11 ms·

I’m Done Pretending SF Tech Is Visionary

212 points by dmitrig01 10y ago

fjdhcjjenxncnd 10y ago
And this is precisely why I'm a mechanical engineer instead of a web developer, despite being very very good at the latter.
- woah 10y ago
  What are you engineering right now?
  - fjdhcjjenxncnd 10y ago
    My work is a bit meta at the moment. I'm making software that can take part designs and optimize their physical shape for better performance. So the end result is more fuel efficient cars, faster planes, etc.
    - angersock 10y ago
      Oh, so you're optimizing and not innovating.
      - fjdhcjjenxncnd 10y ago
        Actually no. I'm making the software that did not previously exist. Others down the road can then use it to produce better performing products. Passive aggressive word games aside, you really can't compare "reducing the global need for oil" to "snapchat for cats".
        angersock 10y ago
        Like, what special sauce do you bring to the table that ANSYS or Solidworks or whatever FEA package people use for optimization studies doesn't already do--and probably do well enough? You dismiss twitter, snapchat clones, whatever when they do deliver actual value to people just because they don't meet some arbitrary feelgood measure of "innovative". A measure that coincidentally happens to somehow make your cute little tool worldchanging! Industry, especially in mech and AEC, is hilariously slow to change workflows once they have something that works. Your product is probably going to get lost in the noise, all with you puttering around going "but but but I was innovating! Why don't people support innovation?!". You're coming off as a holier-than-thou "srs bsns" engineer when you should have some humility. Maybe post under your real account.
        fjdhcjjenxncnd 10y ago
        It's still very much a research implementation, but I'm making global black box combinatoric methods which can be used where analytic optimization methods are not available, e.g. multi-objective optimization. >Maybe post under your real account. I have no real account. I always make a new one every few posts partly for privacy reasons, and partly because I enjoy reading posts like your own. :^)
        arcanus 10y ago
        As someone who did numerical optimization for my doctoral thesis (also mechE), this sounds more amenable to publications than a start up. Are you trying to commercialize?
        mappu 10y ago
        > I have no real account. I always make a new one every few posts partly for privacy reasons This is the logical next step after random site-specific passwords. The login/logout workflow does make this inconvenient though. Browser extension idea? Chan boards use thread-specific IDs or thread-specific tripcode salts to achieve much the same thing - privacy by default, but identifiers when it helps you follow a conversation.
        user5994461 10y ago
        > Passive aggressive word games aside, you really can't compare "reducing the global need for oil" to "snapchat for cats". Actually. By reducing the consumption of oil, it becomes cheaper to travel and people will travel more... increasing the consumption of oil. Game word in point: You might be having the opposing effect of what you think :D
        fulafel 10y ago
        It's known that we can't dig up and burning all profitably extractable hydrocarbons, if we want to avoid the worst case scenarios of global warming. See eg. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/sep/27/fracking-digging-drilling-paris-agreement-fossil-fuels https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/sep/27/fracki...
        dTal 10y ago
        That would be Jevon's Paradox: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
    - HNSucksAss 10y ago
      "My work is a bit meta at the moment." That doesn't mean anything. So we can infer that you're not doing shit.
Apreche 10y ago
Every one of those entrepreneurs and VCs are working on something they believe in. Making themselves rich(er). That's all there is to it.
- fjdhcjjenxncnd 10y ago
  If our economic system as we know it is no longer capable of delivering innovation, then something is seriously wrong and we should be reevaluating why we are still using that system.
  - mzw_mzw 10y ago
    What alternative system would you propose?
  - oldmanjay 10y ago
    Has anyone actually made a serious case that innovation has stopped? The closest I've ever seen are people asserting that things they feel are obvious in retrospect aren't innovations, but that's just a silly bias.
    - internaut 10y ago
      Stopped no. Stagnated, yes. I've made at least a dozen posts explaining the Stagnation Hypothesis, there's a long list of people in Silicon Valley who take it seriously. The basic idea is that since '73 the rate of change has slowed down. This excludes computation of course. It is an explanation for present day economic stresses in the West that I believe hangs together far better than the mainstream theories that get news headlines.
      - JBlue42 10y ago
        What happened in 1973 to cause this to kickoff?
        someguydave 10y ago
woah 10y ago
What about all these corner grocery stores? They could be out saving the world, fighting malaria, going to mars, but what are they doing? Selling groceries. What a bunch of assholes.
- epistasis 10y ago
  Corner grocery stores don't fluff the press with stories about changing the world and grand visions.
  - oldmanjay 10y ago
    Most SF startups don't, either. Do you believe in the concept of group responsibility for individual action?
  - sardonicbryan 10y ago
    Are soup kitchens assholes because Daniel Patterson and Roy Choi are making a big deal about "changing the world" through Locol?
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
  - collyw 10y ago
    They probably pay their taxes as well.
- astrodust 10y ago
  Corner grocery stores don't get hundreds of millions in VC funding, hire the brightest of this generation, and make them stock shelves of soup.
  - bodmd 10y ago
    Maybe the 'brightest of this generation' should start companies working on 'real problems' instead of stocking soup at companies working on 'trivial problems'. VC money is apparently being thrown at anything and everything, after all.
samysaadi 10y ago
Let’s not forget that Elon Musk’s first company was a site that made city guides for newspapers. It’s much easier to start companies that solve small less impactful problems first, and then move onto the big important ideas. I think the problem is that a lot of the low hanging fruit has been picked. It’s pretty hard for a CS student out of college to tackle a healthcare problem with no experience in the matter..
- bootload 10y ago
  "It’s much easier to start companies that solve small less impactful problems first, and then move onto the big important ideas." A variant of this, start with a small chunk of a big problem then move with the users to the problem they identify.
- a13n 10y ago
  Which is why most people shouldn't found companies straight out of college, they should join organizations with impactful missions that align with their goals.
  - WalterSear 10y ago
    Except those won't teach them what starting companies with small impactful goals would. Joining something large (larger than you could start) is the opposite.
- WalterBright 10y ago
  > I think the problem is that a lot of the low hanging fruit has been picked. I've heard that sentiment constantly for the last 40 years. I guarantee you that there's low hanging fruit dangling right in front of us, and there's a billion dollar company forming in a garage right now to pick it. It'll all be obvious in hindsight, and we'll kick ourselves for not seeing it.
ZanyProgrammer 10y ago
Well, you do get paid lots of money (at least enough to live in the Bay Area) and I'm sure there's plenty of good drugs and booze to go around in those circles.
cbanek 10y ago
This may be a silly question, but why do we think that SV startup mentality must solve every problem? Like the article states, there are lots of "big" problems, like homelessness, healthcare, and inequality. These are usually the realms of government and non-profits. While some of these are startups or institutions with novel ideas / methods, I'm not sure that entrepreneurship solves everything. I'm just not sure you can make a working business out of any problem. But I may just be a quitter.
- M_Grey 10y ago
  There are plenty of people who think that governments need to be smaller, often for ideological reasons. Those people won't or can't accept the scale of problems which require those governments, and are too involved in their own mythology of "bootstraps" and the like to see beyond that. This is often also the reason why people who in no way stand to benefit from the status quo, deny AGW; the solution is ideologically repugnant to them. Bottom line: people believe what they want to believe, most of the time.
  - candiodari 10y ago
    The economic counterargument would be that any solution to a problem that is not a Nash-equilibrium cannot be implemented. Pretending otherwise is popular, expensive, painful, and doomed to failure as consuming all economic resources on the planet (or any finite amount) cannot fix the underlying problem. But a government can grow, grow, grow while pretending to solve the problem, failing, and "correcting" for the problem that caused them to fail. The moral counterargument is that people should be allowed to decide for themselves and for their own government what is and is not a problem. If, under those basic conditions, no policy can work, then those policies are still immoral. And the moral hazard counterargument is that "qui bono" often fits both sides. In this problem, there is certainly merit to the argument that the IPCC, politicians and scientists involved, the governments, and ... stand to benefit as well. Increased budgets, more people, bigger organisations, more experiments, more things to manage, more power to tell others what to do. Worse, this money and power will come at the expense of the "bootstraps" folk. Bottom line: usually people on both sides of an argument believe what they want to believe. Exceptions exist, but not nearly as much as I thought when I was 16 years old. This is why science should work in the hard, provable only, way. That any result can be duplicated by anyone who wants to do so, and anyone should be given the tools to convince themselves any given theory works. Climate science is a bit lacking on this front, to put it mildly.
codyk 10y ago
Yeah, there are a lot of companies in silicon valley not solving "real" problems. That idea has been discussed in many a blog post. I won't point out the painful irony here.
danblick 10y ago
Just something to think about: everyone who gives advice has their own goals. Sometimes those goals align with yours and sometimes they don't. The economics of VC make it so that they need their companies to be big successes or not succeed at all (Thiel's "Zero to One" talks about the power law distribution of VC returns on investment). So it makes sense for a VC to give "take huge risks" as advice. That may be good advice, or it may not be, but if advice is in someone's economic interest you should probably take that into account... For that matter "Zero to One" also argues that people should aim high and do important things.
aarao 10y ago
This is stupid. The claim is not that all SF tech companies are visionary. The claim may be that most visionary companies, today, are concentrated in or benefit from SF tech. From a simple market perspective, many tech companies are "visionary" by definition of the premium over current earnings. People may be "realizing their potential" in ways that are not obvious to you and me. The laundromat next door helps a lot of people, and does its part in increasing general quality of life – some of the "dumb" companies may do that tomorrow. That's what people putting their time and money on the line believe, at least.
partycoder 10y ago
SF is the hot potato economy. Just take a company, hire lots of people that fit into the western "strategic genius" stereotype, create lots of hype, inflate the value by hiring lots of people and expanding, clone lots of technology that already exists, then when it's time to actually make revenue, sell it really expensively. The value of something is relative. The entire idea is to inflate the value of a company as much as possible, then sell it, then repeat the cycle again and again. Then, in some cases it might be fine to buy a company because of their intellectual property such as their patent portfolio, their franchises, branding, know-how... but if you buy a company because of its software, make sure you are not buying a communal pot of spaghetti. Send a tech person to make sure you are not getting scammed into a technical debt nightmare.
shruubi 10y ago
As someone who is outside of SF looking in, to me the whole startup culture there seems utterly insane. To me, it seems as though there is some kind of reality distortion field that convinces us all that no matter what we is being worked on or created, it is in some way world changing or "disruptive", despite how stupid it is, or how viable a market there is for what is being made. The funny thing is, organizations that are actually trying to make the world a better place by helping the homeless, poor, disadvantaged etc I've never even heard of. The way I see it is that VC's are all about world changing and making the world a better place, so long as in this better world they can still milk a market for every last penny.
- M_Grey 10y ago
  It's all about people who've seen how absurdly rich you can get, and want a piece of that. That's all there is to it. The rest is window dressing and empty words to facilitate an IPO, selling the company, or hitting that lucky lottery win in some other way. When it inevitably, eventually implodes, nothing of lasting value will be lost.
  - refurb 10y ago
    It's all about people who've seen how absurdly rich you can get, and want a piece of that. That about sums it up. If people suddenly became rich through farming, you'd see people flocking to the mid-west. A lot of people claim a higher calling or passion for tech, but it's mostly just dollar signs in their eyes.
    - M_Grey 10y ago
      They're smart enough to know that saying, "This is the new gold rush" would make them look bad, exactly.
    - sp527 10y ago
      I had a passion for tech. Then it was beaten out of me by large, successful tech companies. Some day, the majority of us who are relegated to inane, shitty work will wake up and acknowledge that. So what do you do when you are a capable programmer who isn't rich enough to work on something challenging/interesting/meaningful like electric cars or rockets? Maximize expected value. That's not immoral. That's the shitty reality of being a person of average means.
grondilu 10y ago
> And we can all name a lot of things that are broken: healthcare, education, homelessness and poverty, food waste, climate change... Successful people in Silicon Valley are not concerned by these issues. They can afford to pay physicians without relying on public generosity, they can send their kids in private schools if they're not happy with public ones, they're neither homeless nor likely to become so (by hypothesis : they're successful), and they're not poor. So basically, the subjects that are mentioned are really problems only for people who have a high sense of altruism. Why are people not as altruistic as the author? I don't know, but it's probably just a fact.
- jon_richards 10y ago
  Didn't Zuckerberg spend a ton of money trying to fix education? How'd that go?
- HillaryBriss 10y ago
  healthcare is really difficult to fix because of laws that get in the way. how can an app or a website change, say, FDA regulations, physician licensing rules, and the insurance rate approval boards? do other countries and health care markets have lower costs and better results because they have better websites, apps, data sets and machine learning algorithms?
bootload 10y ago
"Find a problem you really care* about solving and pursue that. Even if the likelihood of success is slim, put your head down and go."* I'm interested in startup idea patterns, Care isn't one I've seen or heard before. Are there any examples of startups using this pattern and succeeding?
- simplemath 10y ago
  What's your definition of success?
  - bootload 10y ago
    "success" Not dying.
KirinDave 10y ago
One nitpick I have about this: the peninsula tech scene is huge. It leads in all sorts of places outside of what you'll read about on tech crunch. SSF is a massive hub of Biotech (as is the rapidly expanding UCSF-centered campus in Mission Bay). Financial technology is rapidly expanding in the city as well, and only the older players in that space have substantial ties to traditional Uber For _____ startup VC firms. Companies like Tally that are genuinely trying to change the relationship. Even big companies like Capital One (my employer) are moving into SF to recruit and acquire because it's where we can recruit the top talent away from people bored on working on Adtech. There are LOTS of great places to work, not just in the Peninsula & Valley of California but all over the country. SF is just nice because it's a small city with a high density of tech jobs. But I hate to see it defined by the well-publicized caricature of the startup scene. Honestly, it bothers me enough to lead me to bad decision about it.
- arcanus 10y ago
  Good point, but I'll note that many cities have technology companies that just don't get the press and hype you see for VC backed software companies in SF. There aren't that many articles about biotechnology in Boston, for instance. The software paradigm has captured a great deal of mindshare.
  - KirinDave 10y ago
    One I struggle to undo every day!
  - astrodust 10y ago
    Oh, don't worry, in twenty years we'll all be talking about the Good Old Days when computer tech got respect and money, not like all those biotech firms with their trillions in funding and ridiculously hyped valuations. Genetic engineers will be the new software engineers and software engineers will be the new plumbers.
    - sidlls 10y ago
      Plumbers can do significantly better than software engineers even today. We are paid relatively poorly for the economic value the companies we work for receive from our labor.
pascalxus 10y ago
Not everything can be solved with technology. Sure, tech will play a role, but the biggest problem is Government, legislation and the laws that prevent innovation, increasing barriers to entry so high, it drives out and prevents all innovation: hence why there's not many innovative companies going after the trillion dollar housing market.
- astrodust 10y ago
  Not everything can be solved with technology, but many if not most things can be improved with it. It's important to be specific here that "technology" does not necessarily mean an app, or code, or even computers. It means taking advantage of the rich ecosystem of products, services, and talent at our disposal today and improving something. "Disruption" should be a positive change: Removing the old and replacing it with something new that's better in every respect. Sadly "disrupting" companies often replace the old with some new thing that's not as good, but is more convenient, or is exactly the same just minus the middle man. That's not innovation, that's just optimization.
anindha 10y ago
Nearly all big companies started as small companies solving more trivial problems. Facebook was a way to find people you met at parties at Harvard. Apple was a company that made computers for hobbyists. The idea is that you learn to become a good entrepreneur solving the smaller problems.
Xcelerate 10y ago
An important point that I think is missing is that solving small, "useless" problems is a good way to get enough money to start solving big, "impactful" problems. Elon Musk didn't just start SpaceX out of the blue; he used his profits from Zip2 and PayPal to fund his more grandiose ideas.
- floatrock 10y ago
  I don't disagree. A while back I met a founder of a respectively successful startup who was pulling an Elon and was saying he hopes to cash out so he can follow his true passion and start a space rocket engine company that will provide infrastructure for the beyond-satellite-orbit space journeys. I think the problem is this guy is the only person I've met who describes his current venture as a stepping stone towards a grander vision. Most people just see the dollar signs right in front of them.
teuobk 10y ago
Societal problems are not necessarily business opportunities. That said, I do agree with the general point of the article. I cringe whenever I talk with the latest would-be entrepreneur who is "solving" the current trendy non-problem.
Manishearth 10y ago
> Right now, entrepreneurs are trying to fix things that aren’t broken. And we can all name a lot of things that are broken: healthcare, education, homelessness and poverty, food waste, climate change… need I continue? I'm kinda apprehensive of what would happen if SV got a hold of these problems and tried to "solve" them.
- toomuchtodo 10y ago
  You get the US Digital Service; well intentioned tech professionals slamming on the accelerator pedal of bad policy using tech. Example: healthcare.gov works well now, but the ACA is falling apart financially due to being untenable in its current form. The solution is not startups. The solution is people organizing for better government policy (single payer healthcare, etc). Full disclosure: I interviewed with the USDS but declined the job offer.
jwatte 10y ago
There is visionary tech in SF. And for each vision, there are 100 me-too venture capital chasers going nowhere while strip mining the common good.
brandonb 10y ago
I hear this sentiment a lot, and don't entirely disagree with it... but it oversimplifies our community massively. If you want to work on big, meaningful problems, here are some compelling options. Do you think our government is broken? Join Nava (a new type of government contractor working on helping the VA fix its backlog and helping CMS move our healthcare system toward value-based-care) or 18F (a new agency within the government). Want to save lives? There's Syapse (precision medicine to cure cancer), Clover (building a Medicare Advantage health insurance company from scratch), Omada Health (diabetes prevention through behavior change), or Grail or Freenome (liquid biopsy). Even well-known startups are helping to solve important problems: think about the impact of Uber and Lyft on drunk driving, or of Airbnb on foreclosures. It wasn't a coincidence Airbnb was founded in the middle of a housing crisis. I don't know green tech well, but surely somebody here will have good suggestions on what technologists can do about the environment.
- ghull95 10y ago
  Completely agree. While there are a lot of startups that may not be tackling "meaningful" problems, there are plenty that are. On top of the ones you mentioned there are many FinTech companies that are focused on helping middle and lower class Americans. The Financial Solutions Lab has tons of startups interested in tackling large financial problems. Even works on income smoothing to make hourly and seasonal workers have steady paychecks. Digit helps with automated saving. Tala uses machine learning to create credit scores for people in Kenya, Tanzania, and other developing countries. Nova Credit helps immigrant gain better credit. There are dozens more that are all helping people get access to better/fairer financial products.
- ubernostrum 10y ago
  Clover (building a Medicare Advantage health insurance company from scratch) I've been at Clover since January. Cannot recommend enough. If you want to learn why, I'm always open and willing to chat about it.
  - otps22 10y ago
    Have wanted to learn more about Clover for a while now--down to chat sometime?
derricgilling 10y ago
Startups are not easy and there is only so much bandwidth. Many startups ideas can be visionary since it's a pain that the founder dealt with either in real life or as a developer. Is it right to call Uber less visionary than a company focused on solving healthcare or to keep Moore's going forward? There can be both technical and business innovation. Uber (and especially it's initial black car service) may have seemed like a SF-only problem in the early days superficially, but now Uber solves real problems such as mobilizing senior citizens that don't have a license or reducing drunk driving. Vision isn't something that is built and realized on day one but rather grows organically over time.
- collyw 10y ago
  >but now Uber solves real problems such as mobilizing senior citizens that don't have a license or reducing drunk driving. Taxis existed before Uber.
  - aianus 10y ago
    Taxis are 2.5x to 4x (if you pool) more expensive than Uber where I live. Uber definitely changed the economics of dropping in to visit your grandkids or using a DD vs driving drunk vs ride sharing.
neilsharma 10y ago
What are some ways for technologists to address climate/environmental issues in a high-impact way? Would love to do something in the space, but the 8/10 companies that show interest in me have to do with ads or luxury services in one way shape or form.
objectiveariel 10y ago
Strong, much-needed words here: "Right now, entrepreneurs are trying to fix things that aren’t broken. And we can all name a lot of things that are broken: healthcare, education, homelessness and poverty, food waste, climate change…" Damn right. Those are real problems. But then the author praises Elon Musk for sending people to Mars. For prioritising space exploration over alleviating famine, poverty, illiteracy, whatnot. The author's utter inability and unwillingness to distinguish between frivolous and meaningful is precisely the problem he's denouncing.
- jvandonsel 10y ago
  Well, one could argue that spreading humans outside this single planet is a requirement for long-term survival of the species, and thus as important or more important than those other causes you mention. I don't personally subscribe to this belief, but many people do.
  - drakonandor 10y ago
    The primary obstacle of the "real problems" mentioned is people. For example, consider that: Sometimes people don't want to be helped (see: many homeless) Sometimes leaders don't want their people to be helped, because they gain from keeping them down (see: African warlords / government leaders embezzling aid) When faced with SOCIAL problems like these, it's no wonder that someone of a 'hacker' mindset like Elon instead prefers to devote his time to solving problems which instead have technological roadblocks (well, maybe not entirely applicable in the case of Tesla or SolarCity).
mailarchis 10y ago
Elon Musk's first successful exit was Zip2 that provided online city guide software to newspapers. Bill Gates sold Basic Interpreter to MITS. How successful would they have been if the first problems they had picked to solve was landing man on Mars and eliminating Polio from the world. Sometimes, its all right to work on smaller problems until you are ready for the bigger ones.
jvandonsel 10y ago
Relevant article on YC and startup culture in last month's New Yorker: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/10/10/sam-altmans-manifest-destiny http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/10/10/sam-altmans-man...
woodandsteel 10y ago
Good article, but part of the problem is that software developers, due to their social class and mental make-up, tend to not have the sort of immediate experience and understanding needed to take on real-world problems like homelessness and the health care system. They would have to work hard to get out of their epistemological bubbles. Of course, some of them do that, but it seems to be rather unusual.

212 points by dmitrig01 10y ago

And this is precisely why I'm a mechanical engineer instead of a web developer, despite being very very good at the latter.

woah 10y ago
What are you engineering right now?
- fjdhcjjenxncnd 10y ago
  My work is a bit meta at the moment. I'm making software that can take part designs and optimize their physical shape for better performance. So the end result is more fuel efficient cars, faster planes, etc.
  - angersock 10y ago
    Oh, so you're optimizing and not innovating.
    - fjdhcjjenxncnd 10y ago
      Actually no. I'm making the software that did not previously exist. Others down the road can then use it to produce better performing products. Passive aggressive word games aside, you really can't compare "reducing the global need for oil" to "snapchat for cats".
      - angersock 10y ago
        Like, what special sauce do you bring to the table that ANSYS or Solidworks or whatever FEA package people use for optimization studies doesn't already do--and probably do well enough? You dismiss twitter, snapchat clones, whatever when they do deliver actual value to people just because they don't meet some arbitrary feelgood measure of "innovative". A measure that coincidentally happens to somehow make your cute little tool worldchanging! Industry, especially in mech and AEC, is hilariously slow to change workflows once they have something that works. Your product is probably going to get lost in the noise, all with you puttering around going "but but but I was innovating! Why don't people support innovation?!". You're coming off as a holier-than-thou "srs bsns" engineer when you should have some humility. Maybe post under your real account.
        fjdhcjjenxncnd 10y ago
        It's still very much a research implementation, but I'm making global black box combinatoric methods which can be used where analytic optimization methods are not available, e.g. multi-objective optimization. >Maybe post under your real account. I have no real account. I always make a new one every few posts partly for privacy reasons, and partly because I enjoy reading posts like your own. :^)
        arcanus 10y ago
        As someone who did numerical optimization for my doctoral thesis (also mechE), this sounds more amenable to publications than a start up. Are you trying to commercialize?
        mappu 10y ago
        > I have no real account. I always make a new one every few posts partly for privacy reasons This is the logical next step after random site-specific passwords. The login/logout workflow does make this inconvenient though. Browser extension idea? Chan boards use thread-specific IDs or thread-specific tripcode salts to achieve much the same thing - privacy by default, but identifiers when it helps you follow a conversation.
      - user5994461 10y ago
        > Passive aggressive word games aside, you really can't compare "reducing the global need for oil" to "snapchat for cats". Actually. By reducing the consumption of oil, it becomes cheaper to travel and people will travel more... increasing the consumption of oil. Game word in point: You might be having the opposing effect of what you think :D
        fulafel 10y ago
        It's known that we can't dig up and burning all profitably extractable hydrocarbons, if we want to avoid the worst case scenarios of global warming. See eg. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/sep/27/fracking-digging-drilling-paris-agreement-fossil-fuels https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/sep/27/fracki...
        dTal 10y ago
        That would be Jevon's Paradox: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
  - HNSucksAss 10y ago
    "My work is a bit meta at the moment." That doesn't mean anything. So we can infer that you're not doing shit.

Apreche 10y ago

Every one of those entrepreneurs and VCs are working on something they believe in. Making themselves rich(er). That's all there is to it.

fjdhcjjenxncnd 10y ago
If our economic system as we know it is no longer capable of delivering innovation, then something is seriously wrong and we should be reevaluating why we are still using that system.
- mzw_mzw 10y ago
  What alternative system would you propose?
- oldmanjay 10y ago
  Has anyone actually made a serious case that innovation has stopped? The closest I've ever seen are people asserting that things they feel are obvious in retrospect aren't innovations, but that's just a silly bias.
  - internaut 10y ago
    Stopped no. Stagnated, yes. I've made at least a dozen posts explaining the Stagnation Hypothesis, there's a long list of people in Silicon Valley who take it seriously. The basic idea is that since '73 the rate of change has slowed down. This excludes computation of course. It is an explanation for present day economic stresses in the West that I believe hangs together far better than the mainstream theories that get news headlines.
    - JBlue42 10y ago
      What happened in 1973 to cause this to kickoff?
      - someguydave 10y ago

woah 10y ago

What about all these corner grocery stores? They could be out saving the world, fighting malaria, going to mars, but what are they doing? Selling groceries. What a bunch of assholes.

epistasis 10y ago
Corner grocery stores don't fluff the press with stories about changing the world and grand visions.
- oldmanjay 10y ago
  Most SF startups don't, either. Do you believe in the concept of group responsibility for individual action?
- sardonicbryan 10y ago
  Are soup kitchens assholes because Daniel Patterson and Roy Choi are making a big deal about "changing the world" through Locol?
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
- collyw 10y ago
  They probably pay their taxes as well.
astrodust 10y ago
Corner grocery stores don't get hundreds of millions in VC funding, hire the brightest of this generation, and make them stock shelves of soup.
- bodmd 10y ago
  Maybe the 'brightest of this generation' should start companies working on 'real problems' instead of stocking soup at companies working on 'trivial problems'. VC money is apparently being thrown at anything and everything, after all.

samysaadi 10y ago

Let’s not forget that Elon Musk’s first company was a site that made city guides for newspapers. It’s much easier to start companies that solve small less impactful problems first, and then move onto the big important ideas. I think the problem is that a lot of the low hanging fruit has been picked. It’s pretty hard for a CS student out of college to tackle a healthcare problem with no experience in the matter..

bootload 10y ago
"It’s much easier to start companies that solve small less impactful problems first, and then move onto the big important ideas." A variant of this, start with a small chunk of a big problem then move with the users to the problem they identify.
a13n 10y ago
Which is why most people shouldn't found companies straight out of college, they should join organizations with impactful missions that align with their goals.
- WalterSear 10y ago
  Except those won't teach them what starting companies with small impactful goals would. Joining something large (larger than you could start) is the opposite.
WalterBright 10y ago
> I think the problem is that a lot of the low hanging fruit has been picked. I've heard that sentiment constantly for the last 40 years. I guarantee you that there's low hanging fruit dangling right in front of us, and there's a billion dollar company forming in a garage right now to pick it. It'll all be obvious in hindsight, and we'll kick ourselves for not seeing it.

ZanyProgrammer 10y ago

Well, you do get paid lots of money (at least enough to live in the Bay Area) and I'm sure there's plenty of good drugs and booze to go around in those circles.

cbanek 10y ago

This may be a silly question, but why do we think that SV startup mentality must solve every problem? Like the article states, there are lots of "big" problems, like homelessness, healthcare, and inequality. These are usually the realms of government and non-profits. While some of these are startups or institutions with novel ideas / methods, I'm not sure that entrepreneurship solves everything. I'm just not sure you can make a working business out of any problem. But I may just be a quitter.

M_Grey 10y ago
There are plenty of people who think that governments need to be smaller, often for ideological reasons. Those people won't or can't accept the scale of problems which require those governments, and are too involved in their own mythology of "bootstraps" and the like to see beyond that. This is often also the reason why people who in no way stand to benefit from the status quo, deny AGW; the solution is ideologically repugnant to them. Bottom line: people believe what they want to believe, most of the time.
- candiodari 10y ago
  The economic counterargument would be that any solution to a problem that is not a Nash-equilibrium cannot be implemented. Pretending otherwise is popular, expensive, painful, and doomed to failure as consuming all economic resources on the planet (or any finite amount) cannot fix the underlying problem. But a government can grow, grow, grow while pretending to solve the problem, failing, and "correcting" for the problem that caused them to fail. The moral counterargument is that people should be allowed to decide for themselves and for their own government what is and is not a problem. If, under those basic conditions, no policy can work, then those policies are still immoral. And the moral hazard counterargument is that "qui bono" often fits both sides. In this problem, there is certainly merit to the argument that the IPCC, politicians and scientists involved, the governments, and ... stand to benefit as well. Increased budgets, more people, bigger organisations, more experiments, more things to manage, more power to tell others what to do. Worse, this money and power will come at the expense of the "bootstraps" folk. Bottom line: usually people on both sides of an argument believe what they want to believe. Exceptions exist, but not nearly as much as I thought when I was 16 years old. This is why science should work in the hard, provable only, way. That any result can be duplicated by anyone who wants to do so, and anyone should be given the tools to convince themselves any given theory works. Climate science is a bit lacking on this front, to put it mildly.

codyk 10y ago

Yeah, there are a lot of companies in silicon valley not solving "real" problems. That idea has been discussed in many a blog post. I won't point out the painful irony here.

danblick 10y ago

Just something to think about: everyone who gives advice has their own goals. Sometimes those goals align with yours and sometimes they don't. The economics of VC make it so that they need their companies to be big successes or not succeed at all (Thiel's "Zero to One" talks about the power law distribution of VC returns on investment). So it makes sense for a VC to give "take huge risks" as advice. That may be good advice, or it may not be, but if advice is in someone's economic interest you should probably take that into account... For that matter "Zero to One" also argues that people should aim high and do important things.

aarao 10y ago

This is stupid. The claim is not that all SF tech companies are visionary. The claim may be that most visionary companies, today, are concentrated in or benefit from SF tech. From a simple market perspective, many tech companies are "visionary" by definition of the premium over current earnings. People may be "realizing their potential" in ways that are not obvious to you and me. The laundromat next door helps a lot of people, and does its part in increasing general quality of life – some of the "dumb" companies may do that tomorrow. That's what people putting their time and money on the line believe, at least.

partycoder 10y ago

SF is the hot potato economy. Just take a company, hire lots of people that fit into the western "strategic genius" stereotype, create lots of hype, inflate the value by hiring lots of people and expanding, clone lots of technology that already exists, then when it's time to actually make revenue, sell it really expensively. The value of something is relative. The entire idea is to inflate the value of a company as much as possible, then sell it, then repeat the cycle again and again. Then, in some cases it might be fine to buy a company because of their intellectual property such as their patent portfolio, their franchises, branding, know-how... but if you buy a company because of its software, make sure you are not buying a communal pot of spaghetti. Send a tech person to make sure you are not getting scammed into a technical debt nightmare.

shruubi 10y ago

As someone who is outside of SF looking in, to me the whole startup culture there seems utterly insane. To me, it seems as though there is some kind of reality distortion field that convinces us all that no matter what we is being worked on or created, it is in some way world changing or "disruptive", despite how stupid it is, or how viable a market there is for what is being made. The funny thing is, organizations that are actually trying to make the world a better place by helping the homeless, poor, disadvantaged etc I've never even heard of. The way I see it is that VC's are all about world changing and making the world a better place, so long as in this better world they can still milk a market for every last penny.

M_Grey 10y ago
It's all about people who've seen how absurdly rich you can get, and want a piece of that. That's all there is to it. The rest is window dressing and empty words to facilitate an IPO, selling the company, or hitting that lucky lottery win in some other way. When it inevitably, eventually implodes, nothing of lasting value will be lost.
- refurb 10y ago
  It's all about people who've seen how absurdly rich you can get, and want a piece of that. That about sums it up. If people suddenly became rich through farming, you'd see people flocking to the mid-west. A lot of people claim a higher calling or passion for tech, but it's mostly just dollar signs in their eyes.
  - M_Grey 10y ago
    They're smart enough to know that saying, "This is the new gold rush" would make them look bad, exactly.
  - sp527 10y ago
    I had a passion for tech. Then it was beaten out of me by large, successful tech companies. Some day, the majority of us who are relegated to inane, shitty work will wake up and acknowledge that. So what do you do when you are a capable programmer who isn't rich enough to work on something challenging/interesting/meaningful like electric cars or rockets? Maximize expected value. That's not immoral. That's the shitty reality of being a person of average means.

grondilu 10y ago

> And we can all name a lot of things that are broken: healthcare, education, homelessness and poverty, food waste, climate change... Successful people in Silicon Valley are not concerned by these issues. They can afford to pay physicians without relying on public generosity, they can send their kids in private schools if they're not happy with public ones, they're neither homeless nor likely to become so (by hypothesis : they're successful), and they're not poor. So basically, the subjects that are mentioned are really problems only for people who have a high sense of altruism. Why are people not as altruistic as the author? I don't know, but it's probably just a fact.

jon_richards 10y ago
Didn't Zuckerberg spend a ton of money trying to fix education? How'd that go?
HillaryBriss 10y ago
healthcare is really difficult to fix because of laws that get in the way. how can an app or a website change, say, FDA regulations, physician licensing rules, and the insurance rate approval boards? do other countries and health care markets have lower costs and better results because they have better websites, apps, data sets and machine learning algorithms?

bootload 10y ago

"Find a problem you really care* about solving and pursue that. Even if the likelihood of success is slim, put your head down and go."* I'm interested in startup idea patterns, Care isn't one I've seen or heard before. Are there any examples of startups using this pattern and succeeding?

simplemath 10y ago
What's your definition of success?
- bootload 10y ago
  "success" Not dying.

KirinDave 10y ago

One nitpick I have about this: the peninsula tech scene is huge. It leads in all sorts of places outside of what you'll read about on tech crunch. SSF is a massive hub of Biotech (as is the rapidly expanding UCSF-centered campus in Mission Bay). Financial technology is rapidly expanding in the city as well, and only the older players in that space have substantial ties to traditional Uber For _____ startup VC firms. Companies like Tally that are genuinely trying to change the relationship. Even big companies like Capital One (my employer) are moving into SF to recruit and acquire because it's where we can recruit the top talent away from people bored on working on Adtech. There are LOTS of great places to work, not just in the Peninsula & Valley of California but all over the country. SF is just nice because it's a small city with a high density of tech jobs. But I hate to see it defined by the well-publicized caricature of the startup scene. Honestly, it bothers me enough to lead me to bad decision about it.

arcanus 10y ago
Good point, but I'll note that many cities have technology companies that just don't get the press and hype you see for VC backed software companies in SF. There aren't that many articles about biotechnology in Boston, for instance. The software paradigm has captured a great deal of mindshare.
- KirinDave 10y ago
  One I struggle to undo every day!
- astrodust 10y ago
  Oh, don't worry, in twenty years we'll all be talking about the Good Old Days when computer tech got respect and money, not like all those biotech firms with their trillions in funding and ridiculously hyped valuations. Genetic engineers will be the new software engineers and software engineers will be the new plumbers.
  - sidlls 10y ago
    Plumbers can do significantly better than software engineers even today. We are paid relatively poorly for the economic value the companies we work for receive from our labor.

pascalxus 10y ago

Not everything can be solved with technology. Sure, tech will play a role, but the biggest problem is Government, legislation and the laws that prevent innovation, increasing barriers to entry so high, it drives out and prevents all innovation: hence why there's not many innovative companies going after the trillion dollar housing market.

astrodust 10y ago
Not everything can be solved with technology, but many if not most things can be improved with it. It's important to be specific here that "technology" does not necessarily mean an app, or code, or even computers. It means taking advantage of the rich ecosystem of products, services, and talent at our disposal today and improving something. "Disruption" should be a positive change: Removing the old and replacing it with something new that's better in every respect. Sadly "disrupting" companies often replace the old with some new thing that's not as good, but is more convenient, or is exactly the same just minus the middle man. That's not innovation, that's just optimization.

anindha 10y ago

Nearly all big companies started as small companies solving more trivial problems. Facebook was a way to find people you met at parties at Harvard. Apple was a company that made computers for hobbyists. The idea is that you learn to become a good entrepreneur solving the smaller problems.

Xcelerate 10y ago

An important point that I think is missing is that solving small, "useless" problems is a good way to get enough money to start solving big, "impactful" problems. Elon Musk didn't just start SpaceX out of the blue; he used his profits from Zip2 and PayPal to fund his more grandiose ideas.

floatrock 10y ago
I don't disagree. A while back I met a founder of a respectively successful startup who was pulling an Elon and was saying he hopes to cash out so he can follow his true passion and start a space rocket engine company that will provide infrastructure for the beyond-satellite-orbit space journeys. I think the problem is this guy is the only person I've met who describes his current venture as a stepping stone towards a grander vision. Most people just see the dollar signs right in front of them.

teuobk 10y ago

Societal problems are not necessarily business opportunities. That said, I do agree with the general point of the article. I cringe whenever I talk with the latest would-be entrepreneur who is "solving" the current trendy non-problem.

Manishearth 10y ago

> Right now, entrepreneurs are trying to fix things that aren’t broken. And we can all name a lot of things that are broken: healthcare, education, homelessness and poverty, food waste, climate change… need I continue? I'm kinda apprehensive of what would happen if SV got a hold of these problems and tried to "solve" them.

toomuchtodo 10y ago
You get the US Digital Service; well intentioned tech professionals slamming on the accelerator pedal of bad policy using tech. Example: healthcare.gov works well now, but the ACA is falling apart financially due to being untenable in its current form. The solution is not startups. The solution is people organizing for better government policy (single payer healthcare, etc). Full disclosure: I interviewed with the USDS but declined the job offer.

jwatte 10y ago

There is visionary tech in SF. And for each vision, there are 100 me-too venture capital chasers going nowhere while strip mining the common good.

brandonb 10y ago

I hear this sentiment a lot, and don't entirely disagree with it... but it oversimplifies our community massively. If you want to work on big, meaningful problems, here are some compelling options. Do you think our government is broken? Join Nava (a new type of government contractor working on helping the VA fix its backlog and helping CMS move our healthcare system toward value-based-care) or 18F (a new agency within the government). Want to save lives? There's Syapse (precision medicine to cure cancer), Clover (building a Medicare Advantage health insurance company from scratch), Omada Health (diabetes prevention through behavior change), or Grail or Freenome (liquid biopsy). Even well-known startups are helping to solve important problems: think about the impact of Uber and Lyft on drunk driving, or of Airbnb on foreclosures. It wasn't a coincidence Airbnb was founded in the middle of a housing crisis. I don't know green tech well, but surely somebody here will have good suggestions on what technologists can do about the environment.

ghull95 10y ago
Completely agree. While there are a lot of startups that may not be tackling "meaningful" problems, there are plenty that are. On top of the ones you mentioned there are many FinTech companies that are focused on helping middle and lower class Americans. The Financial Solutions Lab has tons of startups interested in tackling large financial problems. Even works on income smoothing to make hourly and seasonal workers have steady paychecks. Digit helps with automated saving. Tala uses machine learning to create credit scores for people in Kenya, Tanzania, and other developing countries. Nova Credit helps immigrant gain better credit. There are dozens more that are all helping people get access to better/fairer financial products.
ubernostrum 10y ago
Clover (building a Medicare Advantage health insurance company from scratch) I've been at Clover since January. Cannot recommend enough. If you want to learn why, I'm always open and willing to chat about it.
- otps22 10y ago
  Have wanted to learn more about Clover for a while now--down to chat sometime?

derricgilling 10y ago

Startups are not easy and there is only so much bandwidth. Many startups ideas can be visionary since it's a pain that the founder dealt with either in real life or as a developer. Is it right to call Uber less visionary than a company focused on solving healthcare or to keep Moore's going forward? There can be both technical and business innovation. Uber (and especially it's initial black car service) may have seemed like a SF-only problem in the early days superficially, but now Uber solves real problems such as mobilizing senior citizens that don't have a license or reducing drunk driving. Vision isn't something that is built and realized on day one but rather grows organically over time.

collyw 10y ago
>but now Uber solves real problems such as mobilizing senior citizens that don't have a license or reducing drunk driving. Taxis existed before Uber.
- aianus 10y ago
  Taxis are 2.5x to 4x (if you pool) more expensive than Uber where I live. Uber definitely changed the economics of dropping in to visit your grandkids or using a DD vs driving drunk vs ride sharing.

neilsharma 10y ago

What are some ways for technologists to address climate/environmental issues in a high-impact way? Would love to do something in the space, but the 8/10 companies that show interest in me have to do with ads or luxury services in one way shape or form.

objectiveariel 10y ago

Strong, much-needed words here: "Right now, entrepreneurs are trying to fix things that aren’t broken. And we can all name a lot of things that are broken: healthcare, education, homelessness and poverty, food waste, climate change…" Damn right. Those are real problems. But then the author praises Elon Musk for sending people to Mars. For prioritising space exploration over alleviating famine, poverty, illiteracy, whatnot. The author's utter inability and unwillingness to distinguish between frivolous and meaningful is precisely the problem he's denouncing.

jvandonsel 10y ago
Well, one could argue that spreading humans outside this single planet is a requirement for long-term survival of the species, and thus as important or more important than those other causes you mention. I don't personally subscribe to this belief, but many people do.
- drakonandor 10y ago
  The primary obstacle of the "real problems" mentioned is people. For example, consider that: Sometimes people don't want to be helped (see: many homeless) Sometimes leaders don't want their people to be helped, because they gain from keeping them down (see: African warlords / government leaders embezzling aid) When faced with SOCIAL problems like these, it's no wonder that someone of a 'hacker' mindset like Elon instead prefers to devote his time to solving problems which instead have technological roadblocks (well, maybe not entirely applicable in the case of Tesla or SolarCity).

mailarchis 10y ago

Elon Musk's first successful exit was Zip2 that provided online city guide software to newspapers. Bill Gates sold Basic Interpreter to MITS. How successful would they have been if the first problems they had picked to solve was landing man on Mars and eliminating Polio from the world. Sometimes, its all right to work on smaller problems until you are ready for the bigger ones.

jvandonsel 10y ago

Relevant article on YC and startup culture in last month's New Yorker: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/10/10/sam-altmans-manifest-destiny http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/10/10/sam-altmans-man...

woodandsteel 10y ago

Good article, but part of the problem is that software developers, due to their social class and mental make-up, tend to not have the sort of immediate experience and understanding needed to take on real-world problems like homelessness and the health care system. They would have to work hard to get out of their epistemological bubbles. Of course, some of them do that, but it seems to be rather unusual.