the world than that.

vas1 11y ago

I think the key here is that as long as your building something and are enjoying doing it in the process, who cares if its useful. Tinker long enough and you might fall onto something revolutionary.

whatwha 11y ago

I have yet to see a working definition for "change the world." And if there is one, who creates this definition? VC? Journalists? Once I see a workable definition, my next question is why "change the world" is a metric, a goal, or whatever it is. Given your answer, what does that imply? Maybe the phrase should be more truthful... something like "make a meaningful contribution". Maybe this is just an American buzz phrase and I am not getting it? To be honest, I am getting a little tired of it. There's that Woodstock generation song from the 60's with the chorus: "I'd love to change the world, but I don't know what to do..." I guess software VC and tech journalists have now solved that issue? Funny, but "changing the world" (in the idelistic sense of the song) today seems a much more daunting task than it did back then, even with the addition of cable TV and now another communication medium being offered by the telcos and cable companies. The world is better entertained and possibly better informed. The "change" it led to is some ridiculously strong monopolies that like to maintain status quo.

effie 11y ago
In Czech/Slovak Republic, it would sound quite preposterous and pathetic if someone claimed "and this will change the world" or "this will make the world a better place", so thankfully we do not usually get this nonsense, although generally the pathetic PR-speak continues to creep in into public communications. I recall there is a nice Czech song by the old group Nedvědi+Brontosauři with a verse going "...I wished to rebuild the world, yeah that happens, so many of us did and still nothing...".
- prodmerc 11y ago
  And that's why you never will (change the world). Or the people who can will move elsewhere. If someone in CZ would invent a new battery and claim it will change the world, they'd be ridiculed even if they can prove it works. But not in major tech hubs, most of which are still in the US. They'd get money. In a world where exaggeration is the norm, it's hard to break through with understatements and even normal statements (like stating pure facts and refraining from saying preposterous things like "world changing"). "Aim for the stars and you'll land on the Moon" holds true for most businesses imo...

tajano 11y ago

If you're accused of working on stupid, trivial things, and Facebook and Twitter are your best counterexamples, it's a little pathetic. It's very easy to conflate making a lot of money with doing something that matters. At the end of the day, they're ad-serving time-sucks that delivers CandyCrush and advertisements and an endless stream of selfies from our most annoying, narcissistic acquaintances. Almost every founder, engineer, Stanford grad, and VC has been chanting "We're changing the world!" for the last eight years. Stop it. It's trite and annoying and it pisses people off. It doesn't piss people off because your current batch of products are half-baked and stupid. It pisses people off because your very best products of the last decade are, at the end of the day, stupid and trivial and really haven't changed the world in a very positive way. It pisses people off because it doesn't hold water outside the myopic Silicon Valley bubble, where everyone tells each other "We're changing the world" often enough that they actually buy into it.

joelrunyon 11y ago
> At the end of the day, they're ad-serving time-sucks I can understand how you could say this about FB, but Twitter seems much more useful as a protocol. Maybe it's not the best example of a great VC business, but you can't deny that it's changed how people communicate & especially how we get news.
- rtpg 11y ago
  I'd also like to point out that FB has served a great purpose for me and pretty much all my social circle. It lets me keep up with people I would _otherwise not bother to talk with_ by seeing what's happening in their lives. It lets me organize events and coordinate with ease. It lets me share things like photos and video (both privately and publicly) super easily Sure, technically, it's "incremental improvements" on blogs + RSS + email, but only in the same sense that C is an incremental improvement on Brainfuck. It's made a lot of these concepts easy to use for non-nerds on a large scale. Dismissing Facebook ignores the social impact it's had on a huge amount of people.
cgriswald 11y ago
That's a rather blithe and shallow criticism of Facebook and Twitter. I could easily complain about email because of spam, but it would totally disregard its usefulness and impact. (As for Candy Crush invites and annoying selfies, Facebook actually provides tools to deal with those problems. RTFM?) Facebook in particular has allowed me to keep in touch with a much larger social circle. It has made it easier to meet people, establish friendships, maintain distance relationships, and keep in touch with more of my extended family. It allows me to plan events quickly and on short notice, and get quick feed back on who will be attending. It helps me learn about new events or activities that I otherwise might have missed.

amandahugnkiss9 11y ago

"The internet commenters and journalists that say you’re working on something that doesn’t matter are probably not building anything at all themselves." Mic dropped... exit stage left.

nattaggart 11y ago

It seems that there is a much higher threshold of "changing the world" applied to the private sector than to government or non-profits. I routinely hear people in relatively less influential organizations of the latter make such claims without coming off as arrogant. This makes me think that people in Silicon Valley aren't arrogant as much as they tend to break an unstated social rule: One can't claim to be doing good while making a profit (even if what you're doing is in fact net-good).

x5n1 11y ago
The world is already changing. It changes every day.
idlewords 11y ago
This social rule has been elegantly hacked by no longer bothering to make a profit.
- TheOtherHobbes 11y ago
  Or doing any real good. Part of the problem is that markets don't distinguish between "screw the little guy (or the clueless VC) and make a quick buck" returns, and "have customers flocking to you because your product is awesome and it makes them awesome too" returns. As far as markets are concerned, there's only money. Accountants and auditors know nothing about social value, and care less. How can you measure social value when there are no accepted metrics?

titzer 11y ago

The language people use is just a function of the funding environment. With VC cash in the billions for the taking, the loudest, most arrogant and most self-deluded have a leg up on those that are quietly building something solid. So no wonder that environment tends to produce louder, more obnoxious people.

seiji 11y ago
Great point. The most important VCs want to fund the most important companies, so everybody has to ego-inflate themselves into being the best in the world at everything or else nobody will even look at you.

jwr 11y ago

The most important sentence in that article is the very last one: > The internet commenters and journalists that say you’re working on something that doesn’t matter are probably not building anything at all themselves. I live by this approach. If you build something, you will encounter lots of critics. Most of them do not do anything meaningful and produce no value. Do not listen to those. Only take to heart what you hear from people that actually built something. Actually, the most extreme example are todays "journalists & bloggers" — very few provide value. So if you get criticized by Ars Technica, you should think about what they said carefully. But pay no attention to what yet another news-regurgitating site wrote.

rtpg 11y ago
I don't think that's the best example of dismissing criticism (basically an ad hominem). Just like a car critic doesn't need to build cars, the Times doesn't need to build an Uber clone to comment on the fact that in the long term, Uber will likely lower taxi driver income.
- jwr 11y ago
  So what is a „car critic”? Why would I value his/her opinion? In order for me to value someone's opinion, that someone needs to earn my respect. People who have built something (anything!) get that respect automatically. And if you want to write about cars, you don't necessarily have to build cars — you just have to have built something. There is too much criticism from people who built nothing, and provide little or no value. All they can do is criticize.

kriro 11y ago

Warning, the following only relates to small remark from the article... I really like the remark "noone understands hyperexponential growth". I've always wondered if it's possible to learn understanding this better. I'd like to think that most things can be learned and improved on at least to some degree so it might be worthwhile to investigate this. I used to play online poker for a living and I feel it improved my intuitive understanding of limited chance events quite a bit (and taught me to think a lot more in expected value than in actual results which is very valuable imo). My hypothesis would be that a pool of (good) poker players understand something like every day variance better than a comparable sample with no poker background. There's some counter evidence that may be related (econ students routinely know very little about basic econ concepts) but these examples tend to be about theoretical and not practical knowledge. Not sure what other groups one could include, statisticians or people who use statistics regularly (data scientists, data centric QM, investment bankers maybe) Constructing an instrument (questionnaire?) to measure intuitive understanding of statistics is probably non-trivial. +I'm already having nightmares of endless Frequentist vs. Bayesian debates. Afterwards, the interesting thing would be to construct creative (I'm thinking games due to my background but it could be anything) learning environments where an improved understanding of (hyper)exponential growth is developed.

kriro 11y ago

I like the advice to not claim to change the world but it also seems that by and large to get VC you kind of have to claim exactly this (at least implicitly). Hypergrowth potential or go home. While this isn't the official mantra of VC it's probably a lot harder to get funding for a humble idea that you also pitch humbly. Maybe a sub-YC with the explicit idea of "pitch your startup with no hypergrowth potential" would be an interesting experiment. Ironically I think YC is probably the best about not looking too much at hypergrowth potential and focusing more on execution potential but they are also the most likely to try a sub batch like this (based on the recent "superearlystage pitches only" and including non-profits etc.)

netcan 11y ago

'Most of the “intermediate” companies, although it would take a separate long post to explain why, end up not having a big impact' This is something I can't quite accept at face value, though I'm open to convincing. It kind of depends on the terms you're think in, anyway. Sounds worthy of a long post. I mean, how do we class twitter or whatsapp? World Changers. On one hand, they have that hyperexponential growth in users usefulness. They have had "political scale" implications. On the other hand, we can speculate that had these specific services not been started, other would have. Do they count as toys or hyperambitious endeavours at the start? Being network effect apps, they have that need/implication for lots of users. They are also "toys" in the sense that they are relatively simple apps. I'd like to hear about the terms he's thinking in, basically. Regarding the SV hate, I think this is more about (1) not understanding low probability, high risk than exponential growth and (2) the arrogance of saying you are going to change the world while being cashed up. IE, when investors pay $100k for a 1% of a company that may be worth $10bn at some point, that's assuming an awful lot of companies that failed to become worth $10bn. People see hundreds of companies reported on (or in person). Even if they're good at picking out potential, they see that effectively all of these companies are ridiculously unlikely to ever reach anything like that. Yet, they are talking in these grandiose terms. Sounds delusional and arrogant.

bambax 11y ago

The point with changing the world is you should change it for the better. It's very arguable that Facebook and Uber, for example, are changing the world for the worse.

br_smartass 11y ago
Honestly, I can barely stand HN and the startup world anymore, why not be up front about it already and say it's all about being rich and escaping the common folk disgusting lifes? How is Facebook an example of "changing the world" in any relevant way? How is Apple any different of other big corporation of yesterday like IBM, GE, Ford? To me this is startup gospel with zero substance("ohhhhh network effects! It's like special effects!"). This is mainstream culture, but I guess the "idealist hacker maker underdog" myth is just too good to let go.

noobie 11y ago

I am reading this with a grain of salt given that Ycombinator backed this "world changing" idea. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10032671 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10032671

hugh4 11y ago
My generous assumption is that the ridiculous home-delivery business model is designed to get people talking ahead of a fully intended pivot to selling the condoms in stores. Or something. Otherwise it's a ridiculously terrible idea. The number of people needing condoms, yet wanting to wait an hour instead of popping down to the convenience store, is not something you can build a business around.
zamalek 11y ago
One way to look at it as world-changing is a reduction in STD spread and a reduction in unwanted conception. Condoms are world-changers and this brings them closer to people who could make bad decisions because a condom is out-of-reach. It's like Uber: taxi in an app. Think about all the lives saved because of the convenience of Uber when drinking. I was taxying about before Uber and it wasn't a pleasant experience: you always had to have cash on hand and 2AM calls were expensive. Now it's super convenient, no cash, no problems, no excuses and it saves lives - it just wasn't obvious at the outset that this is where it would lead to. There is definitely some shit that won't make a difference, though. Condoms on demand is not one of those things that won't make a difference; whether that startup fails or succeeds comes down to delivery (specifically: how fast).

CPLX 11y ago

"One, don’t claim you’re changing the world until you’ve changed it." Indeed. I daresay that would solve a good chunk of the perceived arrogance problem in one fell swoop.

joeyspn 11y ago

Not a single app that sprouts from intelectual curiosity is "stupid". It's the use stereotypical marketing wording like "change the world" or "join the revolution" what makes a product (and its founders) look stupid.

jpeterson 11y ago

These apps "change the world" only if your "world" is the silicon valley echo chamber. The real world is only moderately impacted, and only for a limited time, even by an anomaly like Facebook. Seriously, to all the silicon valley startups and investors: get over yourself. You are not changing the world. *EDIT: There are a lot of interesting and cool things going on in silicon valley, perhaps more than in any other place in the world. To that, I agree. The whole "changing the world" thing is a bit much, though, and I believe anyone who claims this is either overestimating their startup or underestimating the world (or both).

3pt14159 11y ago
A third of divorce filings in the United States contain the word Facebook. People are writing whole books (or incite revolutions) on iPhones while they're on the bus. I'm not saying that Facebook is as important as genetically modified rice on a worldwide scale, but it's up there.
- mratzloff 11y ago
  I suspect that any marriage that was destroyed by Facebook was probably not long for this world to begin with.
  - reagency 11y ago
    Marriages, cars, houses, computer programs and businesses all take work, are subject to rot, and can be rebuilt. If every bump in marriage doomed it, nearly no marriage would survive. The viability is a combination of all the negative and positive pressures.
- forgotpwtomain 11y ago
  > iPhones while they're on the bus Writing books on iphones? Seriously, that's neither beneficial nor effective -- smartphones might be changing the world but certainly not because it's helping people write books. > A third of divorce filings in the United States contain the word Facebook. Do you have a link for this statistic? Do 90% of divorce filings also contain the word `cheated`? And would they have contained `journal` or `letter` 70 years ago in as much as they cite email or cellphones? The medium of expression is changing but that's not the same as `world-changing` not to say they aren't linked, but surely divorce is a terrible example.

curiousjorge 11y ago

Send me a 'Yo' if you think this article is cool

alexandercrohde 11y ago

What's hyper-exponential growth supposed to mean? "User base doubles every month" (so 2^x) but then "the value is the square of the number nodes" which yields 2^2x, which still has the same properties as 2^x. Mix a dash of math, a pinch halo effect from fame, and suddenly something meaningless sounds meaningful.