8 ms·

Solving All the Wrong Problems

121 points by joeyespo 10y ago

dkural 10y ago
A large portion of the world has no access to basics - food, clean water, basic healthcare (i.e. essential medication, antibiotics, etc.), electricity, being able to read&write. The resources and technology we have are unevenly distributed. There are ways to distribute them more evenly: Volunteer for Doctors Without Borders, go teach abroad, document the plight of refugees by visiting refuge camps, learn the language of a poorer country, be politically active in your own community to ask for more equitable distribution and making sure things like Pepfar continue.
wolfgke 10y ago
> " Products and services are designed to “disrupt” market sectors (a.k.a. bringing to market things no one really needs) more than to solve actual problems, especially those problems experienced by what the writer C. Z. Nnaemeka has described as “the unexotic underclass” — single mothers, the white rural poor, veterans, out-of-work Americans over 50 — who, she explains, have the “misfortune of being insufficiently interesting.”" The problem is: According to Malcolm Gladwell - The Tipping Point (https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=The_Tipping_Point&oldid=737360462 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=The_Tipping_Point...) there are three kind of people that one have to reach to become viral (cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=The_Tipping_Point&oldid=737360462#The_Law_of_the_Few https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=The_Tipping_Point...): "Connectors are the people in a community who know large numbers of people and who are in the habit of making introductions. A connector is essentially the social equivalent of a computer network hub. They usually know people across an array of social, cultural, professional, and economic circles, and make a habit of introducing people who work or live in different circles. [...]" "Mavens are "information specialists", or "people we rely upon to connect us with new information".[4] They accumulate knowledge, especially about the marketplace, and know how to share it with others." "Salesmen are "persuaders", charismatic people with powerful negotiation skills. They tend to have an indefinable trait that goes beyond what they say, which makes others want to agree with them." Unluckily the groups in the quote above do not fall into these three classes. The problem really is if you start a startup you make a bet that in a rather short time (until money runs out) you will reach a critical mass of people for the startup to become self-sustained (or at least get enough customers such that you can get further funding). Obtaining such a critical mass in a short time is much easier if you concentrate on Malcolm Gladwell's three classes of people than on "single mothers, the white rural poor, veterans, out-of-work Americans over 50". Also the opposite holds: If these groups want to stop the "misfortune of being insufficiently interesting" they really should think how they can become a member of the three groups.
- bbctol 10y ago
  Why do you say that single mothers, the white rural poor, and veterans are not definitely connectors, usually mavens, and plausibly salesmen? Out-of-work Americans over 50 are the only group I can see as out of these classes.
inputcoffee 10y ago
Point taken. The most important thing in the world is love. The most cherished thing in the world is a memory of a loved one. Idea! I must make an app that helps me take pictures of loved ones, and share them with other loved ones.
- wolfgke 10y ago
  > The most important thing in the world is love. If you hint at dating startups, here two texts why this is difficult: > http://old.ycombinator.com/ideas.html http://old.ycombinator.com/ideas.html > http://andrewchen.co/why-investors-dont-fund-dating/ http://andrewchen.co/why-investors-dont-fund-dating/
  - jaredsohn 10y ago
    FWIW, based on the following sentences it doesn't look like the GP is hinting at that.
    - inputcoffee 10y ago
      I was basically joking. The joke is (I hate explaining these): the most overdone app, exemplifying the NYtimes article, that I can think of is a photosharing app. And then I worked back into how a photosharing app is what the article is encouraging us to create. Although a dating app joke would have worked just as well, and I suspect wolfgke was implying that.
- inputcoffee 10y ago
  I am glad someone is listening: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/product/microsoftpix/ https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/product/microsoftpi...
im_down_w_otp 10y ago
> "As one colleague in tech explained it to me recently, for most people working on such projects, the goal is basically to provide for themselves everything that their mothers no longer do." Ha! I've used the exact same characterization. Anyway, this seems entirely predictable given a couple different considerations. 1) People are most apt to effectively solve problems for which they have some context. 2) People who are underserved or otherwise have "real problems" don't often have much overlap with people who have discretionary money to pay for solutions. So you end up with a selection bias in the pool of problem solvers (and thus the scope of addressable problems) and a selection bias in the expectation for investment returns. Which results in the best minds of our generation crunching all manner of machine learning models to make it so we don't have to do something mundane like selecting an outfit to wear that's color and style coordinated.
- ixtli 10y ago
  I came here to say exactly this, although I do not think that the doomsaying about the Wall•E-sque dystopia is really called for.
- gjolund 10y ago
  I just said the same thing about wash.io closing down.
  - im_down_w_otp 10y ago
    Yeah... it seems to me like the world might be well served to give people with more pressing or interesting problems access to more tools and means to try to solve them.
    - gjolund 10y ago
      I feel the same way about advertising. It makes me sad that some of the smartest people in the world are at Google and FB getting people to click ads.
  - calbear81 10y ago
panglott 10y ago
Maybe we can try to solve small problems as well as big ones? It would be as easy to deride the early plans of Google, Facebook, and Wikipedia as what the author does here (finding better kitten pictures, sharing kitten pictures with your sorority, peddling misinformation to your middle school teacher).
mattnewton 10y ago
It's true that there are large underserved populations of lower economic status. But this isn't because they are "uninteresting" in my view; helping single mothers is much more interesting than coming up with a CRM for all but the most heartless. The rub in my view is people without means don't have the means to fund your startup over food and shelter, and those two segments have some pretty fierce competition. Perhaps universal basic income or other stimulus programs that will put dollars in the hands of those people, and then companies can compete for those dollars.
- colmvp 10y ago
  To add to your point, some projects are simply not going to be profitable, but will certainly have a benefit to society nonetheless. A lot of civic tech projects help increase awareness to certain issues or aim to empower disenfranchised groups, but don't have have a profitable revenue model. I'm lucky enough to be well-off in many regards that I can freely spend 20-30 hours a week to design/code projects that will hopefully have a meaningful impact to people in my city, specifically increasing awareness of mental health and injustice towards people of color. But I'm not being paid for it, nor is anyone here capable of giving me a salary/donation that comes even close to what I'd earn at a tech startup. The government is also pretty limited to how much they'd provide as a grant. I'm reminded of an organization here that created a platform to enable non-profits find and manage volunteers, which has clear efficiency benefits for organizations since the process can be very messy. But because organizations can't really pay them that much, they are limited as to how quickly they can expand the team and add new features. Given the limits of their market, no 'investor' is going to invest in them in the hopes of expecting a meaningful financial return. I'm not sure where I'm going with my train of thought. Maybe something like it'd be nice if there were a non-VC model that enabled groups to work on projects that had no clear profit model? I know the U.S. has organizations that give grants to transformative projects, like the Sunlight and Knight Foundation. Sadly, not every country is lucky enough to have something like that.
BadassFractal 10y ago
We have a broad spectrum of people working on all sorts of different problems, what's the issue here? There are companies out there making luxury watches and there are companies out there making life-saving medications. Should the former experience constant shame for the professional direction they chose?
aetherson 10y ago
It's pretty un-self-aware for someone to simultaneously bitch that: 1. Some populations are underserved because they aren't sexy and high profile and interesting. 2. Some apps are solving small problems instead of tackling global warming. The truth is that many (perhaps all) of those apps will fail, and if any succeed, most of the successes will be kind of marginal successes that don't upend the world. So what? That's how it works most of the time -- small incremental improvements to people's lives.
- calbear81 10y ago
  It's okay that the marginal successes don't upend the world, the writer simply is asking if those of us in the valley are "disrupting" the right problems for the right populations. A marginal amount of time-savings for a high-income earner in having their car parking woes solved might be economically more viable than working on a problem that is less sexy but potentially has significantly less impact on actual improvement to people's lives.
  - aetherson 10y ago
    The "right" problems for the "right" populations is a silly formulation. First of all, the implicit idea that the founders of these companies are all like, "Oh, hey, I have ten really highly functional business plans for bringing an app to profitability, and I'll reject the ones serving population X because I think it's 5% less profitable than the ones serving population Y" is dumb. Second, the idea that that writer can identify the "right" populations and problems is risible. And, to be clear, she absolutely is complaining that people are attacking small problems instead of global warming. She explicitly calls out rising sea levels. And while a few of the services he identifies are targeted to a rich userbase (such as: locating rentable yachts, and probably the drone filming service, and the valet parking one), plenty of others aren't. The one about renting driveways is probably mostly enabling people who are relatively low-income for the area they live in to monetize an unused asset. Getting a new toothbrush addresses a need everyone has. Getting killed by the police is a problem faced disproportionately by lower-income people and minorities. There are lots of false steps towards progress, and like I said, probably most or all of those will fail. But we've seen time and time again that top down direction to only focus on what some member of the cultural elite deems important is a recipe for disaster.
ixtli 10y ago
I believe the salient point that "the goal is basically to provide for themselves everything that their mothers no longer do" is a direct effect of lack of diversity in our field. Homogenous, largely white, largely male, largely safe people are not going to detect the problems the author appears to be implying are going untreated.
- mzw_mzw 10y ago
  Please don't use racist language on HN.
  - ixtli 10y ago
    Sorry, I'm unclear how what I said was racist :/ Edit: To be clear I used those examples because they are the majority in America (which I should have been more clear about) in an effort to point out that the majority often does not pay as close attention to the problems that arise from being in a minority.
    - ebcode 10y ago
      >Homogenous, largely white, largely male, largely safe people are not going to detect the problems the author appears to be implying are going untreated. What you said was both racist and sexist. You're saying that a group of people (based on race and sex) are "not going to ..." do something. Speaking in generalizations using these classifications is generally regarded by most folks as racist/sexist. It can be tricky though. You might be right, but you'll still be called out for it. For example, the peoples of eastern asia are statistically less tall than their counterparts in western europe. Nevertheless, "asians are shorter than europeans", is still a racist statement. Unless you can see, as well as explain, how the generalizations you're making benefit the conversation, it's probably best to avoid making those types of statements in the first place. Racism itself might be "wrong", but that doesn't mean you can't be racist and still be "right" in your assertions. That's the tricky part.
      - perrygeo 10y ago
anotheryou 10y ago
It's very difficult, sometimes even dangerous to try to solve problems that are not yours. I think it would be important to do it with the effected people, but certainly not just for them.
forrestbrazeal 10y ago
"I’m concerned that such a focus on comfort and instant gratification will reduce us all to those characters in “Wall-E,” bound to their recliners, Big Gulps in hand, interacting with the world exclusively through their remotes." I found this quote puzzling in light of the rest of the article. The author's main argument seems to be that tech "innovators" are focused on providing frivolous solutions to imaginary problems, while society crumbles in the background. But this quote -unless I'm misunderstanding it - ascribes a hugely far-reaching, dystopian power to technology that undercuts her overall point. You can't have it both ways. Either tech products are mostly irrelevant, or they are fundamentally changing the most basic aspects of our existence. Which is it?
- throwanem 10y ago
  You certainly can have it both ways. Tech products are mostly irrelevant; those which are not irrelevant are fundamentally changing the most basic aspects of our existence. Hundreds of millions of people, at least, now experience a social world whose existence and interactions are mediated by a single, rather secretive, advertising company. I'd call that both a relevant and a fundamental change.
giglamesh 10y ago
I fail to see how "And a new proposal to create an app designed to stop police killings." fits on the list of problems that don't need to be solved. Am I missing something?
- otoburb 10y ago
  My interpretation from the article is that app was included to emphasize just how many frivolous apps crossed her radar except for that particular one that was truly solving a meaningful problem.
  - ixtli 10y ago
    Maybe it's a rhetorical failure then? I feel like to get that reading requires you to assume a lot about the emphasis placed on the word "And".
  - throwanem 10y ago
    Although I would argue that it's worth asking whether or not that's a problem best addressed by means of an app. I'm not going to presume that that's why the author included it in the list, but it does seem a worthy question nonetheless.
- ixtli 10y ago
  There are definitely ways this _could_ make sense in the context of the article but you're right that without proper explanation is seems at best heartless and at worst pretty racist.
- sachel1sta 10y ago
  Responding to the point you're trying to make: How big of a problem are police killings--really? We all understand the act of (unjustified) police killings is a bad one, but how much of a _problem_ is it? Look at the evidence. Then look at all of the other problems that we all face, not just in the states, but worldwide. I can name a great problem that almost all of us should be focusing on: global warming. Why don't we spend our energy on a significant and catastrophic problem? We need to prioritize. Anyone who tries to up or downplay something as a problem to you might have their own agenda, or have bought into someone else's agenda. Don't just believe me. Look for the evidence.
outsideline 10y ago
It's cyclical. Warren buffet classically highlighted the nature of the cycle some time ago : - The innovator, the imitator, and the idiot.. "At one point, his interviewer asked the question that is on all our minds: “Should wise people have known better?” Of course, they should have, Buffett replied, but there’s a “natural progression” to how good new ideas go wrong. He called this progression the “three I’s.” First come the innovators, who see opportunities that others don’t. Then come the imitators, who copy what the innovators have done. And then come the idiots, whose avarice undoes the very innovations they are trying to use to get rich." Source : https://hbr.org/2008/10/wisdom-of-warren-buffet-on-imi https://hbr.org/2008/10/wisdom-of-warren-buffet-on-imi Cloud computing, big data, social media, and most of tech is in a prolonged idiot phase. A new paradigm will be ushered in and the cycle will begin again. Any more detail just highlights or attempts to justify the idiocy.
muzster 10y ago
In case there is just one person in this world who desperately needs any one of the said apps.. you can thank me later. A service that sends someone to fill your car with gas. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-05-02/gas-delivery-startups-want-to-fill-up-your-car-anywhere-is-that-allowed http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-05-02/gas-delive... A service that sends a valet on a scooter to you, wherever you are, to park your car. http://luxe.com/ http://luxe.com/ A service that will film anything you desire with a drone. http://thenextweb.com/insider/2015/09/03/droners-is-a-marketplace-where-you-can-hire-a-drone-and-operator-for-anything-you-want/#gref http://thenextweb.com/insider/2015/09/03/droners-is-a-market... A service that will pack your suitcase — virtually. http://www.dufl.com/ http://www.dufl.com/ A service that delivers a new toothbrush head to your mailbox every three months. http://www.getquip.com/ http://www.getquip.com/ A service that delivers your beer right to your door. https://sauceyapp.com/ https://sauceyapp.com/ An app that analyzes the quality of your French kissing. https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/ifrenchkiss-french-kissing/id321931020?mt=8 https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/ifrenchkiss-french-kissing/i... A “smart” button and zipper that alerts you if your fly is down. https://www.fastcodesign.com/3060268/brilliant-this-zipper-warns-you-when-your-fly-is-down https://www.fastcodesign.com/3060268/brilliant-this-zipper-w... An app with speaker that plays music from within a mother’s vaginal walls to her unborn baby. https://www.babypod.net/en/babypod/ https://www.babypod.net/en/babypod/ A sensor placed in your child’s diaper that sends you an alert when the diaper needs changing. https://www.aabacosmallbusiness.com/advisor/smart-diaper-alerts-parents-baby-pees-145807261.html https://www.aabacosmallbusiness.com/advisor/smart-diaper-ale... An app that lets us brew our coffee from anywhere. http://smarter.am/coffee/ http://smarter.am/coffee/ A refrigerator advertised as “the Family Hub” that promises to act as a personal assistant, message board, stereo and photo album. http://www.samsung.com/us/explore/family-hub-refrigerator/ http://www.samsung.com/us/explore/family-hub-refrigerator/ An app to locate rentable driveways for parking. https://www.justpark.com/rent-out-a-parking-space/ https://www.justpark.com/rent-out-a-parking-space/ An app to locate rentable yachts. https://getmyboat.com/ https://getmyboat.com/ WTF? An app to help you understand “cause and effect in your life.” An app that guides mindful meditation. An app that imparts wisdom. And a new proposal to create an app designed to stop police killings.
- calbear81 10y ago
objectivistbrit 10y ago
"Every day, innovative companies promise to make the world a better place. Are they succeeding?" Companies promise to make money by offering valuable goods and services to customers. "Making the world a better place" is just Silicon Valley hype. Companies aren't non-profits.
tomc1985 10y ago
But of course, all anyone here is going to do is talk about it, before resuming work on useless "innovation" X
alanwatts 10y ago
"We are still looking at the computer as if it were a means of doing what we were already doing." -Marshall McLuhan
saturdaysaint 10y ago
She's free to get away with a smear like this because it's impossible to quantify or predict the amazing things that can arise from instant access to information or from every human saving hundreds of hours a year and getting better products and services shopping online. Even when things inarguably improve - like when society suddenly decides to embrace and defend the rights of new categories of minorities - it's impossible to establish a definitive cause. I'm sure some variant of this story could have been written at any time during the rise of global capitalism, yet the world has, by just about any measure, become a radically better place during just about any 25 year time frime. Show me a chart on https://ourworldindata.org/ https://ourworldindata.org/ where anything has gotten worse - from America to places once considered irredeemably "third world", just about anything we can measure is improving. We don't need concern trolls on high horses to make the world a better place.
- pron 10y ago
  What does this have to do with the article? Her criticism is very specific and is about something very recent.
AznHisoka 10y ago
"A service that sends someone to fill your car with gas." Yes please. So I can have more time to solve bigger, and more challenging problems... I don't understand how we can even tackle these harder problems if we're spending so much time on mundane chores.. it all adds up.
jdoliner 10y ago
I find articles like this pretty frustrating. There's tons of companies in Silicon Valley that are trying to do audacious things that people's mothers never did for them. They don't get much press coverage and that's fine, media outlets are businesses too so they need to write about companies that their readership wants to read about. But the fact that they then turn around and complain about the fact that all the companies on their radar are the same is outrageous. They're all the same because there's this huge selection bias applied by the fact that they only cover companies they think their average reader can understand. Which isn't a very wide variety.
- gk1 10y ago
  I fail to see a single original thought in this article. This same article could have been written 10, 20, 100 years ago, about the stupid ideas from those times. There is no shortage of stupid ideas and there never has been. (If you think those periods didn't have as many stupid ideas, it's only because of survivor bias.)
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - Chinjut 10y ago
    Perhaps 10, 20, and 100 years ago, it was also a tragedy that so much effort was directed toward the minor desires of the reasonably well-off and so comparatively little into addressing the needs of those with little disposable income.
- nickpsecurity 10y ago
  One might say Uber and Airbnb, among most hyped, were counter-examples where poor travelers or workers got more benefit than they otherwise would in those sectors. I haven't priced these in a while so these examples might be good or bad. I just know there's supply and demand side opportunities here for lower classes.
- hudibras 10y ago
  >There's tons of companies in Silicon Valley that are trying to do audacious things that people's mothers never did for them. Can you name one?
scandox 10y ago
I think if you take into account the target audience for this article, then she has a fair point to make which is simply the mismatch between the hubristic talk and the reality. That's something non-tech people probably should have brought to their attention. At the same time it's obviously frustrating that she uses such a basic hook at the beginning to get her point across. Perhaps I'm living under a rock but it seems to me that the great majority of tech companies and their employees (including me) are working on things that aren't very important in the scheme of things. Which is fine. What isn't fine are the delusions of grandeur. Especially when people are actually buying into it. I hadn't realized how crazy stuff had got until I read this, from one of our own homegrown entrepreneurs: https://blog.websummit.net/maths-and-conferences-lanyards-and-legibility/ https://blog.websummit.net/maths-and-conferences-lanyards-an... Maybe I should have been watching Silicon Valley on TV.
microcolonel 10y ago
I don't see what's wrong with building businesses which serve niche desires. Does she not understand that surely there's somebody somewhere who desperately needs their car parked, that without the internet people already had beer delivered to their door? She just seems to have such a curmudgeonly attitude, where all people must be working to solve her favourite enormous issues and never to slightly enhance the lives of some customers.
dasil003 10y ago
None of this is going to change unless capital miraculously grows a conscience. As an entrepreneur seeking funding you can't afford to solve problems for the poor because there's no way to raise money for that, and there's certainly not a lot of disposable income available to bootstrap from. The problem with this type of article is that it conflates all the struggling little startups with the unicorns who are actually making a lot of money. These big companies probably should grow a conscience, but it's not really in their DNA, because if they had been socially conscious from the beginning they never would have succeeded. Meanwhile, all these little companies are in a life or death struggle on a daily basis, so they have to do the thing which gives them a chance to survive til tomorrow. Don't get me wrong, I recognize the privilege of people who get to join a high-risk startup, but just because they are individually privileged with that freedom does not mean that they have the power to actually push our culture to a more socialist mentality. I don't use the word "socialist" as an epithet here BTW, despite American political dog whistles, I think the growing income gap is evidence that we have a real lack of social conscience throughout society.
- nickff 10y ago
  One of the reasons few 'startup' businesses target the needs of the poor is that many (especially among venture capital and government regulators) are uncomfortable with doing business with (or 'making money off') the poor. Marc Andreessen commented that a partner at A16Z has veto-d at least one funding proposal because of this discomfort.
  - matt4077 10y ago
    There's a difference between predatory lending and tackling actual problems. And a16 actually has a few serious companies in its portfolio such as opengov.
- jdoliner 10y ago
  There are plenty of companies who raise money to solve problems for the poor. Although if you want to be cynical you could dismiss it as them just trying to make money off the poor, they are businesses after all. Lendup is a good example of this, their goal is to provide loans to poor people that are better than pay day loans. Pretty impactful stuff if you ask me, but it doesn't seem to count in this article or in your comment. The article would much rather focus on an incredibly narrow band of startups that are easy to poke fun at and prove the point.
sergioisidoro 10y ago
Developed world is dying of obesity, diabetes, suicide and depression. Are those problems less severe than under developed countries, without access to vaccination, medical care and nutrition? All problems are relative to your frame of reference. For someone who always lived with access to basic needs, some problems might be crippling enough to cause significant impact. Yeah you can have food, medical care, and a house, but if you take 2h commuting each way to work you'll probably feel miserable. If you have a crippled or distant social network, despite having all physical basic needs, Social Networking tools might be lifesaving for you (eg. depression, isolation). And I've heard this quite some times: "Todays developed world problems, are going to be tomorrows developing world problems."
SwellJoe 10y ago
The interesting thing about technology is that it has proven to be so powerful that when people do mundane things with it, it is viewed as a failure (maybe rightly so, to some degree). But, and this is a big but, the vast majority of people go to work every day and do very little of importance. 99% of people are not changing the world, for the better or otherwise. All the people making coffee, serving food, pushing paper at the DMV, driving trucks, driving cabs, trimming trees and mowing lawns, writing articles for the NYTimes, etc. they aren't changing the world and they aren't making a significant difference in the lives of the least privileged (except maybe themselves and their own families, if they're in that category). No one writes articles lamenting the fact that a barista isn't changing the world. So, why do techies get blamed for lack of world-changing work? I'm not saying I disagree, per se. I just wonder what makes us (in the broad use of "us" here, to mean anyone who builds technology for a living) that we get tasked with fixing the world? Maybe it's the way tech entrepreneurs often hype the products of their labor as being world-changing...even while probably knowing it's merely a historical footnote, if even that, in the grand scheme of things. I want to make a positive impact on the world with my work, sure, but I also find I have to make economic decisions not unlike people who go to a regular job every day. I have to work on problems that I don't consider important, sometimes, just because I know it will keep my rent paid and food on my table this month. I'm not gonna feel guilty for that, but I also would love to know what the author proposes be done to make it so I don't have to worry about stuff like that and can go back to important but not profitable problems.
- Apocryphon 10y ago
  So, why do techies get blamed for lack of world-changing work? Because there's a visceral, emotional response people get when they see the amount that we're being paid to work and the capital that's being poured into what looks like frivolous trivialities. Artless commerce. If we weren't here the focus would remain on Wall Street, except CDOs and complex financial instruments are trickier to reduce to absurdity in the NYT op-eds.
  - BWStearns 10y ago
    Or because "we" keep insisting that our work "makes the world a better place" and "changes the world". I'm sure there's at least one barista in soho who claims that (and frankly I've had more than one barista or bartender greatly improve my little corner of the world) but it's not constantly used to justify mind boggling financial returns or to write off the negative externalities of their work. None of this is to say that tech can't change the world for the better but that the tech community gets a lot of monetary and prestige benefits that derive from these arguments so we shouldn't be surprised when people want to see results. Edited to add: Wall Street never tried to get the mileage we get out of "no really, we might get rich but the whole world is a better place for it".
SonicSoul 10y ago
> Here is just a sampling of the products, apps and services that have come across my radar I don't know about your radar but my world is a pretty great place. I can summon an Uber for myself or anyone else, get packages the next day at a fixed cost, live in a cash-less, paper-less world if I choose to, download a book 1 minute after learning about it while on the subway and have someone read it to me in a soothing tone, listen to my favorite writers and journalist on demand as they give away their wisdom for free all queued up on my infinite storage phone. why pick and choose small niche startups for this article? what about self driving cars, 3d printing, VR, crypto currency or machine learning?
enjo 10y ago
sighs Another one of these articles. The whole article is a fantastic example of the Texas Sharpshooter fallacy. It finds a bunch of ideas that fit the authors thesis and ignores the thousands of companies working on hard problems that impact nearly everybody. Even the examples in the article are sharpshooters. They drew a circle around a set of people and held them out as support for the idea that tech startups are solely focused one demographic. It's bad logic, but it's also wrong. Single mothers? There's a whole litany of apps targeted at them. Like SupportPay (https://supportpay.com https://supportpay.com) for child support collections. Or CareLulu (http://carelulu.com http://carelulu.com) for finding child care options. The rest of the list (rural poor, out of work Americans over 50, and veterans) can all very much benefit from the huge number of startups trying to make educational accessible over the Internet. Energy startups are out there trying to help folks shave dollars off their energy bills (shamless plug: I work for Gridium at https://gridium.com https://gridium.com - check us out!). Healthcare startups are out there trying to solve hard problems with medical record keeping and information access. Hell those inwardly focused tech companies like Stripe and Gusto have made starting a small business the easiest it's ever been. Want to solve problems for veterans and the out of work over 50 crowd? Remove the friction around starting a small business and let them put a lifetime of experience and knowledge to work. So ya some people are out there trying to solve the small problems. That's great, because sometimes solving a small problem leads to a big one. Amazon went from selling books to completely redefining how commerce happens for a large number of people. Solving those small problems also creates a class of person with experience in company building. Maybe they'll put that towards solving those generational problems in a couple of years.
- Apocryphon 10y ago
  Good links. It'd be nice if someone composed a list somewhere of all startups that are working on social problems. It'd make for a good counterpoint to these articles- and a good resource for job applicants.
- cycomachead 10y ago
  I think there are plenty of startups working on valuable things, but since you mentioned education... Typically, the largest group of students in open online courses like MOOCs are those from privileged backgrounds, like white males, and those who already have high or relatively high levels of education. Certainly, I still believe that these online courses are an amazing resource but they haven't been shown to increase access in ways that people hoped. There are dozens of reasons for this. I think the real problem is that some startups are unable to recognize exactly what problems they are solving and for whom they are solving them. Extra disposable income from driveways is good, as are promoting healthy drinking habits. However, there's a very real chance that these potentially useful tools never reach the audiences where they would be most impactful. For example, it seems like the people who could most benefit from extra income from rentable driveways are most likely to live in areas that are less desirable (high crime rates), are not even likely to have a driveway (apartments). Now, I have no idea what app this even is referring to, to be clear. This is just a potential situation.
spectrum1234 10y ago
These "problems" are being solved because tech is super cheap now. The author doesn't realize that true hard problems don't become much easier when tech gets cheaper.
caseymarquis 10y ago
Well, that solved nothing.
davidivadavid 10y ago
This old saw gets trotted out every other day without fail. Look, it's simple. The "right" problems tend to be hard problems, otherwise they wouldn't be problems anymore. Hard problems are hard to solve not because they require a lot of focus, otherwise spending more money on solving cancer would have solved the problem a long time ago. Hard problems are hard to solve because the solutions are not obvious, and they require serendipity. Quote from Matt Ridley: "Gutenberg made printed books cheap, which triggered a rise in literacy, which created a market for spectacles, which led to the invention of microscopes and telescopes, which led to the discovery that the earth went round the sun." If the path to the solution to those problems was obvious, yeah, it would make sense to criticize "superfluous" stuff. Until then, find more interesting subjects for your op-eds.
vonnik 10y ago
I was disappointed in this article when it was first published in July. Whenever a newspaper columnist makes a plea to reset humanity's "moral compass", you know that the article is basically worthless, an exercise in futility. Usually, these posts are inspired by a sort of lazy annoyance that results when they receive one too many press releases about startups they don't want to cover. But more importantly, writing like this makes a fundamental mistake about how humanity moves forward. We don't do it efficiently, moving in a straight line. We do it while wasting tons of effort. A bit like the media. We could turn Allison's own criticism against her with an article about media coverage entitled: Writing All the Wrong Articles. If you look at any website, there is remarkably little news, and a whole lot of speculation, various ill-informed opinion pieces and other forms of clickbait. Waste is just part of human activity. You need to make mistakes before you get them right. Also, many startups create solutions that are appropriate for niches that any given newspaper columnist may not occupy. They look useless from the outside, but may serve their target well. Finally, the author doesn't even address the fact that industries core to human wellbeing, such as healthcare, are among the most heavily regulated. Founding a healthcare startup is a good way to waste 10 years of your life navigating obscure laws that impose a heavy compliance burden. And that is not startups' fault, it's the fault of lawmakers and industry lobbyists.
- matt4077 10y ago
  THere's the difference between aiming high and failing vs. aiming low and glorifying it (and often still failing). Her argument is that there are a lot of low-hanging fruit that have the potential to actually help people but that the startup community is too homogenous to know or care about such project domains. Some of the domains may be hard to tackle but even within the software domain there are certainly classes od problems that are underserved vs. the gaming/photos/music/sharing market. Indeed one of my favorite example is visible right here: not a week passes without someone writing a new client for Hacker News on (the cli|oculus|as a kernel module). These ate usually side project to learn a new technology and it's completely legitimate to chose a domain you're familiar with, but with a bit more effort I belive it'd be possible to redirect that creative engery to projects that are both more enjoyable and actually useful.
tmptmp 10y ago
This article is full of personal bias and seems to have been written by a person who doesn't understand how technology progresses. I know there is some truth to the criticism of current tech-startup scene in SV. Most startups are without much potential or without much creative juice (e.g. "we will fill your car's tank for you" type). But there are some which have very large disruptive and creative potential. Elon Musk comes to my mind, to begin with. Boston Dynamics is another. This article also reminds me a personality trait that makes some people always complain with "whatever happened to good old days". Seems that people like this article author, want us to prepare our meals the way you see a person is seen doing in this video [1]. (Disclaimer: I have no disrespect to the person in that video [1], I just want to point out that I don't want to live like that and I wish to point out a fallacy in the article.) Such people always seem to complain: Whatever happened to the good old days and good old ways of doing things? All the while, seemingly unaware of the fact that they themselves have become so much used to the technology. Of course, it is apparent that she doesn't realize that without the very technology and the very technology creators she is so happy to criticize, she would not have been able to put her photo along with the article she has written/typed. Since when and why has the ability to publish our photos along with articles become so critical for us? and for such writers? So much for the person criticizing the technology creators from self-assumed higher moral ground. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mvQttEjfYtM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mvQttEjfYtM
booleandilemma 10y ago
The author's examples focus on companies that provide services to individuals, which is a subset of all the companies out there. I'm sure there are many innovative companies silently changing the world in their own small way, we just don't see them because they're not marketing themselves towards individual consumers through tv commercials, online ads, etc.
kozikow 10y ago
Every SV company have the grandiose "mission" or claims like "we are making world a better place" mentioned in the article. Those claims usually get ignored if they become a minor hindrance for projected profits. If you think about it, this moral duplicity is behind majority of SV mockery, like the TV show or this article.

121 points by joeyespo 10y ago

A large portion of the world has no access to basics - food, clean water, basic healthcare (i.e. essential medication, antibiotics, etc.), electricity, being able to read&write. The resources and technology we have are unevenly distributed. There are ways to distribute them more evenly: Volunteer for Doctors Without Borders, go teach abroad, document the plight of refugees by visiting refuge camps, learn the language of a poorer country, be politically active in your own community to ask for more equitable distribution and making sure things like Pepfar continue.

wolfgke 10y ago

> " Products and services are designed to “disrupt” market sectors (a.k.a. bringing to market things no one really needs) more than to solve actual problems, especially those problems experienced by what the writer C. Z. Nnaemeka has described as “the unexotic underclass” — single mothers, the white rural poor, veterans, out-of-work Americans over 50 — who, she explains, have the “misfortune of being insufficiently interesting.”" The problem is: According to Malcolm Gladwell - The Tipping Point (https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=The_Tipping_Point&oldid=737360462 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=The_Tipping_Point...) there are three kind of people that one have to reach to become viral (cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=The_Tipping_Point&oldid=737360462#The_Law_of_the_Few https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=The_Tipping_Point...): "Connectors are the people in a community who know large numbers of people and who are in the habit of making introductions. A connector is essentially the social equivalent of a computer network hub. They usually know people across an array of social, cultural, professional, and economic circles, and make a habit of introducing people who work or live in different circles. [...]" "Mavens are "information specialists", or "people we rely upon to connect us with new information".[4] They accumulate knowledge, especially about the marketplace, and know how to share it with others." "Salesmen are "persuaders", charismatic people with powerful negotiation skills. They tend to have an indefinable trait that goes beyond what they say, which makes others want to agree with them." Unluckily the groups in the quote above do not fall into these three classes. The problem really is if you start a startup you make a bet that in a rather short time (until money runs out) you will reach a critical mass of people for the startup to become self-sustained (or at least get enough customers such that you can get further funding). Obtaining such a critical mass in a short time is much easier if you concentrate on Malcolm Gladwell's three classes of people than on "single mothers, the white rural poor, veterans, out-of-work Americans over 50". Also the opposite holds: If these groups want to stop the "misfortune of being insufficiently interesting" they really should think how they can become a member of the three groups.

bbctol 10y ago
Why do you say that single mothers, the white rural poor, and veterans are not definitely connectors, usually mavens, and plausibly salesmen? Out-of-work Americans over 50 are the only group I can see as out of these classes.

inputcoffee 10y ago

Point taken. The most important thing in the world is love. The most cherished thing in the world is a memory of a loved one. Idea! I must make an app that helps me take pictures of loved ones, and share them with other loved ones.

wolfgke 10y ago
> The most important thing in the world is love. If you hint at dating startups, here two texts why this is difficult: > http://old.ycombinator.com/ideas.html http://old.ycombinator.com/ideas.html > http://andrewchen.co/why-investors-dont-fund-dating/ http://andrewchen.co/why-investors-dont-fund-dating/
- jaredsohn 10y ago
  FWIW, based on the following sentences it doesn't look like the GP is hinting at that.
  - inputcoffee 10y ago
    I was basically joking. The joke is (I hate explaining these): the most overdone app, exemplifying the NYtimes article, that I can think of is a photosharing app. And then I worked back into how a photosharing app is what the article is encouraging us to create. Although a dating app joke would have worked just as well, and I suspect wolfgke was implying that.
inputcoffee 10y ago
I am glad someone is listening: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/product/microsoftpix/ https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/product/microsoftpi...

im_down_w_otp 10y ago

> "As one colleague in tech explained it to me recently, for most people working on such projects, the goal is basically to provide for themselves everything that their mothers no longer do." Ha! I've used the exact same characterization. Anyway, this seems entirely predictable given a couple different considerations. 1) People are most apt to effectively solve problems for which they have some context. 2) People who are underserved or otherwise have "real problems" don't often have much overlap with people who have discretionary money to pay for solutions. So you end up with a selection bias in the pool of problem solvers (and thus the scope of addressable problems) and a selection bias in the expectation for investment returns. Which results in the best minds of our generation crunching all manner of machine learning models to make it so we don't have to do something mundane like selecting an outfit to wear that's color and style coordinated.

ixtli 10y ago
I came here to say exactly this, although I do not think that the doomsaying about the Wall•E-sque dystopia is really called for.
gjolund 10y ago
I just said the same thing about wash.io closing down.
- im_down_w_otp 10y ago
  Yeah... it seems to me like the world might be well served to give people with more pressing or interesting problems access to more tools and means to try to solve them.
  - gjolund 10y ago
    I feel the same way about advertising. It makes me sad that some of the smartest people in the world are at Google and FB getting people to click ads.
- calbear81 10y ago

panglott 10y ago

Maybe we can try to solve small problems as well as big ones? It would be as easy to deride the early plans of Google, Facebook, and Wikipedia as what the author does here (finding better kitten pictures, sharing kitten pictures with your sorority, peddling misinformation to your middle school teacher).

mattnewton 10y ago

It's true that there are large underserved populations of lower economic status. But this isn't because they are "uninteresting" in my view; helping single mothers is much more interesting than coming up with a CRM for all but the most heartless. The rub in my view is people without means don't have the means to fund your startup over food and shelter, and those two segments have some pretty fierce competition. Perhaps universal basic income or other stimulus programs that will put dollars in the hands of those people, and then companies can compete for those dollars.

colmvp 10y ago
To add to your point, some projects are simply not going to be profitable, but will certainly have a benefit to society nonetheless. A lot of civic tech projects help increase awareness to certain issues or aim to empower disenfranchised groups, but don't have have a profitable revenue model. I'm lucky enough to be well-off in many regards that I can freely spend 20-30 hours a week to design/code projects that will hopefully have a meaningful impact to people in my city, specifically increasing awareness of mental health and injustice towards people of color. But I'm not being paid for it, nor is anyone here capable of giving me a salary/donation that comes even close to what I'd earn at a tech startup. The government is also pretty limited to how much they'd provide as a grant. I'm reminded of an organization here that created a platform to enable non-profits find and manage volunteers, which has clear efficiency benefits for organizations since the process can be very messy. But because organizations can't really pay them that much, they are limited as to how quickly they can expand the team and add new features. Given the limits of their market, no 'investor' is going to invest in them in the hopes of expecting a meaningful financial return. I'm not sure where I'm going with my train of thought. Maybe something like it'd be nice if there were a non-VC model that enabled groups to work on projects that had no clear profit model? I know the U.S. has organizations that give grants to transformative projects, like the Sunlight and Knight Foundation. Sadly, not every country is lucky enough to have something like that.

BadassFractal 10y ago

We have a broad spectrum of people working on all sorts of different problems, what's the issue here? There are companies out there making luxury watches and there are companies out there making life-saving medications. Should the former experience constant shame for the professional direction they chose?

aetherson 10y ago

It's pretty un-self-aware for someone to simultaneously bitch that: 1. Some populations are underserved because they aren't sexy and high profile and interesting. 2. Some apps are solving small problems instead of tackling global warming. The truth is that many (perhaps all) of those apps will fail, and if any succeed, most of the successes will be kind of marginal successes that don't upend the world. So what? That's how it works most of the time -- small incremental improvements to people's lives.

calbear81 10y ago
It's okay that the marginal successes don't upend the world, the writer simply is asking if those of us in the valley are "disrupting" the right problems for the right populations. A marginal amount of time-savings for a high-income earner in having their car parking woes solved might be economically more viable than working on a problem that is less sexy but potentially has significantly less impact on actual improvement to people's lives.
- aetherson 10y ago
  The "right" problems for the "right" populations is a silly formulation. First of all, the implicit idea that the founders of these companies are all like, "Oh, hey, I have ten really highly functional business plans for bringing an app to profitability, and I'll reject the ones serving population X because I think it's 5% less profitable than the ones serving population Y" is dumb. Second, the idea that that writer can identify the "right" populations and problems is risible. And, to be clear, she absolutely is complaining that people are attacking small problems instead of global warming. She explicitly calls out rising sea levels. And while a few of the services he identifies are targeted to a rich userbase (such as: locating rentable yachts, and probably the drone filming service, and the valet parking one), plenty of others aren't. The one about renting driveways is probably mostly enabling people who are relatively low-income for the area they live in to monetize an unused asset. Getting a new toothbrush addresses a need everyone has. Getting killed by the police is a problem faced disproportionately by lower-income people and minorities. There are lots of false steps towards progress, and like I said, probably most or all of those will fail. But we've seen time and time again that top down direction to only focus on what some member of the cultural elite deems important is a recipe for disaster.

ixtli 10y ago

I believe the salient point that "the goal is basically to provide for themselves everything that their mothers no longer do" is a direct effect of lack of diversity in our field. Homogenous, largely white, largely male, largely safe people are not going to detect the problems the author appears to be implying are going untreated.

mzw_mzw 10y ago
Please don't use racist language on HN.
- ixtli 10y ago
  Sorry, I'm unclear how what I said was racist :/ Edit: To be clear I used those examples because they are the majority in America (which I should have been more clear about) in an effort to point out that the majority often does not pay as close attention to the problems that arise from being in a minority.
  - ebcode 10y ago
    >Homogenous, largely white, largely male, largely safe people are not going to detect the problems the author appears to be implying are going untreated. What you said was both racist and sexist. You're saying that a group of people (based on race and sex) are "not going to ..." do something. Speaking in generalizations using these classifications is generally regarded by most folks as racist/sexist. It can be tricky though. You might be right, but you'll still be called out for it. For example, the peoples of eastern asia are statistically less tall than their counterparts in western europe. Nevertheless, "asians are shorter than europeans", is still a racist statement. Unless you can see, as well as explain, how the generalizations you're making benefit the conversation, it's probably best to avoid making those types of statements in the first place. Racism itself might be "wrong", but that doesn't mean you can't be racist and still be "right" in your assertions. That's the tricky part.
    - perrygeo 10y ago

anotheryou 10y ago

It's very difficult, sometimes even dangerous to try to solve problems that are not yours. I think it would be important to do it with the effected people, but certainly not just for them.

forrestbrazeal 10y ago

"I’m concerned that such a focus on comfort and instant gratification will reduce us all to those characters in “Wall-E,” bound to their recliners, Big Gulps in hand, interacting with the world exclusively through their remotes." I found this quote puzzling in light of the rest of the article. The author's main argument seems to be that tech "innovators" are focused on providing frivolous solutions to imaginary problems, while society crumbles in the background. But this quote -unless I'm misunderstanding it - ascribes a hugely far-reaching, dystopian power to technology that undercuts her overall point. You can't have it both ways. Either tech products are mostly irrelevant, or they are fundamentally changing the most basic aspects of our existence. Which is it?

throwanem 10y ago
You certainly can have it both ways. Tech products are mostly irrelevant; those which are not irrelevant are fundamentally changing the most basic aspects of our existence. Hundreds of millions of people, at least, now experience a social world whose existence and interactions are mediated by a single, rather secretive, advertising company. I'd call that both a relevant and a fundamental change.

giglamesh 10y ago

I fail to see how "And a new proposal to create an app designed to stop police killings." fits on the list of problems that don't need to be solved. Am I missing something?

otoburb 10y ago
My interpretation from the article is that app was included to emphasize just how many frivolous apps crossed her radar except for that particular one that was truly solving a meaningful problem.
- ixtli 10y ago
  Maybe it's a rhetorical failure then? I feel like to get that reading requires you to assume a lot about the emphasis placed on the word "And".
- throwanem 10y ago
  Although I would argue that it's worth asking whether or not that's a problem best addressed by means of an app. I'm not going to presume that that's why the author included it in the list, but it does seem a worthy question nonetheless.
ixtli 10y ago
There are definitely ways this _could_ make sense in the context of the article but you're right that without proper explanation is seems at best heartless and at worst pretty racist.
sachel1sta 10y ago
Responding to the point you're trying to make: How big of a problem are police killings--really? We all understand the act of (unjustified) police killings is a bad one, but how much of a _problem_ is it? Look at the evidence. Then look at all of the other problems that we all face, not just in the states, but worldwide. I can name a great problem that almost all of us should be focusing on: global warming. Why don't we spend our energy on a significant and catastrophic problem? We need to prioritize. Anyone who tries to up or downplay something as a problem to you might have their own agenda, or have bought into someone else's agenda. Don't just believe me. Look for the evidence.

outsideline 10y ago

It's cyclical. Warren buffet classically highlighted the nature of the cycle some time ago : - The innovator, the imitator, and the idiot.. "At one point, his interviewer asked the question that is on all our minds: “Should wise people have known better?” Of course, they should have, Buffett replied, but there’s a “natural progression” to how good new ideas go wrong. He called this progression the “three I’s.” First come the innovators, who see opportunities that others don’t. Then come the imitators, who copy what the innovators have done. And then come the idiots, whose avarice undoes the very innovations they are trying to use to get rich." Source : https://hbr.org/2008/10/wisdom-of-warren-buffet-on-imi https://hbr.org/2008/10/wisdom-of-warren-buffet-on-imi Cloud computing, big data, social media, and most of tech is in a prolonged idiot phase. A new paradigm will be ushered in and the cycle will begin again. Any more detail just highlights or attempts to justify the idiocy.

muzster 10y ago

In case there is just one person in this world who desperately needs any one of the said apps.. you can thank me later. A service that sends someone to fill your car with gas. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-05-02/gas-delivery-startups-want-to-fill-up-your-car-anywhere-is-that-allowed http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-05-02/gas-delive... A service that sends a valet on a scooter to you, wherever you are, to park your car. http://luxe.com/ http://luxe.com/ A service that will film anything you desire with a drone. http://thenextweb.com/insider/2015/09/03/droners-is-a-marketplace-where-you-can-hire-a-drone-and-operator-for-anything-you-want/#gref http://thenextweb.com/insider/2015/09/03/droners-is-a-market... A service that will pack your suitcase — virtually. http://www.dufl.com/ http://www.dufl.com/ A service that delivers a new toothbrush head to your mailbox every three months. http://www.getquip.com/ http://www.getquip.com/ A service that delivers your beer right to your door. https://sauceyapp.com/ https://sauceyapp.com/ An app that analyzes the quality of your French kissing. https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/ifrenchkiss-french-kissing/id321931020?mt=8 https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/ifrenchkiss-french-kissing/i... A “smart” button and zipper that alerts you if your fly is down. https://www.fastcodesign.com/3060268/brilliant-this-zipper-warns-you-when-your-fly-is-down https://www.fastcodesign.com/3060268/brilliant-this-zipper-w... An app with speaker that plays music from within a mother’s vaginal walls to her unborn baby. https://www.babypod.net/en/babypod/ https://www.babypod.net/en/babypod/ A sensor placed in your child’s diaper that sends you an alert when the diaper needs changing. https://www.aabacosmallbusiness.com/advisor/smart-diaper-alerts-parents-baby-pees-145807261.html https://www.aabacosmallbusiness.com/advisor/smart-diaper-ale... An app that lets us brew our coffee from anywhere. http://smarter.am/coffee/ http://smarter.am/coffee/ A refrigerator advertised as “the Family Hub” that promises to act as a personal assistant, message board, stereo and photo album. http://www.samsung.com/us/explore/family-hub-refrigerator/ http://www.samsung.com/us/explore/family-hub-refrigerator/ An app to locate rentable driveways for parking. https://www.justpark.com/rent-out-a-parking-space/ https://www.justpark.com/rent-out-a-parking-space/ An app to locate rentable yachts. https://getmyboat.com/ https://getmyboat.com/ WTF? An app to help you understand “cause and effect in your life.” An app that guides mindful meditation. An app that imparts wisdom. And a new proposal to create an app designed to stop police killings.

calbear81 10y ago

objectivistbrit 10y ago

"Every day, innovative companies promise to make the world a better place. Are they succeeding?" Companies promise to make money by offering valuable goods and services to customers. "Making the world a better place" is just Silicon Valley hype. Companies aren't non-profits.

tomc1985 10y ago

But of course, all anyone here is going to do is talk about it, before resuming work on useless "innovation" X

alanwatts 10y ago

"We are still looking at the computer as if it were a means of doing what we were already doing." -Marshall McLuhan

saturdaysaint 10y ago

She's free to get away with a smear like this because it's impossible to quantify or predict the amazing things that can arise from instant access to information or from every human saving hundreds of hours a year and getting better products and services shopping online. Even when things inarguably improve - like when society suddenly decides to embrace and defend the rights of new categories of minorities - it's impossible to establish a definitive cause. I'm sure some variant of this story could have been written at any time during the rise of global capitalism, yet the world has, by just about any measure, become a radically better place during just about any 25 year time frime. Show me a chart on https://ourworldindata.org/ https://ourworldindata.org/ where anything has gotten worse - from America to places once considered irredeemably "third world", just about anything we can measure is improving. We don't need concern trolls on high horses to make the world a better place.

pron 10y ago
What does this have to do with the article? Her criticism is very specific and is about something very recent.

AznHisoka 10y ago

"A service that sends someone to fill your car with gas." Yes please. So I can have more time to solve bigger, and more challenging problems... I don't understand how we can even tackle these harder problems if we're spending so much time on mundane chores.. it all adds up.

jdoliner 10y ago

I find articles like this pretty frustrating. There's tons of companies in Silicon Valley that are trying to do audacious things that people's mothers never did for them. They don't get much press coverage and that's fine, media outlets are businesses too so they need to write about companies that their readership wants to read about. But the fact that they then turn around and complain about the fact that all the companies on their radar are the same is outrageous. They're all the same because there's this huge selection bias applied by the fact that they only cover companies they think their average reader can understand. Which isn't a very wide variety.

gk1 10y ago
I fail to see a single original thought in this article. This same article could have been written 10, 20, 100 years ago, about the stupid ideas from those times. There is no shortage of stupid ideas and there never has been. (If you think those periods didn't have as many stupid ideas, it's only because of survivor bias.)
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- Chinjut 10y ago
  Perhaps 10, 20, and 100 years ago, it was also a tragedy that so much effort was directed toward the minor desires of the reasonably well-off and so comparatively little into addressing the needs of those with little disposable income.
nickpsecurity 10y ago
One might say Uber and Airbnb, among most hyped, were counter-examples where poor travelers or workers got more benefit than they otherwise would in those sectors. I haven't priced these in a while so these examples might be good or bad. I just know there's supply and demand side opportunities here for lower classes.
hudibras 10y ago
>There's tons of companies in Silicon Valley that are trying to do audacious things that people's mothers never did for them. Can you name one?

scandox 10y ago

I think if you take into account the target audience for this article, then she has a fair point to make which is simply the mismatch between the hubristic talk and the reality. That's something non-tech people probably should have brought to their attention. At the same time it's obviously frustrating that she uses such a basic hook at the beginning to get her point across. Perhaps I'm living under a rock but it seems to me that the great majority of tech companies and their employees (including me) are working on things that aren't very important in the scheme of things. Which is fine. What isn't fine are the delusions of grandeur. Especially when people are actually buying into it. I hadn't realized how crazy stuff had got until I read this, from one of our own homegrown entrepreneurs: https://blog.websummit.net/maths-and-conferences-lanyards-and-legibility/ https://blog.websummit.net/maths-and-conferences-lanyards-an... Maybe I should have been watching Silicon Valley on TV.

microcolonel 10y ago

I don't see what's wrong with building businesses which serve niche desires. Does she not understand that surely there's somebody somewhere who desperately needs their car parked, that without the internet people already had beer delivered to their door? She just seems to have such a curmudgeonly attitude, where all people must be working to solve her favourite enormous issues and never to slightly enhance the lives of some customers.

dasil003 10y ago

None of this is going to change unless capital miraculously grows a conscience. As an entrepreneur seeking funding you can't afford to solve problems for the poor because there's no way to raise money for that, and there's certainly not a lot of disposable income available to bootstrap from. The problem with this type of article is that it conflates all the struggling little startups with the unicorns who are actually making a lot of money. These big companies probably should grow a conscience, but it's not really in their DNA, because if they had been socially conscious from the beginning they never would have succeeded. Meanwhile, all these little companies are in a life or death struggle on a daily basis, so they have to do the thing which gives them a chance to survive til tomorrow. Don't get me wrong, I recognize the privilege of people who get to join a high-risk startup, but just because they are individually privileged with that freedom does not mean that they have the power to actually push our culture to a more socialist mentality. I don't use the word "socialist" as an epithet here BTW, despite American political dog whistles, I think the growing income gap is evidence that we have a real lack of social conscience throughout society.

nickff 10y ago
One of the reasons few 'startup' businesses target the needs of the poor is that many (especially among venture capital and government regulators) are uncomfortable with doing business with (or 'making money off') the poor. Marc Andreessen commented that a partner at A16Z has veto-d at least one funding proposal because of this discomfort.
- matt4077 10y ago
  There's a difference between predatory lending and tackling actual problems. And a16 actually has a few serious companies in its portfolio such as opengov.
jdoliner 10y ago
There are plenty of companies who raise money to solve problems for the poor. Although if you want to be cynical you could dismiss it as them just trying to make money off the poor, they are businesses after all. Lendup is a good example of this, their goal is to provide loans to poor people that are better than pay day loans. Pretty impactful stuff if you ask me, but it doesn't seem to count in this article or in your comment. The article would much rather focus on an incredibly narrow band of startups that are easy to poke fun at and prove the point.

sergioisidoro 10y ago

Developed world is dying of obesity, diabetes, suicide and depression. Are those problems less severe than under developed countries, without access to vaccination, medical care and nutrition? All problems are relative to your frame of reference. For someone who always lived with access to basic needs, some problems might be crippling enough to cause significant impact. Yeah you can have food, medical care, and a house, but if you take 2h commuting each way to work you'll probably feel miserable. If you have a crippled or distant social network, despite having all physical basic needs, Social Networking tools might be lifesaving for you (eg. depression, isolation). And I've heard this quite some times: "Todays developed world problems, are going to be tomorrows developing world problems."

SwellJoe 10y ago

The interesting thing about technology is that it has proven to be so powerful that when people do mundane things with it, it is viewed as a failure (maybe rightly so, to some degree). But, and this is a big but, the vast majority of people go to work every day and do very little of importance. 99% of people are not changing the world, for the better or otherwise. All the people making coffee, serving food, pushing paper at the DMV, driving trucks, driving cabs, trimming trees and mowing lawns, writing articles for the NYTimes, etc. they aren't changing the world and they aren't making a significant difference in the lives of the least privileged (except maybe themselves and their own families, if they're in that category). No one writes articles lamenting the fact that a barista isn't changing the world. So, why do techies get blamed for lack of world-changing work? I'm not saying I disagree, per se. I just wonder what makes us (in the broad use of "us" here, to mean anyone who builds technology for a living) that we get tasked with fixing the world? Maybe it's the way tech entrepreneurs often hype the products of their labor as being world-changing...even while probably knowing it's merely a historical footnote, if even that, in the grand scheme of things. I want to make a positive impact on the world with my work, sure, but I also find I have to make economic decisions not unlike people who go to a regular job every day. I have to work on problems that I don't consider important, sometimes, just because I know it will keep my rent paid and food on my table this month. I'm not gonna feel guilty for that, but I also would love to know what the author proposes be done to make it so I don't have to worry about stuff like that and can go back to important but not profitable problems.

Apocryphon 10y ago
So, why do techies get blamed for lack of world-changing work? Because there's a visceral, emotional response people get when they see the amount that we're being paid to work and the capital that's being poured into what looks like frivolous trivialities. Artless commerce. If we weren't here the focus would remain on Wall Street, except CDOs and complex financial instruments are trickier to reduce to absurdity in the NYT op-eds.
- BWStearns 10y ago
  Or because "we" keep insisting that our work "makes the world a better place" and "changes the world". I'm sure there's at least one barista in soho who claims that (and frankly I've had more than one barista or bartender greatly improve my little corner of the world) but it's not constantly used to justify mind boggling financial returns or to write off the negative externalities of their work. None of this is to say that tech can't change the world for the better but that the tech community gets a lot of monetary and prestige benefits that derive from these arguments so we shouldn't be surprised when people want to see results. Edited to add: Wall Street never tried to get the mileage we get out of "no really, we might get rich but the whole world is a better place for it".

SonicSoul 10y ago

> Here is just a sampling of the products, apps and services that have come across my radar I don't know about your radar but my world is a pretty great place. I can summon an Uber for myself or anyone else, get packages the next day at a fixed cost, live in a cash-less, paper-less world if I choose to, download a book 1 minute after learning about it while on the subway and have someone read it to me in a soothing tone, listen to my favorite writers and journalist on demand as they give away their wisdom for free all queued up on my infinite storage phone. why pick and choose small niche startups for this article? what about self driving cars, 3d printing, VR, crypto currency or machine learning?

enjo 10y ago

sighs Another one of these articles. The whole article is a fantastic example of the Texas Sharpshooter fallacy. It finds a bunch of ideas that fit the authors thesis and ignores the thousands of companies working on hard problems that impact nearly everybody. Even the examples in the article are sharpshooters. They drew a circle around a set of people and held them out as support for the idea that tech startups are solely focused one demographic. It's bad logic, but it's also wrong. Single mothers? There's a whole litany of apps targeted at them. Like SupportPay (https://supportpay.com https://supportpay.com) for child support collections. Or CareLulu (http://carelulu.com http://carelulu.com) for finding child care options. The rest of the list (rural poor, out of work Americans over 50, and veterans) can all very much benefit from the huge number of startups trying to make educational accessible over the Internet. Energy startups are out there trying to help folks shave dollars off their energy bills (shamless plug: I work for Gridium at https://gridium.com https://gridium.com - check us out!). Healthcare startups are out there trying to solve hard problems with medical record keeping and information access. Hell those inwardly focused tech companies like Stripe and Gusto have made starting a small business the easiest it's ever been. Want to solve problems for veterans and the out of work over 50 crowd? Remove the friction around starting a small business and let them put a lifetime of experience and knowledge to work. So ya some people are out there trying to solve the small problems. That's great, because sometimes solving a small problem leads to a big one. Amazon went from selling books to completely redefining how commerce happens for a large number of people. Solving those small problems also creates a class of person with experience in company building. Maybe they'll put that towards solving those generational problems in a couple of years.

Apocryphon 10y ago
Good links. It'd be nice if someone composed a list somewhere of all startups that are working on social problems. It'd make for a good counterpoint to these articles- and a good resource for job applicants.
cycomachead 10y ago
I think there are plenty of startups working on valuable things, but since you mentioned education... Typically, the largest group of students in open online courses like MOOCs are those from privileged backgrounds, like white males, and those who already have high or relatively high levels of education. Certainly, I still believe that these online courses are an amazing resource but they haven't been shown to increase access in ways that people hoped. There are dozens of reasons for this. I think the real problem is that some startups are unable to recognize exactly what problems they are solving and for whom they are solving them. Extra disposable income from driveways is good, as are promoting healthy drinking habits. However, there's a very real chance that these potentially useful tools never reach the audiences where they would be most impactful. For example, it seems like the people who could most benefit from extra income from rentable driveways are most likely to live in areas that are less desirable (high crime rates), are not even likely to have a driveway (apartments). Now, I have no idea what app this even is referring to, to be clear. This is just a potential situation.

spectrum1234 10y ago

These "problems" are being solved because tech is super cheap now. The author doesn't realize that true hard problems don't become much easier when tech gets cheaper.

caseymarquis 10y ago

Well, that solved nothing.

davidivadavid 10y ago

This old saw gets trotted out every other day without fail. Look, it's simple. The "right" problems tend to be hard problems, otherwise they wouldn't be problems anymore. Hard problems are hard to solve not because they require a lot of focus, otherwise spending more money on solving cancer would have solved the problem a long time ago. Hard problems are hard to solve because the solutions are not obvious, and they require serendipity. Quote from Matt Ridley: "Gutenberg made printed books cheap, which triggered a rise in literacy, which created a market for spectacles, which led to the invention of microscopes and telescopes, which led to the discovery that the earth went round the sun." If the path to the solution to those problems was obvious, yeah, it would make sense to criticize "superfluous" stuff. Until then, find more interesting subjects for your op-eds.

vonnik 10y ago

I was disappointed in this article when it was first published in July. Whenever a newspaper columnist makes a plea to reset humanity's "moral compass", you know that the article is basically worthless, an exercise in futility. Usually, these posts are inspired by a sort of lazy annoyance that results when they receive one too many press releases about startups they don't want to cover. But more importantly, writing like this makes a fundamental mistake about how humanity moves forward. We don't do it efficiently, moving in a straight line. We do it while wasting tons of effort. A bit like the media. We could turn Allison's own criticism against her with an article about media coverage entitled: Writing All the Wrong Articles. If you look at any website, there is remarkably little news, and a whole lot of speculation, various ill-informed opinion pieces and other forms of clickbait. Waste is just part of human activity. You need to make mistakes before you get them right. Also, many startups create solutions that are appropriate for niches that any given newspaper columnist may not occupy. They look useless from the outside, but may serve their target well. Finally, the author doesn't even address the fact that industries core to human wellbeing, such as healthcare, are among the most heavily regulated. Founding a healthcare startup is a good way to waste 10 years of your life navigating obscure laws that impose a heavy compliance burden. And that is not startups' fault, it's the fault of lawmakers and industry lobbyists.

matt4077 10y ago
THere's the difference between aiming high and failing vs. aiming low and glorifying it (and often still failing). Her argument is that there are a lot of low-hanging fruit that have the potential to actually help people but that the startup community is too homogenous to know or care about such project domains. Some of the domains may be hard to tackle but even within the software domain there are certainly classes od problems that are underserved vs. the gaming/photos/music/sharing market. Indeed one of my favorite example is visible right here: not a week passes without someone writing a new client for Hacker News on (the cli|oculus|as a kernel module). These ate usually side project to learn a new technology and it's completely legitimate to chose a domain you're familiar with, but with a bit more effort I belive it'd be possible to redirect that creative engery to projects that are both more enjoyable and actually useful.

tmptmp 10y ago

This article is full of personal bias and seems to have been written by a person who doesn't understand how technology progresses. I know there is some truth to the criticism of current tech-startup scene in SV. Most startups are without much potential or without much creative juice (e.g. "we will fill your car's tank for you" type). But there are some which have very large disruptive and creative potential. Elon Musk comes to my mind, to begin with. Boston Dynamics is another. This article also reminds me a personality trait that makes some people always complain with "whatever happened to good old days". Seems that people like this article author, want us to prepare our meals the way you see a person is seen doing in this video [1]. (Disclaimer: I have no disrespect to the person in that video [1], I just want to point out that I don't want to live like that and I wish to point out a fallacy in the article.) Such people always seem to complain: Whatever happened to the good old days and good old ways of doing things? All the while, seemingly unaware of the fact that they themselves have become so much used to the technology. Of course, it is apparent that she doesn't realize that without the very technology and the very technology creators she is so happy to criticize, she would not have been able to put her photo along with the article she has written/typed. Since when and why has the ability to publish our photos along with articles become so critical for us? and for such writers? So much for the person criticizing the technology creators from self-assumed higher moral ground. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mvQttEjfYtM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mvQttEjfYtM

booleandilemma 10y ago

The author's examples focus on companies that provide services to individuals, which is a subset of all the companies out there. I'm sure there are many innovative companies silently changing the world in their own small way, we just don't see them because they're not marketing themselves towards individual consumers through tv commercials, online ads, etc.

kozikow 10y ago

Every SV company have the grandiose "mission" or claims like "we are making world a better place" mentioned in the article. Those claims usually get ignored if they become a minor hindrance for projected profits. If you think about it, this moral duplicity is behind majority of SV mockery, like the TV show or this article.