Honestly, most of the skills I've learned in building products for people can be used to make tech that has a social purpose. First, you find a problem. Then yo

Honestly, most of the skills I've learned in building products for people can be used to make tech that has a social purpose. First, you find a problem. Then you find people who can honestly tell you if your solution will actually work. Then, you do the hard work of building what you're gonna build, and seeing if it can fit at the locus of how things are actually done. That sounds vague, so an example might be nice. I travelled to Oaxaca recently and toured around a bunch of palenques (mezcal distilleries) to see how folks did their work. It sounded like there's an enormous problem with overcultivation of maguey — a plant that needs 30-some years to mature in some cases. I thought maybe an app that could identify + track maguey would help. I talked about it with folks, and realized that the problem isn't that they don't know where the plants are, or that they don't know how long they should grow for. It's that there's too much demand for what the ecology can bear, and a lot of it gets carted off to Jalisco to fill tequila bottles before it's mature. In that light, an app for identifying + tracking maguey isn't really gonna help. But now I have the contacts, they know I want to help, and we can keep talking about what they're working on. Maybe it'll line up. But it's uncertain. And frankly, that's how this stuff works — whether you're building something in the hopes of getting into YC, or building something to help out humankind. Just because you can earn a paycheque writing code doesn't mean you can identify and fill a new need with that same skillset.