11 ms·
IMO, if you want to affect people's everyday lives in meaningful (but possibly unglamorous) ways, take your wit and your problem solving abilities and your lead
by scelerat 15y ago
IMO, if you want to affect people's everyday lives in meaningful (but possibly unglamorous) ways, take your wit and your problem solving abilities and your leadership skills to local government. City, county. School board, PTA coach a youth sports team, or teach a class.
The fact is that the startup world is one where extremely rich people give money to already pretty wealthy people (in relative terms: not just money, but education, social standing) to find ways to make them richer. Usually in the form of some kind of mass entertainment experience.
I don't meant to diminish the positive and transformative effects many of the inventions of the startup/Internet age have had on society and people as a whole. But if you are really primarily interested in making people's lives better, start with the real social network first. In the hierarchy of needs, a better photo sharing service is way down on the list.
- timjahn 15y agoSaid perfectly.
- scythe 15y ago>In the hierarchy of needs, a better photo sharing service is way down on the list. The problem with this line of thinking is that needs are a vector, not a scalar, and while one form of contribution may have a larger norm, all forms of contribution are eventually important. Irrelevant of considerations about the precise norm of the contribution-vector, soceity thrives on having people contribute in loads of different ways; if we were all oncologists there would be nobody who could treat heart disease, etc. I say do what you're good at, mostly, and charity where you can.
- xbryanx 15y agoRight on! Code for America is a prototype project that helps people do just this. http://codeforamerica.org/ http://codeforamerica.org/