10 ms·

Is Silicon Valley only interested in the problems of twentysomethings?

151 points by sethbannon 13y ago

destraynor 13y ago
That's not true, every time a founder becomes a parent they build shitty solutions to all those problems too :) But seriously this whole angle frustrates me. Who decided that Silicon Valley had to be held over hot coals for building software companies that solve problems and make money. Why does it always read like "they alone inherited the problems of the universe, and are choosing to build dickpic apps instead". Everywhere in the world there are smart people working on dumb things. In SV there's lots more smart people, but the percentage doesn't change. Also some things look dumb but are actually genius in hindsight, so it's easy to criticise these as problems for twentysomethings today, but fast forward a decade and they're 'problems for the masses'
- te_chris 13y ago
  Path makes money?
- mhurron 13y ago
  > Who decided that Silicon Valley had to be held over hot coals for building software companies that solve problems and make money. It would appear that Silicon Valley did. Every mundane piece of software is going to 'change the world.' People are just waiting for that to happen.
  - mjn 13y ago
    A recent example of that: Google's Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen just wrote a new-agey sort of book explicitly taking that "we're here to change the world" angle. They could've written a different book, more like one Warren Buffet might write, about the business of software and online services, and running a profitable company in the industry. But they don't appear to consider that to be the bar for success.
    - tensor 13y ago
      At least some of Google's work has the possibility of changing the world: AI. Between self driving cars, natural interface methods, and data understanding, the future looks interesting. On the other hand, yet another social network, photoshop filter app, todo list app, instant messaging app, advertising app, these are not going to change the world, though often heralded as such.
      - brianbreslin 13y ago
        I'd argue that google's search changed the world. android is also changing the world.
      - johnjlocke 13y ago
        I would much rather see people working on self-driving cars or solving problems that affect the world than see the 15784th to-do app, weather app, etc. Those only change the fortunes of a handful of people, let's be serious.
      - NegativeK 13y ago
        Google's social network and list of apps are an attempt to stay relevant so they can change the world. Doing expensive R&D without a money maker generally requires government help. I don't think Google wants to go that route.
      - eli_gottlieb 13y ago
        Self-driving cars are really genuinely good work. Other than that, the continued development of AI/ML techniques mostly isn't changing the world. Miniaturizing the code and data, so that the masses can own their own AI/ML processors, that will change the world.
    - makomk 13y ago
      Did you see the Google I/O keynote? They're looking at selling Android smartphones to the whole world, and they're not just talking about the Western world for once. I'd say that'd be pretty world-changing.
  - larrys 13y ago
    Correct. Dates back to at least the interaction between Jobs and Sculley to wit: "Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life? Or do you want to come with me and change the world?". It's much easier to get young people to buy into a dream of changing the world and making money than it is to buy into a dream of making money w/o changing the world. Reminds me a bit of the Capone quote something like "You get more with a gun and a smile than a smile alone.."
    - thwarted 13y ago
      It's funny that Jobs implied that selling sugar water is somehow less world changing than what Jobs/Apple was doing at the time. I happened across this video [0] the other day, "Coca-Cola Small World Machines - Bringing India & Pakistan Together". Coca-cola has the means to do just as much "world changing" as any other company, and seems to. (albeit, Jobs was talking about Pepsi, not Coke, but it's still the "sugar water" industry). I wonder if Jobs thought in 2001 that selling MP3 players was the kind of thing he was thinking about when he said "change the world". http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ts_4vOUDImE http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ts_4vOUDImE
  - gamble 13y ago
    Because the technology industry depends on a lot of idealistic young workers putting in plenty of unpaid overtime, and no one ever motivated that commitment with a call to increase shareholder returns by 17%.
    - jimmaswell 13y ago
      Unpaid overtime isn't legal in the United States where SF is, as far as I know.
      - jelled 13y ago
        Are you familiar with the word "salary"?
        jimmaswell 13y ago
        After researching the issue deeper, apparently there are exceptions to the time-and-a-half regulation, and programmers are an exception. I'm not sure why you're specifically mentioning the word salary though.
        wging 13y ago
        Many people are not paid for their time (wages). Instead they're paid a fixed rate (a salary). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salary#United_States http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salary#United_States
        NegativeK 13y ago
        I think what jimmaswell was getting at is that salary does not equate to overtime exempt. There's plenty of overlap, but salaried workers who aren't exempt get paid overtime on a calculated basis.
      - coldtea 13y ago
        What passes for "salaried time" in the US and SF is called unpaid overtime to everywhere else in the world.
  - thwarted 13y ago
    Nothing in "change the world" says that the change needs to be positive or needs to solve one of the Big Problems (poverty, hunger, energy, etc).
- Fomite 13y ago
  Silicon Valley is often quite pleased with itself, and there's more than one "Ignore the complexities of your problem, what would solve this is five guys in San Francisco and a hackathon!" article drifting around out there. I suspect that's what gets things laid on the shoulders of SV. If its teeming with smart, driven, visionary people with Yankee Know-How and a Can Do Attitude (tm), surely they can do something genuinely spectacular, instead of just inventing a clever way to order pizza.
rverghes 13y ago
It's hard to design and create software for subjects you don't know much about. It's not really a surprise that people create software for their own lives. A lot of open source is focused on programming languages, libraries and things to help you code. It's what most open source people know, and thus what they create. I wonder if it would have been better for CS to have been only offered as a minor or double-major to another field of study, at least at the Bachelor level. We would have fewer pure CS people, but a lot more people with training in another domain.
- qzxt 13y ago
  I second this! or something similar, at least. Having not really gone to college, myself, I was lucky enough to have had so many varied life experiences and interests before I took up tech; so when talking to my colleagues who are cs-equipped, I find their methodology is often very CS oriented, and focused more on the tech than on the problem. I think that's why "design" has become such a big fad these days - it's almost as if we just figured out that people buy products, not tech. That being said, after speaking with quite a few tech-inclined people, I feel they would be a lot more comfortable with less technically inclined subjects if they were stripped of the general cultural pretensions that they come with. There is a very strong resistance to "acculturation" among techies, as it is usually seen - rightly, for the most part - as a mechanism of enforcing a "cool kids' club", so to speak, rather than an actual venue for intellectual exploration. I think, that as techies, we are in a unique situation, as far as intellectual development is concerned. The vast majority of the population can't appreciate technical phenomena because it is culturally viewed as "too hard" or "robotic" or "blah blah, boring". We, OTOH, actively refuse to engage with humanistic pursuits, but not out of any perceived difficulty so much as discomfort with the pretensions that come with "cultured society". If effort can be made to induct some history and philosophy, and heck, maybe even theology into the the techie culture, we could have the best of both worlds and possibly even have some truly fresh ideas put out. In short, it's easier to teach a physicist to write essays than it is to teach a poet Diff Eq
  - mc-lovin 13y ago
    You characterize the situation very well. It reminds me of the parody of the academic left in sci fi such as the novels of Neal Stephenson and Vernor Vinge. And the parodies of religion and philosophy are even worse. It certainly came as a shock to me to realize that much of academia is simultaneously incoherent and pretentious, and full of deep insights.
spullara 13y ago
I think this is a by product of 20 somethings being the most sought after group by advertisers combined with them being the most likely to try new things without a lifetime of bias towards the status quo.
snambi 13y ago
good point. most of the startups are working on trivial problems faced by 20somethings.
- outericky 13y ago
  Startups tend to try to solve problems they are familiar with. So 20something founders, are likely working on something 20somethings face.
ritchiea 13y ago
The title is deceptive because shortly after asking that question in the article, the author comes to a resounding "no" and goes on to talk about why it is our impression that SV only works on the problems of 20-somethings. The core of the author's comment comes at the end: "Imagine how odd it would be to read an article saying that the people who work for manufacturing firms are really just out to make money, or that they don’t seem interested enough in current events. It is only because Silicon Valley has done such an extraordinary job branding itself that articles about their social conscience, or lack thereof, seem completely reasonable. But the tech sector is, on the whole, much more like other sectors of the economy than it likes to believe, or than it likes anyone else to believe."
- seanlinehan 13y ago
  Here is a strategy that I have heard repeated a few times: When you see a rhetorical question in the title of a news article, the answer is no. The answer is always no. The article may say maybe. But the answer is no. Just like that you've saved yourself a few minutes.
  - nairteashop 13y ago
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridges_law_of_headlines http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridges_law_of_headlines
  - jimmaswell 13y ago
    Maybe I'll write an article with the title, "Is the answer to this question no?"
    - 3825 13y ago
      I see where you are headed. The answer is still no because you won't write the aforementioned article. You're clever.
    - doorhammer 13y ago
      [0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liar_paradox http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liar_paradox
kyllo 13y ago
If so, it's probably only because young adults are more likely to use the internet and therefore have problems that can be solved by the internet. The internet can't really fix your problems if you don't use it in the first place. Or maybe it could, but you will never know better.
- potatolicious 13y ago
  But why is "startup" synonymous with "consumer internet startup"? We are software people, we solve problems with software - not just with the internet, and not just for the mass public. Today was the launch day of the bike-sharing program in NYC and I've taken a few bikes out for a spin. The whole system is plugged into a (supposedly) impressive backend that will allow the city to gain an unprecedented insight into cycling patterns and drive the future of not only bike sharing but also cycling infrastructure development in general. Why is it that when we think "startup" we don't think about problems like this, and instead we only think about mass market consumer internet applications used exclusively by young adults? We solve problems with software. The fact that we've pigeonholed Silicon Valley into strictly solving end-user-young-adult-internet problems is our fault.
- davebindy 13y ago
  Twenty years ago, this might have been true. I don't think it is today. I'm 60 years old, and while I'm somewhat unusual in that computers and tech have been part of my life, both personally and professionally, for half my life, I would have to think pretty hard to come up with someone in my circle of friends and relatives in the 50-80 age range who doesn't use the Internet. My 80 year old aunt has a desktop, an iPad and an iPhone. My 81 year old landlady spends an average of 4 hours a day online. Just examples. We could debate their "expertise" in using the Web or software/apps in general. On the whole, given the kinds of questions I end up fielding from them and others, it isn't particularly high. But then again, that may actually be the fault of the software itself, much of which is difficult for someone for whom tech is not an abiding interest to understand. I spent 10 years reviewing software full-time, and it was often a struggle for me to forget what I knew and judge it from the standpoint of the average Joe. At any rate, I think it's a canard to say that older adults (or even senior citizens, since I guess I am one now) don't use the Internet. They may not use it the way someone younger does, but that doesn't mean they don't use it.
jiggy2011 13y ago
Today's 20 somethings are tomorrows 30 and 40 somethings. Get them hooked young and you can milk them for a lifetime. It's probably easier to persuade a 20 something to try something new. I know middle aged people who choose smartphones by waiting for their kids to each buy different ones and then choosing one of these for themselves.
politician 13y ago
Well, it's probably harder to meaningfully shift the way older consumers live in general. Between regulations and routine, business has an increasingly difficult time selling to us as we age. For all the dollars in pharma, grandma still won't take her pills and grandpa won't get rid of that old beater. Etc.
- doctorpangloss 13y ago
  There's an article on HN right now about setting up a MacBook for grandma. And everyone talks about how great an iPad has been for the elderly. I don't think they're stubborn, they're just different. I also don't think they're cheap either, because an iPad (let alone a MacBook) is still a consumer electronic luxury.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
DeusExMachina 13y ago
I think that the assumption of the New Yorker that Airbnb is only for twentysomethings is not correct (I can't speak about Uber). I'm 33 years old and living in Europe. Between my passions there is dancing tango. This actually involves a lot of traveling to international festivals where to meet and dance different people. There are many of these events and many dancers are really dedicated, traveling around a lot, sometimes almost every weekend. In this situation it gets really helpful to travel on a budget, even if there are not many people in their 20s in the community. As a result Airbnb is getting the de facto choice for the community of the 30-40 years old international traveling dancers.
andyl 13y ago
Most new companies fail, but not all. Apple and Google were founded by twenty-somethings, and in the early days, nobody was certain what they would become. The key is to keep trying stuff, even ideas that might seem unusual. One group that displays much 'irritating self-regard' are east-coast pundits who write on subjects they don't understand.
_pius 13y ago
Betteridge's Law of Headlines applies.
- asveikau 13y ago
  To disprove this all somebody needs to do is write a headline: Is Betteridge's Law of Headlines correct?
ChikkaChiChi 13y ago
What is more frustrating to me is that so much of the startup focus is in Silicon Valley and ascertaining viability for these disruptive service is wholly dependent on the SV set's adoption rate. Some of these businesses should spend more time planning the logistical and strategic side of rolling out satellites to other markets (maybe even as a franchise model) to see if uptake rates change based on cost off living, regional preference, different geographical factors, etc. What plays in tech saavy SV, the NW, New York, and Austin might be different than in Tampa, Pittsburgh, St. Paul, and Phoenix. Does anyone agree?
tyre 13y ago
The best part of Silicon Valley is brilliant people solving hard problems. In the beginning, there were a lot of talented, bright you people with not a lot of business sense. And it showed in their draw towards 'sexy' problems. But, as that space got incredibly crowded and, to a large degree, 'solved', people moved on. I am a 20-something and was drawn to Silicon Valley to work on payroll specifically because I saw it as a sign that SV was 'growing up.' Not every company is working on social-local-mobile-freemium-gaming, and that is incredibly refreshing.
speeder 13y ago
My startup was made to solve problems of older people that has children... But maybe, like the article theorises in the start, because the person that had the idea was in that group himself (my associate, and CEO of the company, had the idea to make apps for children after not finding enough apps for his own children and hearing comments from his similarly-aged friends about the same subject).
samfisher83 13y ago
I think software tends to favor the young. In general the biggest companies in tech were founded by younger people. Google - Founded by 20 somethings Apple - Founded by 20 something Facebook - Founder by 20 something Amazon - Founded by 20 something So they solve problems for a younger generation.
- mhurron 13y ago
  The problem with this is they are not run by 20-somethings now. If they were working on 20-something problems because they were 20-somethings, why haven't they moved on? Also, I wouldn't categorize Amazon as solving problems for a younger generation.
  - allenu 13y ago
    A lot of the problems these companies cover are interesting to everyone. Search is interesting to everyone, maintaining a social network is interesting to everyone, buying stuff online is interesting to everyone. Cab-sharing is not interesting to everyone. Staying in strangers' homes instead of a hotel isn't interesting to everyone. Taking photos of your meals and sharing it with friends is not interesting to everyone.
- plainOldText 13y ago
  For the record, Jeff Bezos was 30 when he founded Amazon.
yarrel 13y ago
s/problems/money/
acchow 13y ago
twentysomethings are interested in the problems of twentysomethings.
- Fomite 13y ago
  One thing that seems to be lost between the article and the comments - it's not just twentysomethings. It's twentysomethings "with cash on hand". That adds a degree of self-indulgence to the description. It's not just twentysomethings solving the problems of people their age, tackling the questions of their generation, but solving the problems of (at least culturally) affluent, employed tech workers with disposable income.
joejohnson 13y ago
"[Packer]’s clearly onto something in the way the experience of continuously solving seemingly insoluble technical problems can lead the technocracy to dismiss the challenges of actual societies or, worse, decide they’re simply above them." This rings true for a number of issues in San Francisco. Let's underfund our public transportation and make taxis inefficient and hard to find -- we'll let the free market solve those problems! Corporate shuttles and a thousand taxi hailing apps will make up the difference. Except they don't. I can't take a corporate shuttle to buy groceries or go out at night, and the cab situation in San Francisco is embarrassing. How do people here think they're living in the future when they can't even run basic infrastructure? You can order food or hail a cab with your phone in any city. I only know of one city where idiots who will tell you this is revolutionary.
- rogerclark 13y ago
  i just looked at your comments on a hunch and i was right: most of your comments have to do with shitting on san francisco. cool hobby
allenu 13y ago
I would say yes, it is biased towards twentysomethings because 1) they have disposable income and more easily part with it, and 2) they are more likely to create a tech solution (and surrounding business) to a problem they are familiar with. Disclosure: I'm in my 30s but had similar wide-eyed dreams in my 20s of creating some big piece of tech that would net me millions.
alanh 13y ago
Apologies for the self-promotion, but at NoRedInk, we are funded, have traction, and are hiring while improving the status quo of grammar education.
LordHumungous 13y ago
Silicon Valley is interested in finding solution to problems that make money, just like every other industry.
- johnjlocke 13y ago
  Silicon Valley is more similar to Wall Street than it cares to admit.
coldtea 13y ago
A similar question I wanted to ask: "Who are all this skaters, hip hop singers wannabees, surfers, brooming indie artists" and such BS that 99% of ads, videos and startup media material seems to target to? I've been all around the US (literally: the 48 states), and those are like 1% of the youth population, if that.
wittysense 13y ago
The hypercompetitive culture makes SV a series of silos. We may be working workstation-to-workstation, but just as you drive along the interstate, it's a series of anonymous silos of farmers loosely affiliated, if that. And any shoplifting guide worth its weight will tell you that those farmers are screwing you over in at least 3 different ways via strict affiliations with government and taxation, price gouging the market, and transportation costs, along with manipulative garned relationships with the GroceryStoreCartel(tm), all while you fancy the philosophical scenario of whether they're interested in your problems. You as a driver should move along, or learn the road. The only response to "Does some large group X care about me?" is Hanlon's Razor.
ChuckMcM 13y ago
Its useful for the non-tech press to point out that no, we're not only solving problems for young people with more disposable income than they know what to do with. It does suggest that there is a very good business to be had 10 - 15 years from now as these people mature and now do need to do something with that income but that is a different article :-) One wave of things I'm looking for (and it's seems to be foreshadowed with things like the maker movement) is spontaneous manufacturing. Places where you need something built and a bunch of people, using tools in their garage or workshop, contribute parts where a co-ordinator assembles into widgets.
eli_gottlieb 13y ago
Speaking for myself, I can perceive a few problems with the tech industry: one more (but not entirely) individual, one more (but not entirely) cultural, and one more (but not entirely) legal/economic. The cultural one is simply that Silicon Valley and the tech sector in general currently constitute one of the last remaining vestiges of the upper-middle class and the petite bourgeoisie in an otherwise recessionary and degrading Western society. Others refer to us occasionally as the "Tech Sector Master Race". Forgive the 4chan slang, but that is how we come across sometimes: as a little nerdy subculture that smugly walks through a world we don't quite belong to, demanding coffee and consumer electronics and thinking about our investment accounts while other people think about making rent. And the worse the rest of society gets, the worse this effect will become. See below. The individual one is that, frankly, I have too easy a time contenting myself with my gadgetry to see wide-open markets, and when I do see an idea, I expect the corporate behemoths to colonize it first. An undergrad here at Technion once came and talked to me about starting a groceries-delivery service here in Israel. I immediately thought of Stop&Shop's Peapod, before realizing we don't have anything like that here. Then my next thought was, "What, people can't be bothered to go to the market?" It's easy to overlook opportunities to solve others' pain points just because you personally don't have a lot of pain points (which ties right back in to techies being so massively fortunate!). The legal/economic one is that productizing technology has gotten very hard. I'm always glad to see more hardware start-ups and such, but people often hesitate to commit money to unknown companies. Then software is more and more functionally impossible to sell in a shrink-wrapped box as a product (due to piracy and upgrades), people hate advertisements, non-corporate users hate paying subscription fees for software because they think they bought their copy, and people are still demanding ever more quality for fixed or shrinking prices. Lastly, technology has gotten less and less "do it yourself" and more and more "black box", pushing all kinds of things underground. Overall, the path from tinkering to a product to a sale to tinkering again has gotten longer, and that's what drives the endless rounds of "social-mobile-local Big Data cat-picture analytics apps". And of course, this also goes right back to large parts of society being unable to afford innovative luxury goods produced by the tech sector. A game console that costs $400 now instead of $200 ten years ago wouldn't be that much of a problem if the cost of living had stayed the same or if wages had doubled (before inflation, even). They haven't. So until we find some ways to fix this stuff, Silicon Valley is going to be stuck catering to the one audience who will consistently buy into Silicon Valley, that being Silicon Valley.

151 points by sethbannon 13y ago

That's not true, every time a founder becomes a parent they build shitty solutions to all those problems too :) But seriously this whole angle frustrates me. Who decided that Silicon Valley had to be held over hot coals for building software companies that solve problems and make money. Why does it always read like "they alone inherited the problems of the universe, and are choosing to build dickpic apps instead". Everywhere in the world there are smart people working on dumb things. In SV there's lots more smart people, but the percentage doesn't change. Also some things look dumb but are actually genius in hindsight, so it's easy to criticise these as problems for twentysomethings today, but fast forward a decade and they're 'problems for the masses'

te_chris 13y ago
Path makes money?
mhurron 13y ago
> Who decided that Silicon Valley had to be held over hot coals for building software companies that solve problems and make money. It would appear that Silicon Valley did. Every mundane piece of software is going to 'change the world.' People are just waiting for that to happen.
- mjn 13y ago
  A recent example of that: Google's Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen just wrote a new-agey sort of book explicitly taking that "we're here to change the world" angle. They could've written a different book, more like one Warren Buffet might write, about the business of software and online services, and running a profitable company in the industry. But they don't appear to consider that to be the bar for success.
  - tensor 13y ago
    At least some of Google's work has the possibility of changing the world: AI. Between self driving cars, natural interface methods, and data understanding, the future looks interesting. On the other hand, yet another social network, photoshop filter app, todo list app, instant messaging app, advertising app, these are not going to change the world, though often heralded as such.
    - brianbreslin 13y ago
      I'd argue that google's search changed the world. android is also changing the world.
    - johnjlocke 13y ago
      I would much rather see people working on self-driving cars or solving problems that affect the world than see the 15784th to-do app, weather app, etc. Those only change the fortunes of a handful of people, let's be serious.
    - NegativeK 13y ago
      Google's social network and list of apps are an attempt to stay relevant so they can change the world. Doing expensive R&D without a money maker generally requires government help. I don't think Google wants to go that route.
    - eli_gottlieb 13y ago
      Self-driving cars are really genuinely good work. Other than that, the continued development of AI/ML techniques mostly isn't changing the world. Miniaturizing the code and data, so that the masses can own their own AI/ML processors, that will change the world.
  - makomk 13y ago
    Did you see the Google I/O keynote? They're looking at selling Android smartphones to the whole world, and they're not just talking about the Western world for once. I'd say that'd be pretty world-changing.
- larrys 13y ago
  Correct. Dates back to at least the interaction between Jobs and Sculley to wit: "Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life? Or do you want to come with me and change the world?". It's much easier to get young people to buy into a dream of changing the world and making money than it is to buy into a dream of making money w/o changing the world. Reminds me a bit of the Capone quote something like "You get more with a gun and a smile than a smile alone.."
  - thwarted 13y ago
    It's funny that Jobs implied that selling sugar water is somehow less world changing than what Jobs/Apple was doing at the time. I happened across this video [0] the other day, "Coca-Cola Small World Machines - Bringing India & Pakistan Together". Coca-cola has the means to do just as much "world changing" as any other company, and seems to. (albeit, Jobs was talking about Pepsi, not Coke, but it's still the "sugar water" industry). I wonder if Jobs thought in 2001 that selling MP3 players was the kind of thing he was thinking about when he said "change the world". http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ts_4vOUDImE http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ts_4vOUDImE
- gamble 13y ago
  Because the technology industry depends on a lot of idealistic young workers putting in plenty of unpaid overtime, and no one ever motivated that commitment with a call to increase shareholder returns by 17%.
  - jimmaswell 13y ago
    Unpaid overtime isn't legal in the United States where SF is, as far as I know.
    - jelled 13y ago
      Are you familiar with the word "salary"?
      - jimmaswell 13y ago
        After researching the issue deeper, apparently there are exceptions to the time-and-a-half regulation, and programmers are an exception. I'm not sure why you're specifically mentioning the word salary though.
        wging 13y ago
        Many people are not paid for their time (wages). Instead they're paid a fixed rate (a salary). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salary#United_States http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salary#United_States
        NegativeK 13y ago
        I think what jimmaswell was getting at is that salary does not equate to overtime exempt. There's plenty of overlap, but salaried workers who aren't exempt get paid overtime on a calculated basis.
    - coldtea 13y ago
      What passes for "salaried time" in the US and SF is called unpaid overtime to everywhere else in the world.
- thwarted 13y ago
  Nothing in "change the world" says that the change needs to be positive or needs to solve one of the Big Problems (poverty, hunger, energy, etc).
Fomite 13y ago
Silicon Valley is often quite pleased with itself, and there's more than one "Ignore the complexities of your problem, what would solve this is five guys in San Francisco and a hackathon!" article drifting around out there. I suspect that's what gets things laid on the shoulders of SV. If its teeming with smart, driven, visionary people with Yankee Know-How and a Can Do Attitude (tm), surely they can do something genuinely spectacular, instead of just inventing a clever way to order pizza.

rverghes 13y ago

It's hard to design and create software for subjects you don't know much about. It's not really a surprise that people create software for their own lives. A lot of open source is focused on programming languages, libraries and things to help you code. It's what most open source people know, and thus what they create. I wonder if it would have been better for CS to have been only offered as a minor or double-major to another field of study, at least at the Bachelor level. We would have fewer pure CS people, but a lot more people with training in another domain.

qzxt 13y ago
I second this! or something similar, at least. Having not really gone to college, myself, I was lucky enough to have had so many varied life experiences and interests before I took up tech; so when talking to my colleagues who are cs-equipped, I find their methodology is often very CS oriented, and focused more on the tech than on the problem. I think that's why "design" has become such a big fad these days - it's almost as if we just figured out that people buy products, not tech. That being said, after speaking with quite a few tech-inclined people, I feel they would be a lot more comfortable with less technically inclined subjects if they were stripped of the general cultural pretensions that they come with. There is a very strong resistance to "acculturation" among techies, as it is usually seen - rightly, for the most part - as a mechanism of enforcing a "cool kids' club", so to speak, rather than an actual venue for intellectual exploration. I think, that as techies, we are in a unique situation, as far as intellectual development is concerned. The vast majority of the population can't appreciate technical phenomena because it is culturally viewed as "too hard" or "robotic" or "blah blah, boring". We, OTOH, actively refuse to engage with humanistic pursuits, but not out of any perceived difficulty so much as discomfort with the pretensions that come with "cultured society". If effort can be made to induct some history and philosophy, and heck, maybe even theology into the the techie culture, we could have the best of both worlds and possibly even have some truly fresh ideas put out. In short, it's easier to teach a physicist to write essays than it is to teach a poet Diff Eq
- mc-lovin 13y ago
  You characterize the situation very well. It reminds me of the parody of the academic left in sci fi such as the novels of Neal Stephenson and Vernor Vinge. And the parodies of religion and philosophy are even worse. It certainly came as a shock to me to realize that much of academia is simultaneously incoherent and pretentious, and full of deep insights.

spullara 13y ago

I think this is a by product of 20 somethings being the most sought after group by advertisers combined with them being the most likely to try new things without a lifetime of bias towards the status quo.

snambi 13y ago

good point. most of the startups are working on trivial problems faced by 20somethings.

outericky 13y ago
Startups tend to try to solve problems they are familiar with. So 20something founders, are likely working on something 20somethings face.

ritchiea 13y ago

The title is deceptive because shortly after asking that question in the article, the author comes to a resounding "no" and goes on to talk about why it is our impression that SV only works on the problems of 20-somethings. The core of the author's comment comes at the end: "Imagine how odd it would be to read an article saying that the people who work for manufacturing firms are really just out to make money, or that they don’t seem interested enough in current events. It is only because Silicon Valley has done such an extraordinary job branding itself that articles about their social conscience, or lack thereof, seem completely reasonable. But the tech sector is, on the whole, much more like other sectors of the economy than it likes to believe, or than it likes anyone else to believe."

seanlinehan 13y ago
Here is a strategy that I have heard repeated a few times: When you see a rhetorical question in the title of a news article, the answer is no. The answer is always no. The article may say maybe. But the answer is no. Just like that you've saved yourself a few minutes.
- nairteashop 13y ago
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridges_law_of_headlines http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridges_law_of_headlines
- jimmaswell 13y ago
  Maybe I'll write an article with the title, "Is the answer to this question no?"
  - 3825 13y ago
    I see where you are headed. The answer is still no because you won't write the aforementioned article. You're clever.
  - doorhammer 13y ago
    [0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liar_paradox http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liar_paradox

kyllo 13y ago

If so, it's probably only because young adults are more likely to use the internet and therefore have problems that can be solved by the internet. The internet can't really fix your problems if you don't use it in the first place. Or maybe it could, but you will never know better.

potatolicious 13y ago
But why is "startup" synonymous with "consumer internet startup"? We are software people, we solve problems with software - not just with the internet, and not just for the mass public. Today was the launch day of the bike-sharing program in NYC and I've taken a few bikes out for a spin. The whole system is plugged into a (supposedly) impressive backend that will allow the city to gain an unprecedented insight into cycling patterns and drive the future of not only bike sharing but also cycling infrastructure development in general. Why is it that when we think "startup" we don't think about problems like this, and instead we only think about mass market consumer internet applications used exclusively by young adults? We solve problems with software. The fact that we've pigeonholed Silicon Valley into strictly solving end-user-young-adult-internet problems is our fault.
davebindy 13y ago
Twenty years ago, this might have been true. I don't think it is today. I'm 60 years old, and while I'm somewhat unusual in that computers and tech have been part of my life, both personally and professionally, for half my life, I would have to think pretty hard to come up with someone in my circle of friends and relatives in the 50-80 age range who doesn't use the Internet. My 80 year old aunt has a desktop, an iPad and an iPhone. My 81 year old landlady spends an average of 4 hours a day online. Just examples. We could debate their "expertise" in using the Web or software/apps in general. On the whole, given the kinds of questions I end up fielding from them and others, it isn't particularly high. But then again, that may actually be the fault of the software itself, much of which is difficult for someone for whom tech is not an abiding interest to understand. I spent 10 years reviewing software full-time, and it was often a struggle for me to forget what I knew and judge it from the standpoint of the average Joe. At any rate, I think it's a canard to say that older adults (or even senior citizens, since I guess I am one now) don't use the Internet. They may not use it the way someone younger does, but that doesn't mean they don't use it.

jiggy2011 13y ago

Today's 20 somethings are tomorrows 30 and 40 somethings. Get them hooked young and you can milk them for a lifetime. It's probably easier to persuade a 20 something to try something new. I know middle aged people who choose smartphones by waiting for their kids to each buy different ones and then choosing one of these for themselves.

politician 13y ago

Well, it's probably harder to meaningfully shift the way older consumers live in general. Between regulations and routine, business has an increasingly difficult time selling to us as we age. For all the dollars in pharma, grandma still won't take her pills and grandpa won't get rid of that old beater. Etc.

doctorpangloss 13y ago
There's an article on HN right now about setting up a MacBook for grandma. And everyone talks about how great an iPad has been for the elderly. I don't think they're stubborn, they're just different. I also don't think they're cheap either, because an iPad (let alone a MacBook) is still a consumer electronic luxury.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]

DeusExMachina 13y ago

I think that the assumption of the New Yorker that Airbnb is only for twentysomethings is not correct (I can't speak about Uber). I'm 33 years old and living in Europe. Between my passions there is dancing tango. This actually involves a lot of traveling to international festivals where to meet and dance different people. There are many of these events and many dancers are really dedicated, traveling around a lot, sometimes almost every weekend. In this situation it gets really helpful to travel on a budget, even if there are not many people in their 20s in the community. As a result Airbnb is getting the de facto choice for the community of the 30-40 years old international traveling dancers.

andyl 13y ago

Most new companies fail, but not all. Apple and Google were founded by twenty-somethings, and in the early days, nobody was certain what they would become. The key is to keep trying stuff, even ideas that might seem unusual. One group that displays much 'irritating self-regard' are east-coast pundits who write on subjects they don't understand.

_pius 13y ago

Betteridge's Law of Headlines applies.

asveikau 13y ago
To disprove this all somebody needs to do is write a headline: Is Betteridge's Law of Headlines correct?

ChikkaChiChi 13y ago

What is more frustrating to me is that so much of the startup focus is in Silicon Valley and ascertaining viability for these disruptive service is wholly dependent on the SV set's adoption rate. Some of these businesses should spend more time planning the logistical and strategic side of rolling out satellites to other markets (maybe even as a franchise model) to see if uptake rates change based on cost off living, regional preference, different geographical factors, etc. What plays in tech saavy SV, the NW, New York, and Austin might be different than in Tampa, Pittsburgh, St. Paul, and Phoenix. Does anyone agree?

tyre 13y ago

The best part of Silicon Valley is brilliant people solving hard problems. In the beginning, there were a lot of talented, bright you people with not a lot of business sense. And it showed in their draw towards 'sexy' problems. But, as that space got incredibly crowded and, to a large degree, 'solved', people moved on. I am a 20-something and was drawn to Silicon Valley to work on payroll specifically because I saw it as a sign that SV was 'growing up.' Not every company is working on social-local-mobile-freemium-gaming, and that is incredibly refreshing.

speeder 13y ago

My startup was made to solve problems of older people that has children... But maybe, like the article theorises in the start, because the person that had the idea was in that group himself (my associate, and CEO of the company, had the idea to make apps for children after not finding enough apps for his own children and hearing comments from his similarly-aged friends about the same subject).

samfisher83 13y ago

I think software tends to favor the young. In general the biggest companies in tech were founded by younger people. Google - Founded by 20 somethings Apple - Founded by 20 something Facebook - Founder by 20 something Amazon - Founded by 20 something So they solve problems for a younger generation.

mhurron 13y ago
The problem with this is they are not run by 20-somethings now. If they were working on 20-something problems because they were 20-somethings, why haven't they moved on? Also, I wouldn't categorize Amazon as solving problems for a younger generation.
- allenu 13y ago
  A lot of the problems these companies cover are interesting to everyone. Search is interesting to everyone, maintaining a social network is interesting to everyone, buying stuff online is interesting to everyone. Cab-sharing is not interesting to everyone. Staying in strangers' homes instead of a hotel isn't interesting to everyone. Taking photos of your meals and sharing it with friends is not interesting to everyone.
plainOldText 13y ago
For the record, Jeff Bezos was 30 when he founded Amazon.

yarrel 13y ago

s/problems/money/

acchow 13y ago

twentysomethings are interested in the problems of twentysomethings.

Fomite 13y ago
One thing that seems to be lost between the article and the comments - it's not just twentysomethings. It's twentysomethings "with cash on hand". That adds a degree of self-indulgence to the description. It's not just twentysomethings solving the problems of people their age, tackling the questions of their generation, but solving the problems of (at least culturally) affluent, employed tech workers with disposable income.

joejohnson 13y ago

"[Packer]’s clearly onto something in the way the experience of continuously solving seemingly insoluble technical problems can lead the technocracy to dismiss the challenges of actual societies or, worse, decide they’re simply above them." This rings true for a number of issues in San Francisco. Let's underfund our public transportation and make taxis inefficient and hard to find -- we'll let the free market solve those problems! Corporate shuttles and a thousand taxi hailing apps will make up the difference. Except they don't. I can't take a corporate shuttle to buy groceries or go out at night, and the cab situation in San Francisco is embarrassing. How do people here think they're living in the future when they can't even run basic infrastructure? You can order food or hail a cab with your phone in any city. I only know of one city where idiots who will tell you this is revolutionary.

rogerclark 13y ago
i just looked at your comments on a hunch and i was right: most of your comments have to do with shitting on san francisco. cool hobby

allenu 13y ago

I would say yes, it is biased towards twentysomethings because 1) they have disposable income and more easily part with it, and 2) they are more likely to create a tech solution (and surrounding business) to a problem they are familiar with. Disclosure: I'm in my 30s but had similar wide-eyed dreams in my 20s of creating some big piece of tech that would net me millions.

alanh 13y ago

Apologies for the self-promotion, but at NoRedInk, we are funded, have traction, and are hiring while improving the status quo of grammar education.

LordHumungous 13y ago

Silicon Valley is interested in finding solution to problems that make money, just like every other industry.

johnjlocke 13y ago
Silicon Valley is more similar to Wall Street than it cares to admit.

coldtea 13y ago

A similar question I wanted to ask: "Who are all this skaters, hip hop singers wannabees, surfers, brooming indie artists" and such BS that 99% of ads, videos and startup media material seems to target to? I've been all around the US (literally: the 48 states), and those are like 1% of the youth population, if that.

wittysense 13y ago

The hypercompetitive culture makes SV a series of silos. We may be working workstation-to-workstation, but just as you drive along the interstate, it's a series of anonymous silos of farmers loosely affiliated, if that. And any shoplifting guide worth its weight will tell you that those farmers are screwing you over in at least 3 different ways via strict affiliations with government and taxation, price gouging the market, and transportation costs, along with manipulative garned relationships with the GroceryStoreCartel(tm), all while you fancy the philosophical scenario of whether they're interested in your problems. You as a driver should move along, or learn the road. The only response to "Does some large group X care about me?" is Hanlon's Razor.

ChuckMcM 13y ago

Its useful for the non-tech press to point out that no, we're not only solving problems for young people with more disposable income than they know what to do with. It does suggest that there is a very good business to be had 10 - 15 years from now as these people mature and now do need to do something with that income but that is a different article :-) One wave of things I'm looking for (and it's seems to be foreshadowed with things like the maker movement) is spontaneous manufacturing. Places where you need something built and a bunch of people, using tools in their garage or workshop, contribute parts where a co-ordinator assembles into widgets.

eli_gottlieb 13y ago

Speaking for myself, I can perceive a few problems with the tech industry: one more (but not entirely) individual, one more (but not entirely) cultural, and one more (but not entirely) legal/economic. The cultural one is simply that Silicon Valley and the tech sector in general currently constitute one of the last remaining vestiges of the upper-middle class and the petite bourgeoisie in an otherwise recessionary and degrading Western society. Others refer to us occasionally as the "Tech Sector Master Race". Forgive the 4chan slang, but that is how we come across sometimes: as a little nerdy subculture that smugly walks through a world we don't quite belong to, demanding coffee and consumer electronics and thinking about our investment accounts while other people think about making rent. And the worse the rest of society gets, the worse this effect will become. See below. The individual one is that, frankly, I have too easy a time contenting myself with my gadgetry to see wide-open markets, and when I do see an idea, I expect the corporate behemoths to colonize it first. An undergrad here at Technion once came and talked to me about starting a groceries-delivery service here in Israel. I immediately thought of Stop&Shop's Peapod, before realizing we don't have anything like that here. Then my next thought was, "What, people can't be bothered to go to the market?" It's easy to overlook opportunities to solve others' pain points just because you personally don't have a lot of pain points (which ties right back in to techies being so massively fortunate!). The legal/economic one is that productizing technology has gotten very hard. I'm always glad to see more hardware start-ups and such, but people often hesitate to commit money to unknown companies. Then software is more and more functionally impossible to sell in a shrink-wrapped box as a product (due to piracy and upgrades), people hate advertisements, non-corporate users hate paying subscription fees for software because they think they bought their copy, and people are still demanding ever more quality for fixed or shrinking prices. Lastly, technology has gotten less and less "do it yourself" and more and more "black box", pushing all kinds of things underground. Overall, the path from tinkering to a product to a sale to tinkering again has gotten longer, and that's what drives the endless rounds of "social-mobile-local Big Data cat-picture analytics apps". And of course, this also goes right back to large parts of society being unable to afford innovative luxury goods produced by the tech sector. A game console that costs $400 now instead of $200 ten years ago wouldn't be that much of a problem if the cost of living had stayed the same or if wages had doubled (before inflation, even). They haven't. So until we find some ways to fix this stuff, Silicon Valley is going to be stuck catering to the one audience who will consistently buy into Silicon Valley, that being Silicon Valley.