12 ms·

The Unexotic Underclass

278 points by ixacto 13y ago

"But if you were to go to Bulgaria to volunteer or to start a social enterprise, how would the folks back on Facebook know you were helping ‘the poor?’ if the poor in your pictures kind of looked like you?"

pvdm 13y ago
Yes, absolutely. We need to import more H1-B workers to work on these very important problems of food, fashion, 'social' and gaming. Makes me want to delete my facebook account right now.
kyllo 13y ago
I noticed that devs on HN often sneer at CRUD apps because they're boring to build, but meanwhile a simple CRUD app could do something like make all these veterans' medical benefit claims paperless so that they can get filled out and approved in minutes rather than months, and they could get the care they need sooner. One could do a lot of good by just making CRUD apps for people who need them and can't afford to pay much for them.
- mikeash 13y ago
  All the technology in the world won't make those veterans' benefit claims go through any faster. The problem there isn't the technology (it's not all that hard of a problem) but getting it into the right place, past all the gatekeepers who want to keep it out. It's not that nobody is building the technology because they're concentrating on other things, but rather nobody is building it because they know it won't sell, because it would have to go sixteen thousand layers of red tape and many tours through Congress before anything got done. I think there's probably a lot of scope for solving problems with fairly simple apps, but this example seems like a terrible one.
  - scrumper 13y ago
    Maybe that's the problem to solve then: navigating (or, dare I say it, disrupting) government procurement.
    - mnutt 13y ago
      That reminds me of DonorsChoose, which connects elementary teachers with people looking to donate. It's unfortunate that many states don't properly fund things like school supplies, but it's a great service nonetheless.
    - kylebgorman 13y ago
      A procurement reform program was Philadelphia's submission to the "Mayors Challenge" this year (http://mayorschallenge.bloomberg.org/index.cfm?objectid=184AE090-8B49-11E2-92C8000C29C7CA2F http://mayorschallenge.bloomberg.org/index.cfm?objectid=184A...). It lost out to Providence, RI's proposal (I have argued elsewhere that Providence's proposal, while noble, is probably a boondoggle: http://wellformedness.com/blog/on-the-providence-word-gap-intervention/ http://wellformedness.com/blog/on-the-providence-word-gap-in...)
  - vkou 13y ago
    From what I understand of Veteran's Affairs, the technology has been built, and it does sell. The only problem is that the government's being fleeced for all its got by the vendors in question. VA's got no end of computer systems, where its staff hand-enter information in one system, print out its report, only to scan it, fax it across the country, where someone else will hand-enter it into... A different system. Engineers, consultants, and Serious Business Contracts were involved in the construction of this abomination - and while they were all in compliance of the standards that the government expects from its vendors, none of them delivered a good product.
    - kyllo 13y ago
      Do they not even use EDI to communicate between the systems?
    - jlujan 13y ago
      "On February 5, 2013, the Secretary of Defense and the Secretary of Veterans Affairs announced that instead of building a single integrated electronic health record (iEHR), both DOD and VA will concentrate on integrating VA and DOD health data by focusing on interoperability and using existing technological solutions. This announcement was a departure from the previous commitments that both Departments had made to design and build a new single iEHR, rather than upgrading their current electronic health records and trying to develop interoperability solutions." http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R42970.pdf http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R42970.pdf
      - kyllo 13y ago
        Gee, that doesn't sound expensive at all.
  - kyllo 13y ago
    You're right, you're right. The VA thing is a bad example. Enterprise software is expensive because big companies make themselves expensive to sell to. And the government is the biggest company of all. I'm sure they spend seven to eight figures on the cruddiest of CRUD apps from companies like Oracle. On the other hand, something like a basic CRUD app could really help out a charity or non-profit that serves disadvantaged populations, and that could be built in Rails or Django for just a few days of developer time.
    - walshemj 13y ago
      Not so sure abotu the charity market. one example back in 2000 I worked on a cheap and cheerful Paperless direct debit so that any Charity could quickly and easily set up a system to take donations. The trouble was each flipping charity/bank wanted a bespoke version some of the changes required by the banks where absoluty nit picking. The product had some good press for the Minister but could we get charity's/banks to hold their nose and just use one form! NO Wonder if any VC in old street/silicon roundabout want to try again I still have few contacts form my days at Poptel
  - Crake 13y ago
    Plus the people who do the paper apps processing probably don't want to have their jobs eliminated and have an interest in refusing new (if computers can be considered "new") technology. Even if it means letting vets die due to the needlessly extended waiting process.
- arkades 13y ago
  The VA has the largest, best-maintained electronic medical records system in the country. It is open-source and available to the public. The problem with vets is not the absence of software. I am rather tired of seeing this particular horse beaten.
  - Cyranix 13y ago
    Can you take this comment a step further and attempt an explanation for why a gargantuan pile of paperwork does exist despite such excellent software?
    - zdw 13y ago
      I'm going to guess that they're two separate things. Medical records keeps track of medical procedure, patient history, what medications they're on, etc. In the private sphere, this is what a hospital would use. What's probably at cause for the huge backlog is actually getting people into the system and approved for care. In the private sphere, this is what an insurance company would use. Or this could be just your standard set of political exaggerations.
    - dr_ 13y ago
      Yes, part of it is registering vets into the system. The other part is a combination of the enormous number of claims and enormous amount of documentation required. As a physician, I worked in C&P (compensation and pension) clinics for a number of years at the VA, as a consultant. The amount of documentation required is astronomical, likely because vets are being compensated for their injuries with taxpayer dollars. Fair enough, but a physician providing these services could find other ways to use their time productively (for themselves). Then there's the volume. You don't just see vets who have lost an arm or a leg or have suffered traumatic brain or spinal cord injuries. You also see the guys who may have sprained a knee or ankle playing basketball in their free time but while they were officially on duty. Throw that into the mix, and you have too many people to examine so thoroughly. They tried to fix this by contracting with an agency and have vets come into a private medical office instead of doctors going to the VA, my partner did this for a while, but the reimbursement offered for the amount of paperwork required ultimately made it impractical. To fix it: 1) screen vets better, some are clearly more severely injured than others 2) better compensate providers who see all these vets and complete all the necessary documentation. The screening part is tricky though, as it can quickly get political.
- mynameishere 13y ago
  a simple CRUD app could do something like make all these veterans' medical benefit claims paperless Changing a massive medical system from paper-based to digital is "simple"?
- whiddershins 13y ago
  This and all the responses to it seem hopelessly naive to me. Obviously, if there is a delay in benefits, the delay has been introduced as a cost cutting measure. The more you delay, the less you pay. This is a pretty typical measure for large organizations trying to surreptitiously reduce costs (see welfare or HMOs) and the problem has nothing to do with logistics.
- yardie 13y ago
  In a past life I built one of these CRUD apps. The CRUD part was simple. The volumes of rules and exceptions is where the time and money went. At one point I tried to replace a DOS terminal-based system with something that would resemble a GUI. Based off the old GUI it was easy to replicate, then the rulebooks came out and I realised I was way over my head.
- adamgravitis 13y ago
  I think I've noticed a pattern with these kinds of systems: its not a software problem; it's a policy problem. When designing (evolving, inventing) rules, regulations, policy, exceptions, limitations, audits, checks, balances, the bureaucracy's princes seem to ignore the bigger picture of what it's all become: a mess. It's not just government systems either. There's a reason why people joke about their phone bills being difficult to understand. Same goes for most utilities. Now, once you have an incoherent, contradictory, thousand page mishmash set of rules, every engineer worthy of the title is going to stay as far away as possible. So, the whole mess gets dumped on an army of coders from a big consultancy. Perhaps instead of focusing on the useless software written to fit a pile of inane rules, people could focus on the economic and operational benefits of redoing the entire policy regime with a zen-shaped comb. Software is an enabler. It's actually covered-up a lot of really awful decision-making. The US tax code could never have become what it is if developers hadn't been able to consistently keep up with crazy new patches to implement it: nobody could possibly manage it by hand.
  - tel 13y ago
    As someone working on a healthcare startup, a thousand times this. More than the technical disgust of building a policy-laden system, marketing is terrifically difficult under regulation. Consumers get scarred by inconsistent regulatory rules and stop being willing to change processes because it's too frightening to possibly run afoul of policy. This is, by the way, a great opportunity for organizing regulatory consultants. Such a service might be an important forerunner or partner to ventures trying to change heavily regulated industries.
dfc 13y ago
" I’m sweeping a fairly catholic brush " What is a catholic brush?
- jckt 13y ago
  "catholic : comprehensive, universal; especially : broad in sympathies, tastes, or interests <a catholic taste in music>" Note that he didn't capitalise the word. Edit: sorry, I don't tend to read the article's author's name -- bad on my part. Sorry about that.
  - jholman 13y ago
    she
  - zipfle 13y ago
    note that he is she.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- falsedan 13y ago
  a shibboleth that the author will use a $5 word where a nickel would do
  - egometry 13y ago
    I see what you did there. (Shibboleth is one of my favorite pieces of esoteric vocabulary, but it's at least $10.)
kstenerud 13y ago
All of this moralizing and "solve big problems" talk is really getting old. On average, chances are pretty low that a particular individual will ever solve a big problem, so stop worrying about it! It's not for others to say how you "should" spend your energy anyway. The moralistic fluff is unnecessary. Those who aren't motivated will ignore it, those who are motivated don't need to be reminded, and the moralizers will use it to beat the rest of the would-be entrepreneurs into a perpetual state of indecision. Condense the article down and you're left with this nugget of advice: You'll have a better chance of success if you target unsaturated, boring markets.
- briancaw2 13y ago
  You said: 1. On average you won't solve a big problem, so don't try. 2. Other folks in your society should have no opinion on what you spend time on. 3. Don't try to change people's opinions because you can't. 4. Stop bringing up morality because it makes people think, not act.
  - kstenerud 13y ago
    "On average you won't solve a big problem, so don't try." On average you won't solve a big problem, so don't worry about it. At what point did I say don't try? "Other folks in your society should have no opinion on what you spend time on." Other folks will have an opinion on what you spend your time on whether you like it or not. They'll talk and talk about how YOU (not they) should do such and such. It's easy to opine when you're not the one actually doing the work. So don't worry too much about what they think. "Don't try to change people's opinions because you can't." It's not that you can't per se, but rather that on average they won't. So don't worry if it doesn't work out. "Stop bringing up morality because it makes people think, not act." Don't let other peoples' moral platitudes paralyze you with the fear of acting.
- raylu 13y ago
  On average, chances are pretty low that a particular startup will ever make even a hundred thousand dollars, so stop starting new companies! It's not for either your investors or your customers to tell you what to build anyway. And just never talk about morals, which I deem "fluff".
dfc 13y ago
Why are overworked young doctors part of the unexotic underclass?
- andyjsong 13y ago
  This is just a guess, but crippling school debt?
zwieback 13y ago
This was a fun read but we've already reached the meta-discussion of the meaningfulness of entrepreneurs so it's probably time to move on. The reality is that entrepreneurs cannot solve the Big Problems or big problems - the investment and time horizon of these problems means that traditional structures, e.g. large companies, research organizations and governments have to step in. Disruption is for the easy stuff, hard stuff still has to be solved the slow way, with decades of hard work.
rbranson 13y ago
This is really a classic criticism of capitalism clothed in a Dropbox t-shirt. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_capitalism#Inefficiency_and_waste http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_capitalism#Ineffic...
greghinch 13y ago
Before you can fix any of the problems that would require you to be a US government contractor, you first have to fix the problems of how US government IT contracts are awarded. There is an entire sub-industry of IT service firms who have perfected the art of bidding on government contracts, and win them regardless of their ability to build the best solution. They just have to present the lowest cost solution that meets all the requirements outlined. They are often monolithic corporate entities with multiple sub-entities, with so many layers of bureaucracy it's amazing anything get's built at all. I did some contract web work for on a government project, and just to get paid I had to set up accounts with 3 separate government agencies which had similar but separate account management and payment distribution software (most likely built by separate IT service contractors). It's an industry that's ripe for disruption if you can figure out how to break down the walls, but those walls have been erected pretty damn high and solid.
- Maxious 13y ago
  Fix the problems of how US government IT contracts are awarded? There's a startup for that. http://www.dobt.co/ http://www.dobt.co/ > During the pilot period, RFP-EZ attracted more than 270 businesses that until now had never approached the world of Federal contracting. http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2013/05/15/rfp-ez-delivers-savings-taxpayers-new-opportunities-small-business http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2013/05/15/rfp-ez-delivers-sa...
  - olefoo 13y ago
    Don't take this the wrong way, but .gov procurement people do notice things like the fact that both domains ( dobt.co and procure.io ) are using cctld's for non-US countries.
  - greghinch 13y ago
    It's a good start, but this is a focused on the relatively low price segment. This doesn't address how some startup could come in and effectively submit a bid for something like the VA system
- jonnathanson 13y ago
abraininavat 13y ago
We have clear ideas of what the exotic underclass looks like because everyone is clamoring to help them.... The exotic underclass are poor Black and Hispanic children (are there any other kind?) living in America’s urban ghettos. Yeah, they're wiping their asses with the money that gets thrown at them. What a fucking joke.
meric 13y ago
Microfinance program for Refugees and Migrant entrepreneurs: http://rosemountgs.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/Community-Commerce-to-launch-in-2013.pdf http://rosemountgs.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/Communi...
seanwoods 13y ago
I feel like this article could have been written with half as many words and 2/3 fewer lofty concepts.
205guy 13y ago
I don't disagree with the article, but I had 2 thoughts form in my mind while reading it: 1) I don't think entrepreneurs (and tech ones at that) have solved any problems, even for the upper classes they cater to. Instead, they have become popular and profitable the old-fashioned way, by creating and filling a need. Even a solution as fundamental as search on the internet is not really helping me lead a better life--though it does make possible the vast stores of knowledge and likely the entire tech sector (including my livelihood). 2) Given 1) above, the entire article essentially seems to encourage people to exploit the under-exploited markets of the unexotic by creating needs there and fulfilling them. I don't really see how entrepreneurs can, for example, fix the bureaucracy of Veteran's Affairs, even if they had a turnkey case-handling solution to sell to them. Finally, the author of the article had a pedigree as long as my sleeve, but I didn't see any work in the unexotic fields. Somewhat related thought: where are the non-tech entrepreneurs? Are there solutions that don't require computers anymore? Are there ways to get funding for such a solution?
- elithrar 13y ago
  > Even a solution as fundamental as search on the internet is not really helping me lead a better life--though it does make possible the vast stores of knowledge and likely the entire tech sector (including my livelihood). I disagree. You can spin this many ways. I look at "search" as solving the problem of "easy access to information" - however one must understand that it is not an unsolved/solved problem (varying degrees of "solved" apply here). Being able to learn new things, research something I'm working on beyond my direct network of friends/colleagues, and engage with others solves a lot of problems for me. All this information also makes it much easier to re-skill or add new skills to my repertoire.
  - Surio 13y ago
    >> I disagree. You can spin this many ways. You've answered him, as well as yourself... It depends on the frame of reference in approaching this... If you take a hovering big picture view, what you say is all good, but in reality, on a individual/micro level, 95% of this "search on the net" business is all about "finding deals", and assorted mindless tivia. :) Someone argues (more convincingly than I can ;) ) that more choice and more information is not necessarily better http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_choice http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_choice
justzisguyuknow 13y ago
"Of the single mothers, the majority is White, 1 in 4 is Hispanic, and 1 in 3 is Black." This does not add up.
- thaumasiotes 13y ago
  I was thinking the same thing. Granting 0% Asian/Pacific Islander/Amerind single motherhood, 5/12 is not a majority.
- beachstartup 13y ago
  i upvoted you because it's a good catch, but it's not necessarily true. there are black hispanics. "non-white hispanic" is the appropriate term for what you're thinking of, but it's probably just the journalist inflating numbers. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Hispanic_and_Latino_Americans http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Hispanic_and_Latino_Ameri...
- Spooky23 13y ago
  Statistics here are easily manipulated. Usually these stats are kid centric, because that's how he census bureau tabulates the data... Nearly 70% of black children are in a household with a single mother vs. 45% Latino, 25-30% white, 15% Asian. The numbers vary when you flip it to be parent-centric, and you can cherry-pick states to some extent to find the results that you want. If you want to decrease single motherhood, you don't need to start a company... You need to change the regulations about certain public benefits that essentially require working class people to not marry in order to raise children. A married, working couple with marginal jobs qualifies for food stamps at best. As a single mother (not required to report the boyfriend's income), you get free daycare, free formula, free healthcare for the child, housing subsidy and additional food subsidy (wic). These benefits can be worth as much as $50k -- more than household income for a married couple. So many poor folks don't marry.
  - twrkit 13y ago
    To back this concept up, check out this post[1] on Zerohedge which points out how it's becoming more lucrative to work a minimum wage job (or no job at all) and collect entitlements than it is to work a 'middle-class' job. [1] http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2012-11-27/when-work-punished-tragedy-americas-welfare-state http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2012-11-27/when-work-punished-...
alexvr 13y ago
You ruined this masterpiece with the Taylor Swift reference. Actually, just kidding. You couldn't ruin this if you devoted a paragraph to explain, out of the blue, that Taylor Swift is a superior musician to Thom Yorke. And if you did, I would probably buy it. I don't praise prose often; but when I do, ... I've got nothing.
pshin45 13y ago
Brings to mind a great quote by Mother Teresa: "In this life we cannot do great things. We can only do small things with great love." Likewise, unless you have the clout and badassery of a Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, or Sebastian Thrun, it's unrealistic to expect a given entrepreneurial individual(s) to solve major world problems on their own or in their own lifetime. All an entrepreneur can really hope for is to be able to at least get the ball rolling, in the short time he/she has on this planet, so that maybe one day someone of a future generation can in turn stand on your shoulders to achieve something great and help finish what you started. > We need: A Paul Graham and his Y Combinator at the incubator level, to devote one season to the underclass, be it veterans, single moms or overworked young doctors, Native Americans, the list is long: “Help these entrepreneurs build something that will help you.” I remember reading that YC recently funded "Watsi", its first non-profit. I wonder if this is just a one-off or a sign of much more to come?
pvnick 13y ago
Awesome article, but, > If you’re under 30 and in finance, you’ve definitely noticed the radical migration of your peers from Wall Street to Silicon Valley and Silicon Alley My heart sank. I don't want those sociopathic Wall Street bros infesting the tech scene.
- krakensden 13y ago
  Let's be honest- that ship sailed years ago.
  - mikecane 13y ago
    And they also run Hollywood. Which is why movies have become expensive amusement rides and hardly anything else.
    - ktf 13y ago
      This has been true since the beginning of film's history, with rare exceptions. Spectacle sells, even going back to the point when the technology of film itself was the spectacle. (See for example the always-thrilling L'Arrivée d'un Train Ã la Ciotat: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1dgLEDdFddk http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1dgLEDdFddk) If you want "film as art," it's generally best to avoid studio mega-corps designed to make cash.
ebiester 13y ago
It's pretty simple. The Unexotic Underclass Doesn't Have Cash. In 2007, the bottom 60% of the country had 4.2% of the country's wealth. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:U.S._Distribution_of_Wealth,_2007.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:U.S._Distribution_of_Weal... Frankly, it doesn't make sense to target anyone but the top 40% of the country. Roll a 20 sided die. If you roll a 1, put in the pile that goes to the bottom 60%. If you roll a 2-20, put it in the money that goes to the top 40% of the country. Which market are you going to get money from? I can tell you which market I'm looking at. Now, the distribution of income isn't as disparate, but there's a reason that the bottom 60% isn't generating wealth, and it's partially because they're spending all of their money on essentials and small, low overhead luxuries. Is it true that you can make a good amount of money in making things more affordable to these segments? Sure, but these don't seem to be the grand problems people are talking about.
- overgard 13y ago
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_companies_by_revenue http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_companies_by_re... Judging by that list, the notion that you can't make money off the unexotic underclass seems suspect. Even excluding Oil and Gas, the vast majority of the companies are not exactly luxury brands for the upper class.
  - csallen 13y ago
    True, but very few of the companies in that list are in industries that entrepreneurs feel confident about entering.
    - pvdm 13y ago
      Why would you want to enter the Oil/Gas industry when you can disrupt them thru Green industries ala Elon Musk ?
      - kyllo 13y ago
        When is Elon Musk going to make an electric car that costs < $30,000 new though?
was8309 13y ago
completely agree, but language matters, and so : "liberal ... (who believes) ... (the underclass) ... has to pull itself up by its own bootstraps". have we lost the meanings of our words?
- icebraining 13y ago
  Well, in a great part of the world, "liberal" is still associated with classical/neo liberalism. Some US right-wing libertarians will tell you that the word was co-opted by left statists and that it doesn't fit them, since they're not for freedom, as the word implies (their argument, not mine). See http://www.libertarianism.org/blog/liberal-is-not-dirty-word http://www.libertarianism.org/blog/liberal-is-not-dirty-word
  - was8309 13y ago
    thank you
  - eli_gottlieb 13y ago
    I actually agree with the libertarians there. It should be pointed out that every major party in the USA, including the Democrats, are basically neoliberals. At the very left extreme-edge of the Democratic Party they have one or two social democrats.
sologoub 13y ago
This article seems to have good intentions, but it does so much insulting to the audience in the first several paragraphs that I struggled to read further... The disgraceful state of the veterans really is a problem that can be solved rather easily with automation. Unfortunately, doing business with the government is very trying. From little experience that I have first hand, keeping the status quo is also very profitable. As to the rest of the problems, people who point out the cash flow issues are spot on. For example, most European countries file childcare right there with education as a good that cannot be left to market forces. They all tend to have stagnated or declining populations, with extremely negative views on immigration. That is hardly the view point in the US. We seem to still think that healthcare can be completely addressed by market forces. (If you are sick and can't work, how are you going to make those payment again? Oh yeas, insurance! Too bad it's tied to the employment you no longer have...)
Crake 13y ago
It's really great to see poor white people considered as people in need. (It would have been even better if the article considered poor asians, too. They're not all rich doctors.) It's a huge demographic that's desperately in need of help, but it doesn't score you any brownie points to help the "unexotic"--just as the article highlights. As a result, many languish in poverty instead of fulfilling their full potential. I know a lot of people who are poor, rural, and white, and they really struggle while resources are freely given to far more affluent peers of a different color. It's really sad to watch someone's dreams of college die before their eyes due to race based discrimination.
- lilsunnybee 13y ago
  Poor people of all colors suffer much more from class-based discrimination. Rich people spend their money on trifles like ipads and gaming computers rather than trying to help their struggling neighbor. Maybe it has something to do with how separated we all are, that rich people probably haven't even really talked to a poor person in years, and operate based on stereotypes and contempt.
  - Crake 13y ago
    Yeah, most of the people who get on the PoC privilege train clearly haven't interacted with low income people for a while. I saw a girl from a $70,000+/year family say once that her family was lower middle class. wtf. One of the worst SRWs I've met, everything was racism to her. She went into social work, and the last I heard was a blog post complaining about how one of the people in a case she was working had called her spoiled. El-oh-el.
vixen99 13y ago
Just my view: reading this is like being harangued by some irate ranter. The style will ensure minimal impact on those who should read it. Small point: why the focus on the Roma as against non-Roma Romanians and Bulgarians who are also very poor but shut up, get down to work and obey the law. Anecdotally (I live in Romania) I would say that many Roma do just that. Plenty join the professions as doctors, lawyers, engineers and media folk or simply do an ordinary job of work but there is a criminal minority who are the authors of their own problems. However it's pointless trying to explain this to some of the right-on human rights brigade.
- Sven7 13y ago
  Who do you think should read it? I doubt this can be written in any other style other than a rant. It will have an impact on people for whom money isn't an issue and who already doubt if there is any real utility to the work they do.
sgt 13y ago
Who is C.Z. Nnaemeka ? Is this a pseudonym of sorts? Born to Nigerian parents, she has a philosophy degree and has worked in the finance industry. I did some googling to find out more, but there's very little information available.
anonymous 13y ago
Those aren't technological problems.
- lilsunnybee 13y ago
  They aren't?
mikecane 13y ago
That was epic. And this is the heart of everything: >>>It’s not rocket science: people build what they know. Cosmopolitan, well-educated young men and women in America’s big cities are rushing into startups and building for other cosmopolitan well-educated young men and women in big cities. Until you've become part of the exotic underclass -- or an over-50 perma-unemployable (tick tick tick) -- you won't see these problems, won't be affected by them, and won't use your skills to solve them. In ten, twenty, thirty years, shit will start to get done. Too late for many, but better late than never.
- lilsunnybee 13y ago
  Stuff can start to get done now. It's just about privileged people thinking about more than themselves. There's plenty of bright people at the bottom too, just without the resources and connections to get anything fixed.
michaelochurch 13y ago
We actually pay dearly for what's happening to the so-called Unexotic Underclass. 1. Many of us will join them. Most people who join VC-istan and Wall Street in 2013 aren't going to make any money. By the time they're eligible to sit at the table, the money will be elsewhere. The vicious culture of VC-istan (with extreme deadlines, fast firing, and little investment in doing things right; so you end up not learning not much) comes out of this "get rich before the ball drops" culture, especially prevalent among young people. 2. Real estate. Why's it so expensive to live in the star cities? In large part, because the rest of the country is dying. We're in 1927 territory. In 1927, there was a deep rural poverty problem (see: Mad Men flashbacks) but urban elites thought there was no way it could reach them. Some of those elites were in New York, which recovered. Some were in places like Buffalo and Detroit and Harrisburg, Pa. Five years later, that cancer of rural poverty was metastatic throughout the whole economy. Replace "rural" with "suburbs and small towns" and you see what's going on today, and what the risks are. VC-istan is actually very top-down, despite its PR, which is why I don't think it's that stable. Most VC-istan companies are more vicious and hierarchical than the archetypal corporate dinosaurs; but also, to get funded, you have to live where the money is. What's bizarre about all this is that the money often comes from elsewhere. The VCs don't get their money from local sources, and they sure aren't going to put their own money in it until they reach a nine-figure net worth, so the money that's often funding these "anti-problem" startups is from the Iowa public school teacher pension fund. Shouldn't they have, at least, the option to fund local talent and revive their own economies, instead of having it all sent West into an investment vehicle that hasn't earned its keep since the late 1990s? At any rate, I don't know how to solve this problem, but kudos to the OP for drawing attention to it.
- theoppositeof 13y ago
  Michaelo Church or Michael O. Church, I don't know who you are, but this is a great comment on the article. Thank you for this perspective. As someone once in VC, I laughed when you said what is true: most VCs are not actually putting their own money behind the investments. Indeed, it's only the 9-figure celebrity ones. My only quibble was your line about not making money. Your first year associates/analysts are pulling in 6 figures which I think is pretty decent dough, even though it may feel like a middle class wage in the "star cities" you rightly mentioned.
gyardley 13y ago
Building products for markets you don't understand isn't such a great idea. Yes, I'm sure there's some nice opportunities out there among the underclass, but most developers in Silicon Valley simply don't have the ability to find them, because that's not what they know. The author would be better off looking for the small subset of potential entrepreneurs that are deeply rooted in the underclass and then encouraging them to take advantage of their cultural knowledge.
- ippisl 13y ago
  That sounds like laziness. What about deeply researching the subject , connecting with people who know about such stuff, or partnering with some domain expert ?
  - gyardley 13y ago
    That sounds like hubris.
    - eli_gottlieb 13y ago
      Great, if we propose a three-month deadline for producing a working prototype, we've got all the virtues of a great programmer!
calinet6 13y ago
All content aside, this is a wonderfully written article. Taking note of the author, and the style to use for inspiration.
netrixllc 13y ago
This article is completely false. There has been an exponential increase in the number of start-ups in America to specifically serve the underclass. What the poor want is money, and the market has responded with almost every conceivable solution. Some examples, Gold for cash stores, Payday Loan stores, Auto Title Loan stores, increasing number of pawn stores, new high risk credit cards offering 29.9% APR, rent-to-own furniture/appliance stores, the 'short term' elimination of any standards towards an approval for purchase of a home to allow predatory 'Borrowers' to buy homes they could not afford, etc...
- smacktoward 13y ago
  You're confusing "serve the underclass" with "rip off the underclass."
vijayr 13y ago
This is a nice read. Is there any place where we can learn more about these problems? as in, a place (blog/site etc) that lists problems that are real world problems to solve, than twitter/facebook type?
- lilsunnybee 13y ago
  You'd be going about it the wrong way if you just looked at a list. Sometimes the underlying issues are complex, or just downright a struggle to fix or disrupt. The best thing you could do is make friends and acquaintances outside of your ingroup. Have people tell you about their problems themselves. You'll get a better idea of the problems out there the more people you talk to and dialogue with. If you want my opinion on the main obstacles against making the world a better place: - gentrification and separation of the rich and poor - social services being a giant wasteful bureaucracy rather than a streamlined, responsive, empowering structure - gridlock in the US legislature as far as finding real solutions, leading to lack of regulations where they should be and mis-managed and destructive overregulation in others Everyone towards the bottom is overworked and have no leftover energy and willpower to jump through all the arbitrary hoops to improve their lot in life. Something needs to change with how wealth, free time, and the benefits of efficiency are distributed in society, or the country will go into further decline and unrest.
niels_olson 13y ago
This article should be stapled to the top of Hacker News, next to new | threads | comments | ask | jobs | submit | to-do
weeksie 13y ago
Good article, mostly well written except for the painful intellectual insecurity of the writer. It is, in fact, possible to write a scathing, stylised essay without doing backflips to use archaic or obscure vocabulary. Sometimes that's what's required to get a point across, but when it's thrown in so haphazardly (my eyes nearly rolled out of my head when I saw "catholic" used as a synonym for "universal"). Take a deep breath, get your point across, and emphasise the stuff that's important. Don't drag me out of your flow just because you want to show off. Regardless, the writer is going to be awesome once they mature a bit.
ianstallings 13y ago
On What I Think the World Should Do - By Sir Grandiloquent
eli_gottlieb 13y ago
And here I wrote a similar critique of Silicon Valley something like two days ago. Nice to see the perspective of "the 99%" getting more play.
lsiebert 13y ago
This is crossposted from my comment in the MeFi discussion of this article. I don't buy that startups are just targeting rich people. It's perhaps part of it, but not all of it. They are targeting people like them, young, single childless generally white guys. I see a million dating sites, but very few sites for married people, which are still a huge chunk of the adult population. Though I seem to recall at least one quick divorce app. Oh, and that dating site for cheating with married people. Childcare is a major concern, but I can't recall one startup doing babysitting/daycare recommendations/referrals. Where is the trending site where you get a months supply of diapers on subscription? I see a lot of sites for young urban people, but very few sites/apps targeting aging populations and people in the suburbs. I think the closest I am aware of is health care and legal service startups. Aside from targeted dating apps, I can't think of very many startups that are trying to serve minority populations. Though I would point out that I saw a dating site for farmers, so that's at least some rural targeting. Married people have money. Old people have money. People with kids have money. They should be being targeted. Now maybe there are more systemic issues... maybe products targeting these areas all exist, and just lack publicity/funding (and the two often go hand in hand), or maybe the press just ignores them. But there are a million app/site/service ideas out there.
- lilsunnybee 13y ago
  Care.com for babysitting/daycare, etc. It runs lots of commercials on all the kids channels. Amazon.com for diapers, or plenty of other sites do subscriptions too. Diaper services are still around. Healthcare and legal services startups sound like a great idea.

278 points by ixacto 13y ago

pvdm 13y ago

Yes, absolutely. We need to import more H1-B workers to work on these very important problems of food, fashion, 'social' and gaming. Makes me want to delete my facebook account right now.

kyllo 13y ago

I noticed that devs on HN often sneer at CRUD apps because they're boring to build, but meanwhile a simple CRUD app could do something like make all these veterans' medical benefit claims paperless so that they can get filled out and approved in minutes rather than months, and they could get the care they need sooner. One could do a lot of good by just making CRUD apps for people who need them and can't afford to pay much for them.

mikeash 13y ago
All the technology in the world won't make those veterans' benefit claims go through any faster. The problem there isn't the technology (it's not all that hard of a problem) but getting it into the right place, past all the gatekeepers who want to keep it out. It's not that nobody is building the technology because they're concentrating on other things, but rather nobody is building it because they know it won't sell, because it would have to go sixteen thousand layers of red tape and many tours through Congress before anything got done. I think there's probably a lot of scope for solving problems with fairly simple apps, but this example seems like a terrible one.
- scrumper 13y ago
  Maybe that's the problem to solve then: navigating (or, dare I say it, disrupting) government procurement.
  - mnutt 13y ago
    That reminds me of DonorsChoose, which connects elementary teachers with people looking to donate. It's unfortunate that many states don't properly fund things like school supplies, but it's a great service nonetheless.
  - kylebgorman 13y ago
    A procurement reform program was Philadelphia's submission to the "Mayors Challenge" this year (http://mayorschallenge.bloomberg.org/index.cfm?objectid=184AE090-8B49-11E2-92C8000C29C7CA2F http://mayorschallenge.bloomberg.org/index.cfm?objectid=184A...). It lost out to Providence, RI's proposal (I have argued elsewhere that Providence's proposal, while noble, is probably a boondoggle: http://wellformedness.com/blog/on-the-providence-word-gap-intervention/ http://wellformedness.com/blog/on-the-providence-word-gap-in...)
- vkou 13y ago
  From what I understand of Veteran's Affairs, the technology has been built, and it does sell. The only problem is that the government's being fleeced for all its got by the vendors in question. VA's got no end of computer systems, where its staff hand-enter information in one system, print out its report, only to scan it, fax it across the country, where someone else will hand-enter it into... A different system. Engineers, consultants, and Serious Business Contracts were involved in the construction of this abomination - and while they were all in compliance of the standards that the government expects from its vendors, none of them delivered a good product.
  - kyllo 13y ago
    Do they not even use EDI to communicate between the systems?
  - jlujan 13y ago
    "On February 5, 2013, the Secretary of Defense and the Secretary of Veterans Affairs announced that instead of building a single integrated electronic health record (iEHR), both DOD and VA will concentrate on integrating VA and DOD health data by focusing on interoperability and using existing technological solutions. This announcement was a departure from the previous commitments that both Departments had made to design and build a new single iEHR, rather than upgrading their current electronic health records and trying to develop interoperability solutions." http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R42970.pdf http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R42970.pdf
    - kyllo 13y ago
      Gee, that doesn't sound expensive at all.
- kyllo 13y ago
  You're right, you're right. The VA thing is a bad example. Enterprise software is expensive because big companies make themselves expensive to sell to. And the government is the biggest company of all. I'm sure they spend seven to eight figures on the cruddiest of CRUD apps from companies like Oracle. On the other hand, something like a basic CRUD app could really help out a charity or non-profit that serves disadvantaged populations, and that could be built in Rails or Django for just a few days of developer time.
  - walshemj 13y ago
    Not so sure abotu the charity market. one example back in 2000 I worked on a cheap and cheerful Paperless direct debit so that any Charity could quickly and easily set up a system to take donations. The trouble was each flipping charity/bank wanted a bespoke version some of the changes required by the banks where absoluty nit picking. The product had some good press for the Minister but could we get charity's/banks to hold their nose and just use one form! NO Wonder if any VC in old street/silicon roundabout want to try again I still have few contacts form my days at Poptel
- Crake 13y ago
  Plus the people who do the paper apps processing probably don't want to have their jobs eliminated and have an interest in refusing new (if computers can be considered "new") technology. Even if it means letting vets die due to the needlessly extended waiting process.
arkades 13y ago
The VA has the largest, best-maintained electronic medical records system in the country. It is open-source and available to the public. The problem with vets is not the absence of software. I am rather tired of seeing this particular horse beaten.
- Cyranix 13y ago
  Can you take this comment a step further and attempt an explanation for why a gargantuan pile of paperwork does exist despite such excellent software?
  - zdw 13y ago
    I'm going to guess that they're two separate things. Medical records keeps track of medical procedure, patient history, what medications they're on, etc. In the private sphere, this is what a hospital would use. What's probably at cause for the huge backlog is actually getting people into the system and approved for care. In the private sphere, this is what an insurance company would use. Or this could be just your standard set of political exaggerations.
  - dr_ 13y ago
    Yes, part of it is registering vets into the system. The other part is a combination of the enormous number of claims and enormous amount of documentation required. As a physician, I worked in C&P (compensation and pension) clinics for a number of years at the VA, as a consultant. The amount of documentation required is astronomical, likely because vets are being compensated for their injuries with taxpayer dollars. Fair enough, but a physician providing these services could find other ways to use their time productively (for themselves). Then there's the volume. You don't just see vets who have lost an arm or a leg or have suffered traumatic brain or spinal cord injuries. You also see the guys who may have sprained a knee or ankle playing basketball in their free time but while they were officially on duty. Throw that into the mix, and you have too many people to examine so thoroughly. They tried to fix this by contracting with an agency and have vets come into a private medical office instead of doctors going to the VA, my partner did this for a while, but the reimbursement offered for the amount of paperwork required ultimately made it impractical. To fix it: 1) screen vets better, some are clearly more severely injured than others 2) better compensate providers who see all these vets and complete all the necessary documentation. The screening part is tricky though, as it can quickly get political.
mynameishere 13y ago
a simple CRUD app could do something like make all these veterans' medical benefit claims paperless Changing a massive medical system from paper-based to digital is "simple"?
whiddershins 13y ago
This and all the responses to it seem hopelessly naive to me. Obviously, if there is a delay in benefits, the delay has been introduced as a cost cutting measure. The more you delay, the less you pay. This is a pretty typical measure for large organizations trying to surreptitiously reduce costs (see welfare or HMOs) and the problem has nothing to do with logistics.
yardie 13y ago
In a past life I built one of these CRUD apps. The CRUD part was simple. The volumes of rules and exceptions is where the time and money went. At one point I tried to replace a DOS terminal-based system with something that would resemble a GUI. Based off the old GUI it was easy to replicate, then the rulebooks came out and I realised I was way over my head.
adamgravitis 13y ago
I think I've noticed a pattern with these kinds of systems: its not a software problem; it's a policy problem. When designing (evolving, inventing) rules, regulations, policy, exceptions, limitations, audits, checks, balances, the bureaucracy's princes seem to ignore the bigger picture of what it's all become: a mess. It's not just government systems either. There's a reason why people joke about their phone bills being difficult to understand. Same goes for most utilities. Now, once you have an incoherent, contradictory, thousand page mishmash set of rules, every engineer worthy of the title is going to stay as far away as possible. So, the whole mess gets dumped on an army of coders from a big consultancy. Perhaps instead of focusing on the useless software written to fit a pile of inane rules, people could focus on the economic and operational benefits of redoing the entire policy regime with a zen-shaped comb. Software is an enabler. It's actually covered-up a lot of really awful decision-making. The US tax code could never have become what it is if developers hadn't been able to consistently keep up with crazy new patches to implement it: nobody could possibly manage it by hand.
- tel 13y ago
  As someone working on a healthcare startup, a thousand times this. More than the technical disgust of building a policy-laden system, marketing is terrifically difficult under regulation. Consumers get scarred by inconsistent regulatory rules and stop being willing to change processes because it's too frightening to possibly run afoul of policy. This is, by the way, a great opportunity for organizing regulatory consultants. Such a service might be an important forerunner or partner to ventures trying to change heavily regulated industries.

dfc 13y ago

" I’m sweeping a fairly catholic brush " What is a catholic brush?

jckt 13y ago
"catholic : comprehensive, universal; especially : broad in sympathies, tastes, or interests <a catholic taste in music>" Note that he didn't capitalise the word. Edit: sorry, I don't tend to read the article's author's name -- bad on my part. Sorry about that.
- jholman 13y ago
  she
- zipfle 13y ago
  note that he is she.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
falsedan 13y ago
a shibboleth that the author will use a $5 word where a nickel would do
- egometry 13y ago
  I see what you did there. (Shibboleth is one of my favorite pieces of esoteric vocabulary, but it's at least $10.)

kstenerud 13y ago

All of this moralizing and "solve big problems" talk is really getting old. On average, chances are pretty low that a particular individual will ever solve a big problem, so stop worrying about it! It's not for others to say how you "should" spend your energy anyway. The moralistic fluff is unnecessary. Those who aren't motivated will ignore it, those who are motivated don't need to be reminded, and the moralizers will use it to beat the rest of the would-be entrepreneurs into a perpetual state of indecision. Condense the article down and you're left with this nugget of advice: You'll have a better chance of success if you target unsaturated, boring markets.

briancaw2 13y ago
You said: 1. On average you won't solve a big problem, so don't try. 2. Other folks in your society should have no opinion on what you spend time on. 3. Don't try to change people's opinions because you can't. 4. Stop bringing up morality because it makes people think, not act.
- kstenerud 13y ago
  "On average you won't solve a big problem, so don't try." On average you won't solve a big problem, so don't worry about it. At what point did I say don't try? "Other folks in your society should have no opinion on what you spend time on." Other folks will have an opinion on what you spend your time on whether you like it or not. They'll talk and talk about how YOU (not they) should do such and such. It's easy to opine when you're not the one actually doing the work. So don't worry too much about what they think. "Don't try to change people's opinions because you can't." It's not that you can't per se, but rather that on average they won't. So don't worry if it doesn't work out. "Stop bringing up morality because it makes people think, not act." Don't let other peoples' moral platitudes paralyze you with the fear of acting.
raylu 13y ago
On average, chances are pretty low that a particular startup will ever make even a hundred thousand dollars, so stop starting new companies! It's not for either your investors or your customers to tell you what to build anyway. And just never talk about morals, which I deem "fluff".

dfc 13y ago

Why are overworked young doctors part of the unexotic underclass?

andyjsong 13y ago
This is just a guess, but crippling school debt?

zwieback 13y ago

This was a fun read but we've already reached the meta-discussion of the meaningfulness of entrepreneurs so it's probably time to move on. The reality is that entrepreneurs cannot solve the Big Problems or big problems - the investment and time horizon of these problems means that traditional structures, e.g. large companies, research organizations and governments have to step in. Disruption is for the easy stuff, hard stuff still has to be solved the slow way, with decades of hard work.

rbranson 13y ago

This is really a classic criticism of capitalism clothed in a Dropbox t-shirt. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_capitalism#Inefficiency_and_waste http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_capitalism#Ineffic...

greghinch 13y ago

Before you can fix any of the problems that would require you to be a US government contractor, you first have to fix the problems of how US government IT contracts are awarded. There is an entire sub-industry of IT service firms who have perfected the art of bidding on government contracts, and win them regardless of their ability to build the best solution. They just have to present the lowest cost solution that meets all the requirements outlined. They are often monolithic corporate entities with multiple sub-entities, with so many layers of bureaucracy it's amazing anything get's built at all. I did some contract web work for on a government project, and just to get paid I had to set up accounts with 3 separate government agencies which had similar but separate account management and payment distribution software (most likely built by separate IT service contractors). It's an industry that's ripe for disruption if you can figure out how to break down the walls, but those walls have been erected pretty damn high and solid.

Maxious 13y ago
Fix the problems of how US government IT contracts are awarded? There's a startup for that. http://www.dobt.co/ http://www.dobt.co/ > During the pilot period, RFP-EZ attracted more than 270 businesses that until now had never approached the world of Federal contracting. http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2013/05/15/rfp-ez-delivers-savings-taxpayers-new-opportunities-small-business http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2013/05/15/rfp-ez-delivers-sa...
- olefoo 13y ago
  Don't take this the wrong way, but .gov procurement people do notice things like the fact that both domains ( dobt.co and procure.io ) are using cctld's for non-US countries.
- greghinch 13y ago
  It's a good start, but this is a focused on the relatively low price segment. This doesn't address how some startup could come in and effectively submit a bid for something like the VA system
jonnathanson 13y ago

abraininavat 13y ago

We have clear ideas of what the exotic underclass looks like because everyone is clamoring to help them.... The exotic underclass are poor Black and Hispanic children (are there any other kind?) living in America’s urban ghettos. Yeah, they're wiping their asses with the money that gets thrown at them. What a fucking joke.

meric 13y ago

Microfinance program for Refugees and Migrant entrepreneurs: http://rosemountgs.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/Community-Commerce-to-launch-in-2013.pdf http://rosemountgs.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/Communi...

seanwoods 13y ago

I feel like this article could have been written with half as many words and 2/3 fewer lofty concepts.

205guy 13y ago

I don't disagree with the article, but I had 2 thoughts form in my mind while reading it: 1) I don't think entrepreneurs (and tech ones at that) have solved any problems, even for the upper classes they cater to. Instead, they have become popular and profitable the old-fashioned way, by creating and filling a need. Even a solution as fundamental as search on the internet is not really helping me lead a better life--though it does make possible the vast stores of knowledge and likely the entire tech sector (including my livelihood). 2) Given 1) above, the entire article essentially seems to encourage people to exploit the under-exploited markets of the unexotic by creating needs there and fulfilling them. I don't really see how entrepreneurs can, for example, fix the bureaucracy of Veteran's Affairs, even if they had a turnkey case-handling solution to sell to them. Finally, the author of the article had a pedigree as long as my sleeve, but I didn't see any work in the unexotic fields. Somewhat related thought: where are the non-tech entrepreneurs? Are there solutions that don't require computers anymore? Are there ways to get funding for such a solution?

elithrar 13y ago
> Even a solution as fundamental as search on the internet is not really helping me lead a better life--though it does make possible the vast stores of knowledge and likely the entire tech sector (including my livelihood). I disagree. You can spin this many ways. I look at "search" as solving the problem of "easy access to information" - however one must understand that it is not an unsolved/solved problem (varying degrees of "solved" apply here). Being able to learn new things, research something I'm working on beyond my direct network of friends/colleagues, and engage with others solves a lot of problems for me. All this information also makes it much easier to re-skill or add new skills to my repertoire.
- Surio 13y ago
  >> I disagree. You can spin this many ways. You've answered him, as well as yourself... It depends on the frame of reference in approaching this... If you take a hovering big picture view, what you say is all good, but in reality, on a individual/micro level, 95% of this "search on the net" business is all about "finding deals", and assorted mindless tivia. :) Someone argues (more convincingly than I can ;) ) that more choice and more information is not necessarily better http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_choice http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_choice

justzisguyuknow 13y ago

"Of the single mothers, the majority is White, 1 in 4 is Hispanic, and 1 in 3 is Black." This does not add up.

thaumasiotes 13y ago
I was thinking the same thing. Granting 0% Asian/Pacific Islander/Amerind single motherhood, 5/12 is not a majority.
beachstartup 13y ago
i upvoted you because it's a good catch, but it's not necessarily true. there are black hispanics. "non-white hispanic" is the appropriate term for what you're thinking of, but it's probably just the journalist inflating numbers. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Hispanic_and_Latino_Americans http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Hispanic_and_Latino_Ameri...
Spooky23 13y ago
Statistics here are easily manipulated. Usually these stats are kid centric, because that's how he census bureau tabulates the data... Nearly 70% of black children are in a household with a single mother vs. 45% Latino, 25-30% white, 15% Asian. The numbers vary when you flip it to be parent-centric, and you can cherry-pick states to some extent to find the results that you want. If you want to decrease single motherhood, you don't need to start a company... You need to change the regulations about certain public benefits that essentially require working class people to not marry in order to raise children. A married, working couple with marginal jobs qualifies for food stamps at best. As a single mother (not required to report the boyfriend's income), you get free daycare, free formula, free healthcare for the child, housing subsidy and additional food subsidy (wic). These benefits can be worth as much as $50k -- more than household income for a married couple. So many poor folks don't marry.
- twrkit 13y ago
  To back this concept up, check out this post[1] on Zerohedge which points out how it's becoming more lucrative to work a minimum wage job (or no job at all) and collect entitlements than it is to work a 'middle-class' job. [1] http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2012-11-27/when-work-punished-tragedy-americas-welfare-state http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2012-11-27/when-work-punished-...

alexvr 13y ago

You ruined this masterpiece with the Taylor Swift reference. Actually, just kidding. You couldn't ruin this if you devoted a paragraph to explain, out of the blue, that Taylor Swift is a superior musician to Thom Yorke. And if you did, I would probably buy it. I don't praise prose often; but when I do, ... I've got nothing.

pshin45 13y ago

Brings to mind a great quote by Mother Teresa: "In this life we cannot do great things. We can only do small things with great love." Likewise, unless you have the clout and badassery of a Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, or Sebastian Thrun, it's unrealistic to expect a given entrepreneurial individual(s) to solve major world problems on their own or in their own lifetime. All an entrepreneur can really hope for is to be able to at least get the ball rolling, in the short time he/she has on this planet, so that maybe one day someone of a future generation can in turn stand on your shoulders to achieve something great and help finish what you started. > We need: A Paul Graham and his Y Combinator at the incubator level, to devote one season to the underclass, be it veterans, single moms or overworked young doctors, Native Americans, the list is long: “Help these entrepreneurs build something that will help you.” I remember reading that YC recently funded "Watsi", its first non-profit. I wonder if this is just a one-off or a sign of much more to come?

pvnick 13y ago

Awesome article, but, > If you’re under 30 and in finance, you’ve definitely noticed the radical migration of your peers from Wall Street to Silicon Valley and Silicon Alley My heart sank. I don't want those sociopathic Wall Street bros infesting the tech scene.

krakensden 13y ago
Let's be honest- that ship sailed years ago.
- mikecane 13y ago
  And they also run Hollywood. Which is why movies have become expensive amusement rides and hardly anything else.
  - ktf 13y ago
    This has been true since the beginning of film's history, with rare exceptions. Spectacle sells, even going back to the point when the technology of film itself was the spectacle. (See for example the always-thrilling L'Arrivée d'un Train Ã la Ciotat: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1dgLEDdFddk http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1dgLEDdFddk) If you want "film as art," it's generally best to avoid studio mega-corps designed to make cash.

ebiester 13y ago

It's pretty simple. The Unexotic Underclass Doesn't Have Cash. In 2007, the bottom 60% of the country had 4.2% of the country's wealth. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:U.S._Distribution_of_Wealth,_2007.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:U.S._Distribution_of_Weal... Frankly, it doesn't make sense to target anyone but the top 40% of the country. Roll a 20 sided die. If you roll a 1, put in the pile that goes to the bottom 60%. If you roll a 2-20, put it in the money that goes to the top 40% of the country. Which market are you going to get money from? I can tell you which market I'm looking at. Now, the distribution of income isn't as disparate, but there's a reason that the bottom 60% isn't generating wealth, and it's partially because they're spending all of their money on essentials and small, low overhead luxuries. Is it true that you can make a good amount of money in making things more affordable to these segments? Sure, but these don't seem to be the grand problems people are talking about.

overgard 13y ago
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_companies_by_revenue http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_companies_by_re... Judging by that list, the notion that you can't make money off the unexotic underclass seems suspect. Even excluding Oil and Gas, the vast majority of the companies are not exactly luxury brands for the upper class.
- csallen 13y ago
  True, but very few of the companies in that list are in industries that entrepreneurs feel confident about entering.
  - pvdm 13y ago
    Why would you want to enter the Oil/Gas industry when you can disrupt them thru Green industries ala Elon Musk ?
    - kyllo 13y ago
      When is Elon Musk going to make an electric car that costs < $30,000 new though?

was8309 13y ago

completely agree, but language matters, and so : "liberal ... (who believes) ... (the underclass) ... has to pull itself up by its own bootstraps". have we lost the meanings of our words?

icebraining 13y ago
Well, in a great part of the world, "liberal" is still associated with classical/neo liberalism. Some US right-wing libertarians will tell you that the word was co-opted by left statists and that it doesn't fit them, since they're not for freedom, as the word implies (their argument, not mine). See http://www.libertarianism.org/blog/liberal-is-not-dirty-word http://www.libertarianism.org/blog/liberal-is-not-dirty-word
- was8309 13y ago
  thank you
- eli_gottlieb 13y ago
  I actually agree with the libertarians there. It should be pointed out that every major party in the USA, including the Democrats, are basically neoliberals. At the very left extreme-edge of the Democratic Party they have one or two social democrats.

sologoub 13y ago

This article seems to have good intentions, but it does so much insulting to the audience in the first several paragraphs that I struggled to read further... The disgraceful state of the veterans really is a problem that can be solved rather easily with automation. Unfortunately, doing business with the government is very trying. From little experience that I have first hand, keeping the status quo is also very profitable. As to the rest of the problems, people who point out the cash flow issues are spot on. For example, most European countries file childcare right there with education as a good that cannot be left to market forces. They all tend to have stagnated or declining populations, with extremely negative views on immigration. That is hardly the view point in the US. We seem to still think that healthcare can be completely addressed by market forces. (If you are sick and can't work, how are you going to make those payment again? Oh yeas, insurance! Too bad it's tied to the employment you no longer have...)

Crake 13y ago

It's really great to see poor white people considered as people in need. (It would have been even better if the article considered poor asians, too. They're not all rich doctors.) It's a huge demographic that's desperately in need of help, but it doesn't score you any brownie points to help the "unexotic"--just as the article highlights. As a result, many languish in poverty instead of fulfilling their full potential. I know a lot of people who are poor, rural, and white, and they really struggle while resources are freely given to far more affluent peers of a different color. It's really sad to watch someone's dreams of college die before their eyes due to race based discrimination.

lilsunnybee 13y ago
Poor people of all colors suffer much more from class-based discrimination. Rich people spend their money on trifles like ipads and gaming computers rather than trying to help their struggling neighbor. Maybe it has something to do with how separated we all are, that rich people probably haven't even really talked to a poor person in years, and operate based on stereotypes and contempt.
- Crake 13y ago
  Yeah, most of the people who get on the PoC privilege train clearly haven't interacted with low income people for a while. I saw a girl from a $70,000+/year family say once that her family was lower middle class. wtf. One of the worst SRWs I've met, everything was racism to her. She went into social work, and the last I heard was a blog post complaining about how one of the people in a case she was working had called her spoiled. El-oh-el.

vixen99 13y ago

Just my view: reading this is like being harangued by some irate ranter. The style will ensure minimal impact on those who should read it. Small point: why the focus on the Roma as against non-Roma Romanians and Bulgarians who are also very poor but shut up, get down to work and obey the law. Anecdotally (I live in Romania) I would say that many Roma do just that. Plenty join the professions as doctors, lawyers, engineers and media folk or simply do an ordinary job of work but there is a criminal minority who are the authors of their own problems. However it's pointless trying to explain this to some of the right-on human rights brigade.

Sven7 13y ago
Who do you think should read it? I doubt this can be written in any other style other than a rant. It will have an impact on people for whom money isn't an issue and who already doubt if there is any real utility to the work they do.

sgt 13y ago

Who is C.Z. Nnaemeka ? Is this a pseudonym of sorts? Born to Nigerian parents, she has a philosophy degree and has worked in the finance industry. I did some googling to find out more, but there's very little information available.

anonymous 13y ago

Those aren't technological problems.

lilsunnybee 13y ago
They aren't?

mikecane 13y ago

That was epic. And this is the heart of everything: >>>It’s not rocket science: people build what they know. Cosmopolitan, well-educated young men and women in America’s big cities are rushing into startups and building for other cosmopolitan well-educated young men and women in big cities. Until you've become part of the exotic underclass -- or an over-50 perma-unemployable (tick tick tick) -- you won't see these problems, won't be affected by them, and won't use your skills to solve them. In ten, twenty, thirty years, shit will start to get done. Too late for many, but better late than never.

lilsunnybee 13y ago
Stuff can start to get done now. It's just about privileged people thinking about more than themselves. There's plenty of bright people at the bottom too, just without the resources and connections to get anything fixed.

michaelochurch 13y ago

We actually pay dearly for what's happening to the so-called Unexotic Underclass. 1. Many of us will join them. Most people who join VC-istan and Wall Street in 2013 aren't going to make any money. By the time they're eligible to sit at the table, the money will be elsewhere. The vicious culture of VC-istan (with extreme deadlines, fast firing, and little investment in doing things right; so you end up not learning not much) comes out of this "get rich before the ball drops" culture, especially prevalent among young people. 2. Real estate. Why's it so expensive to live in the star cities? In large part, because the rest of the country is dying. We're in 1927 territory. In 1927, there was a deep rural poverty problem (see: Mad Men flashbacks) but urban elites thought there was no way it could reach them. Some of those elites were in New York, which recovered. Some were in places like Buffalo and Detroit and Harrisburg, Pa. Five years later, that cancer of rural poverty was metastatic throughout the whole economy. Replace "rural" with "suburbs and small towns" and you see what's going on today, and what the risks are. VC-istan is actually very top-down, despite its PR, which is why I don't think it's that stable. Most VC-istan companies are more vicious and hierarchical than the archetypal corporate dinosaurs; but also, to get funded, you have to live where the money is. What's bizarre about all this is that the money often comes from elsewhere. The VCs don't get their money from local sources, and they sure aren't going to put their own money in it until they reach a nine-figure net worth, so the money that's often funding these "anti-problem" startups is from the Iowa public school teacher pension fund. Shouldn't they have, at least, the option to fund local talent and revive their own economies, instead of having it all sent West into an investment vehicle that hasn't earned its keep since the late 1990s? At any rate, I don't know how to solve this problem, but kudos to the OP for drawing attention to it.

theoppositeof 13y ago
Michaelo Church or Michael O. Church, I don't know who you are, but this is a great comment on the article. Thank you for this perspective. As someone once in VC, I laughed when you said what is true: most VCs are not actually putting their own money behind the investments. Indeed, it's only the 9-figure celebrity ones. My only quibble was your line about not making money. Your first year associates/analysts are pulling in 6 figures which I think is pretty decent dough, even though it may feel like a middle class wage in the "star cities" you rightly mentioned.

gyardley 13y ago

Building products for markets you don't understand isn't such a great idea. Yes, I'm sure there's some nice opportunities out there among the underclass, but most developers in Silicon Valley simply don't have the ability to find them, because that's not what they know. The author would be better off looking for the small subset of potential entrepreneurs that are deeply rooted in the underclass and then encouraging them to take advantage of their cultural knowledge.

ippisl 13y ago
That sounds like laziness. What about deeply researching the subject , connecting with people who know about such stuff, or partnering with some domain expert ?
- gyardley 13y ago
  That sounds like hubris.
  - eli_gottlieb 13y ago
    Great, if we propose a three-month deadline for producing a working prototype, we've got all the virtues of a great programmer!

calinet6 13y ago

All content aside, this is a wonderfully written article. Taking note of the author, and the style to use for inspiration.

netrixllc 13y ago

This article is completely false. There has been an exponential increase in the number of start-ups in America to specifically serve the underclass. What the poor want is money, and the market has responded with almost every conceivable solution. Some examples, Gold for cash stores, Payday Loan stores, Auto Title Loan stores, increasing number of pawn stores, new high risk credit cards offering 29.9% APR, rent-to-own furniture/appliance stores, the 'short term' elimination of any standards towards an approval for purchase of a home to allow predatory 'Borrowers' to buy homes they could not afford, etc...

smacktoward 13y ago
You're confusing "serve the underclass" with "rip off the underclass."

vijayr 13y ago

This is a nice read. Is there any place where we can learn more about these problems? as in, a place (blog/site etc) that lists problems that are real world problems to solve, than twitter/facebook type?

lilsunnybee 13y ago
You'd be going about it the wrong way if you just looked at a list. Sometimes the underlying issues are complex, or just downright a struggle to fix or disrupt. The best thing you could do is make friends and acquaintances outside of your ingroup. Have people tell you about their problems themselves. You'll get a better idea of the problems out there the more people you talk to and dialogue with. If you want my opinion on the main obstacles against making the world a better place: - gentrification and separation of the rich and poor - social services being a giant wasteful bureaucracy rather than a streamlined, responsive, empowering structure - gridlock in the US legislature as far as finding real solutions, leading to lack of regulations where they should be and mis-managed and destructive overregulation in others Everyone towards the bottom is overworked and have no leftover energy and willpower to jump through all the arbitrary hoops to improve their lot in life. Something needs to change with how wealth, free time, and the benefits of efficiency are distributed in society, or the country will go into further decline and unrest.

niels_olson 13y ago

weeksie 13y ago

Good article, mostly well written except for the painful intellectual insecurity of the writer. It is, in fact, possible to write a scathing, stylised essay without doing backflips to use archaic or obscure vocabulary. Sometimes that's what's required to get a point across, but when it's thrown in so haphazardly (my eyes nearly rolled out of my head when I saw "catholic" used as a synonym for "universal"). Take a deep breath, get your point across, and emphasise the stuff that's important. Don't drag me out of your flow just because you want to show off. Regardless, the writer is going to be awesome once they mature a bit.

ianstallings 13y ago

On What I Think the World Should Do - By Sir Grandiloquent

eli_gottlieb 13y ago

And here I wrote a similar critique of Silicon Valley something like two days ago. Nice to see the perspective of "the 99%" getting more play.

lsiebert 13y ago

This is crossposted from my comment in the MeFi discussion of this article. I don't buy that startups are just targeting rich people. It's perhaps part of it, but not all of it. They are targeting people like them, young, single childless generally white guys. I see a million dating sites, but very few sites for married people, which are still a huge chunk of the adult population. Though I seem to recall at least one quick divorce app. Oh, and that dating site for cheating with married people. Childcare is a major concern, but I can't recall one startup doing babysitting/daycare recommendations/referrals. Where is the trending site where you get a months supply of diapers on subscription? I see a lot of sites for young urban people, but very few sites/apps targeting aging populations and people in the suburbs. I think the closest I am aware of is health care and legal service startups. Aside from targeted dating apps, I can't think of very many startups that are trying to serve minority populations. Though I would point out that I saw a dating site for farmers, so that's at least some rural targeting. Married people have money. Old people have money. People with kids have money. They should be being targeted. Now maybe there are more systemic issues... maybe products targeting these areas all exist, and just lack publicity/funding (and the two often go hand in hand), or maybe the press just ignores them. But there are a million app/site/service ideas out there.

lilsunnybee 13y ago
Care.com for babysitting/daycare, etc. It runs lots of commercials on all the kids channels. Amazon.com for diapers, or plenty of other sites do subscriptions too. Diaper services are still around. Healthcare and legal services startups sound like a great idea.