I’m Done Pretending SF Tech Is Visionary

As someone who is outside of SF looking in, to me the whole startup culture there seems utterly insane. To me, it seems as though there is some kind of reality distortion field that convinces us all that no matter what we is being worked on or created, it is in some way world changing or &quot;disruptive&quot;, despite how stupid it is, or how viable a market there is for what is being made.<p>The funny thing is, organizations that are actually trying to make the world a better place by helping the homeless, poor, disadvantaged etc I&#x27;ve never even heard of.<p>The way I see it is that VC&#x27;s are all about world changing and making the world a better place, so long as in this better world they can still milk a market for every last penny.

I hear this sentiment a lot, and don&#x27;t entirely disagree with it... but it oversimplifies our community massively.<p>If you want to work on big, meaningful problems, here are some compelling options.<p>Do you think our government is broken? Join Nava (a new type of government contractor working on helping the VA fix its backlog and helping CMS move our healthcare system toward value-based-care) or 18F (a new agency within the government).<p>Want to save lives? There&#x27;s Syapse (precision medicine to cure cancer), Clover (building a Medicare Advantage health insurance company from scratch), Omada Health (diabetes prevention through behavior change), or Grail or Freenome (liquid biopsy).<p>Even well-known startups are helping to solve important problems: think about the impact of Uber and Lyft on drunk driving, or of Airbnb on foreclosures. It wasn&#x27;t a coincidence Airbnb was founded in the middle of a housing crisis.<p>I don&#x27;t know green tech well, but surely somebody here will have good suggestions on what technologists can do about the environment.

This may be a silly question, but why do we think that SV startup mentality must solve every problem?<p>Like the article states, there are lots of &quot;big&quot; problems, like homelessness, healthcare, and inequality. These are usually the realms of government and non-profits. While some of these are startups or institutions with novel ideas &#x2F; methods, I&#x27;m not sure that entrepreneurship solves everything.<p>I&#x27;m just not sure you can make a working business out of any problem. But I may just be a quitter.

Let’s not forget that Elon Musk’s first company was a site that made city guides for newspapers. It’s much easier to start companies that solve small less impactful problems first, and then move onto the big important ideas.<p>I think the problem is that a lot of the low hanging fruit has been picked. It’s pretty hard for a CS student out of college to tackle a healthcare problem with no experience in the matter..

SF is the hot potato economy.<p>Just take a company, hire lots of people that fit into the western &quot;strategic genius&quot; stereotype, create lots of hype, inflate the value by hiring lots of people and expanding, clone lots of technology that already exists, then when it&#x27;s time to actually make revenue, sell it really expensively.<p>The value of something is relative. The entire idea is to inflate the value of a company as much as possible, then sell it, then repeat the cycle again and again.<p>Then, in some cases it might be fine to buy a company because of their intellectual property such as their patent portfolio, their franchises, branding, know-how... but if you buy a company because of its software, make sure you are not buying a communal pot of spaghetti. Send a tech person to make sure you are not getting scammed into a technical debt nightmare.

Nearly all big companies started as small companies solving more trivial problems.<p>Facebook was a way to find people you met at parties at Harvard.<p>Apple was a company that made computers for hobbyists.<p>The idea is that you learn to become a good entrepreneur solving the smaller problems.

Just something to think about: everyone who gives advice has their own goals. Sometimes those goals align with yours and sometimes they don&#x27;t. The economics of VC make it so that they need their companies to be <i>big</i> successes or not succeed at all (Thiel&#x27;s &quot;Zero to One&quot; talks about the power law distribution of VC returns on investment). So it makes sense for a VC to give &quot;take huge risks&quot; as advice. That may be good advice, or it may not be, but if advice is in someone&#x27;s economic interest you should probably take that into account...<p>For that matter &quot;Zero to One&quot; also argues that people should aim high and do important things.

&gt; Right now, entrepreneurs are trying to fix things that aren’t broken. And we can all name a lot of things that are broken: healthcare, education, homelessness and poverty, food waste, climate change… need I continue?<p>I&#x27;m kinda apprehensive of what would happen if SV got a hold of these problems and tried to &quot;solve&quot; them.

Every one of those entrepreneurs and VCs are working on something they believe in. Making themselves rich(er). That&#x27;s all there is to it.

One nitpick I have about this: the peninsula tech scene is huge. It leads in all sorts of places outside of what you&#x27;ll read about on tech crunch. SSF is a massive hub of Biotech (as is the rapidly expanding UCSF-centered campus in Mission Bay).<p>Financial technology is rapidly expanding in the city as well, and only the older players in that space have substantial ties to traditional Uber For _____ startup VC firms. Companies like Tally that are genuinely trying to change the relationship. Even big companies like Capital One (my employer) are moving into SF to recruit and acquire because it&#x27;s where we can recruit the top talent away from people bored on working on Adtech.<p>There are LOTS of great places to work, not just in the Peninsula &amp; Valley of California but all over the country. SF is just nice because it&#x27;s a small city with a high density of tech jobs. But I hate to see it defined by the well-publicized caricature of the startup scene. Honestly, it bothers me enough to lead me to bad decision about it.

Societal problems are not necessarily business opportunities.<p>That said, I do agree with the general point of the article. I cringe whenever I talk with the latest would-be entrepreneur who is &quot;solving&quot; the current trendy non-problem.

&gt; And we can all name a lot of things that are broken: healthcare, education, homelessness and poverty, food waste, climate change...<p>Successful people in Silicon Valley are not concerned by these issues. They can afford to pay physicians without relying on public generosity, they can send their kids in private schools if they&#x27;re not happy with public ones, they&#x27;re neither homeless nor likely to become so (by hypothesis : they&#x27;re successful), and they&#x27;re not poor.<p>So basically, the subjects that are mentioned are really problems only for people who have a high sense of altruism.<p>Why are people not as altruistic as the author? I don&#x27;t know, but it&#x27;s probably just a fact.

An important point that I think is missing is that solving small, &quot;useless&quot; problems is a good way to get enough money to start solving big, &quot;impactful&quot; problems. Elon Musk didn&#x27;t just start SpaceX out of the blue; he used his profits from Zip2 and PayPal to fund his more grandiose ideas.

Strong, much-needed words here:<p>&quot;Right now, entrepreneurs are trying to fix things that aren’t broken. And we can all name a lot of things that are broken: healthcare, education, homelessness and poverty, food waste, climate change…&quot;<p>Damn right. Those are real problems.<p>But then the author praises Elon Musk for sending people to Mars. For prioritising space exploration over alleviating famine, poverty, illiteracy, whatnot.<p>The author&#x27;s utter inability and unwillingness to distinguish between frivolous and meaningful is <i>precisely</i> the problem he&#x27;s denouncing.

Elon Musk&#x27;s first successful exit was Zip2 that provided online city guide software to newspapers. Bill Gates sold Basic Interpreter to MITS. How successful would they have been if the first problems they had picked to solve was landing man on Mars and eliminating Polio from the world.<p>Sometimes, its all right to work on smaller problems until you are ready for the bigger ones.

What about all these corner grocery stores? They could be out saving the world, fighting malaria, going to mars, but what are they doing? Selling groceries. What a bunch of assholes.

Not everything can be solved with technology. Sure, tech will play a role, but the biggest problem is Government, legislation and the laws that prevent innovation, increasing barriers to entry so high, it drives out and prevents all innovation: hence why there&#x27;s not many innovative companies going after the trillion dollar housing market.

And this is precisely why I&#x27;m a mechanical engineer instead of a web developer, despite being very very good at the latter.

<i>&quot;Find a problem you really </i>care* about solving and pursue that. Even if the likelihood of success is slim, put your head down and go.&quot;*<p>I&#x27;m interested in startup idea patterns, <i>Care</i> isn&#x27;t one I&#x27;ve seen or heard before. Are there any examples of startups using this pattern and succeeding?

Startups are not easy and there is only so much bandwidth. Many startups ideas can be visionary since it&#x27;s a pain that the founder dealt with either in real life or as a developer. Is it right to call Uber less visionary than a company focused on solving healthcare or to keep Moore&#x27;s going forward? There can be both technical and business innovation. Uber (and especially it&#x27;s initial black car service) may have seemed like a SF-only problem in the early days superficially, but now Uber solves real problems such as mobilizing senior citizens that don&#x27;t have a license or reducing drunk driving. Vision isn&#x27;t something that is built and realized on day one but rather grows organically over time.

What are some ways for technologists to address climate&#x2F;environmental issues in a high-impact way? Would love to do something in the space, but the 8&#x2F;10 companies that show interest in me have to do with ads or luxury services in one way shape or form.

Good article, but part of the problem is that software developers, due to their social class and mental make-up, tend to not have the sort of immediate experience and understanding needed to take on real-world problems like homelessness and the health care system. They would have to work hard to get out of their epistemological bubbles. Of course, some of them do that, but it seems to be rather unusual.

There is visionary tech in SF. And for each vision, there are 100 me-too venture capital chasers going nowhere while strip mining the common good.

Relevant article on YC and startup culture in last month&#x27;s New Yorker: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.newyorker.com&#x2F;magazine&#x2F;2016&#x2F;10&#x2F;10&#x2F;sam-altmans-manifest-destiny" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.newyorker.com&#x2F;magazine&#x2F;2016&#x2F;10&#x2F;10&#x2F;sam-altmans-man...</a>

Yeah, there are a lot of companies in silicon valley not solving &quot;real&quot; problems. That idea has been discussed in many a blog post. I won&#x27;t point out the painful irony here.

Well, you do get paid lots of money (at least enough to live in the Bay Area) and I&#x27;m sure there&#x27;s plenty of good drugs and booze to go around in those circles.

This is stupid. The claim is not that all SF tech companies are visionary. The claim may be that most visionary companies, today, are concentrated in or benefit from SF tech. From a simple market perspective, many tech companies are &quot;visionary&quot; by definition of the premium over current earnings. People may be &quot;realizing their potential&quot; in ways that are not obvious to you and me. The laundromat next door helps a lot of people, and does its part in increasing general quality of life – some of the &quot;dumb&quot; companies may do that tomorrow. That&#x27;s what people putting their time and money on the line believe, at least.