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Does the world need another Facebook or Google? How bout a cure for the common cold or something useful?

zizee 16y ago
He's not saying that palantir is going to be the next big social network or search engine. He is saying it is going to be the next tens of billions $ startup exit.
dualogy 16y ago
Go right ahead kid.
- dougabug 16y ago
  My comment was not really so as glib as all that. We see hundreds of billions of dollars worth of speculative investments in "technologies", recalling the heady days of the dot-com era and the now iconic pets.com. Cures for common viral diseases, while surely not as monumental as daily groupons or facebook status changes, would be a boon for the billions of people who suffer from their effects. Look, a hundred billion dollars is a lot of money. Enough to secure progress on major scientific fronts. Enough to launch half a dozen Human Genome Projects. If groupon is worth $15 billion, and facebook is worth $70 billion, it's not so absurd to wonder if the way we are valuing technological and intellectual resources has gone off the reservation. Memory of the dot com bust seems to have completely faded from the valley. The valuations we place on forms of innovation, intellectual achievement, affect where we are going. Yes, I would rather pursue the cure for the common cold, flus, and other viral diseases, even with a low probability of success. The odds of creating the next Facebook are similarly astronomically low, and even if I succeeded, it would be less meaningful than even advancing the solution of the former. I would credit myself if I merely convinced a few smart people that this was a worthier goal towards which to apply their energies and abilities. Imagine a world where (more than a few) hackers thought and communicated about the structure and meaning of dna. Wrote programs which probed protein structures and revealed their dynamics and interactions. That seems far fetched now, but decades ago, computers were extravagantly expensive devices maintained by a relatively small priesthood. The ecosystem of software which has evolved since the democratization of computing brought about by the personal computer and Internet revolution represents billions of man hours of work by smart, dedicated (and even not so dedicated) people. My point is that hackers can and do contribute a great deal to solving very difficult, truly important problems, and that we shouldn't be so obsessed with trying to create the next twitter or twaddle, because twaddling is so ab$urdly overvalued at the moment.

zizee 16y ago

He's not saying that palantir is going to be the next big social network or search engine. He is saying it is going to be the next tens of billions $ startup exit.

dualogy 16y ago

Go right ahead kid.

dougabug 16y ago
My comment was not really so as glib as all that. We see hundreds of billions of dollars worth of speculative investments in "technologies", recalling the heady days of the dot-com era and the now iconic pets.com. Cures for common viral diseases, while surely not as monumental as daily groupons or facebook status changes, would be a boon for the billions of people who suffer from their effects. Look, a hundred billion dollars is a lot of money. Enough to secure progress on major scientific fronts. Enough to launch half a dozen Human Genome Projects. If groupon is worth $15 billion, and facebook is worth $70 billion, it's not so absurd to wonder if the way we are valuing technological and intellectual resources has gone off the reservation. Memory of the dot com bust seems to have completely faded from the valley. The valuations we place on forms of innovation, intellectual achievement, affect where we are going. Yes, I would rather pursue the cure for the common cold, flus, and other viral diseases, even with a low probability of success. The odds of creating the next Facebook are similarly astronomically low, and even if I succeeded, it would be less meaningful than even advancing the solution of the former. I would credit myself if I merely convinced a few smart people that this was a worthier goal towards which to apply their energies and abilities. Imagine a world where (more than a few) hackers thought and communicated about the structure and meaning of dna. Wrote programs which probed protein structures and revealed their dynamics and interactions. That seems far fetched now, but decades ago, computers were extravagantly expensive devices maintained by a relatively small priesthood. The ecosystem of software which has evolved since the democratization of computing brought about by the personal computer and Internet revolution represents billions of man hours of work by smart, dedicated (and even not so dedicated) people. My point is that hackers can and do contribute a great deal to solving very difficult, truly important problems, and that we shouldn't be so obsessed with trying to create the next twitter or twaddle, because twaddling is so ab$urdly overvalued at the moment.