3 ms·
Alright, I'll bite. I intensely care about maximizing my positive impact. After looking at a lot of things in college, including academic research, finance, con
by sskates 14y ago
Alright, I'll bite. I intensely care about maximizing my positive impact. After looking at a lot of things in college, including academic research, finance, consulting, nonprofits, and engineering at a big company, I concluded starting a company was the best way to have an outsized impact on other people's lives. That is why I'm running a company now. I am trying to build a Microsoft.
It's very easy to be dismissive of widgets. For example, the entire internet is a mechanism to instantly teleport bits of information from one place to another. That's all the widget does. It doesn't help you do anything physical. It just lets you send bits from one place to another, nothing else. It sounds so trivial. Who would have thought that a widget for sending bits from one place to another could have such a big impact?
Now I'm wondering- can you give a specific example of the company/person being described? These criticisms of Silicon Valley are always so abstract, it would be nice to have a few examples.
- fatbird 14y agoInstagram. An app for doing what we were all doing already anyway, but now with a lot of faux-effect filters. Sold for a billion dollars. All that time, energy, and money that did not one thing to help anyone else or measurably improve the world.
- sskates 14y agoInstagram had 13 employees when it was acquired- not that much effort to impact 30 million people. You might dismiss Instagram's innovations, but dismissing the importance of an interface is like dismissing a new programming language because there are already programming languages that are Turing complete.
- cbracy 14y agoJust because 30 million people are using it doesn't mean it "impacted" them.
- fatbird 14y agoNot seeing the impact there. Not seeing anything that couldn't be trivially handled by something already existing. I'm not saying Instagram is worthless. I'm saying Instagram is a new flavour of toothpaste. There's something kind of distasteful about a new flavour of toothpaste marshalling the attention and money that it did, but it's not that I blame Instagram for that. But I do compare it to, say, the Gates Foundation, and it's hard not to think "boy, that whole enterprise could have had vastly greater beneficial impact to a lot more people than it did." Where does the billion dollars that Instagram commanded go? Into a constantly recycling pool of geeks and cash in the Valley who keep funding more companies inventing new flavours of toothpaste, hoping to be either the next Instagram or the next Facebook buying Instagram. Ms. Bracy's whole exhortation is just this: Maybe direct some of that energy, some of that attention, some of that money and time, outside of the incestuous enterprise that is Silicon Valley.
- 001sky 14y agoThey really don’t care that much about making the world a better place, mostly because they feel like they don’t have to live in it. ==Theory of the leisure class
- cbracy 14y agoCrowdTilt