
Ask HN: Is our emphasis on startups healthy? - danm07
Not trying to be inflammatory. I was thinking what if our next Einstein joined a startup to build a mobile app instead of working to further his field.<p>Today&#x27;s news about Robinhood&#x27;s fundraising got me looking into the founders&#x27; profiles. They&#x27;re a bunch of Stanford trained physicists and mathematicians. I can&#x27;t help but think there might be something better for them to do.<p>Just as well, the founder of our competitor is an MIT trained aerospace engineer who is now making a social video app.<p>What do you guys think?
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>Not trying to be inflammatory. I was thinking what if our next Einstein
joined a startup to build a mobile app instead of working to further his
field.

You're not the first to think of this at all. Thiel's quote "We were promised
flying cars, and instead what we got was 140 characters." immediately comes to
mind. Similarly I've read something like "The brightest minds of our
generation are working on click-fraud prevention"

It is easy to fall into this trap, but often the really good ideas now started
as something else. Google was _yet another_ search engine, called Backrub. It
makes me wonder what another to-do list or whatever else will turn in to
something great.

Then besides that, I am pretty optimistic. I'm seeing a lot of the cool things
suddenly present itself themselves in the last 10 years. Tesla and SpaceX come
to mind. My local grocery store has a bank of sci-fi looking superchargers.
Now, that isn't a flying car, but it is a lot closer to the Back to the Future
vision of the future. (Also in that vision, the TVs were still CRTs in 2015)

Lastly, if your MIT trained aerospace engineer really has that background and
doesn't want to do aerospace engineering, they probably shouldn't, you know?
They'll be more productive at something they want to build. If they are
interested, there are drone startups, and full-aircraft startups they could
join.

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fspacef
I don't think so. I am of the opinion that people find a compromise between
what they enjoy doing and something that allows them to live the lifestyle
they want. From my experience the folks you mentioned all seem to have in
common an interest in solving difficult problems. So being a
physicist/engineer/mathematician can be a means to this end.

In fact, doing something for so long in college can make you realize that it's
not something you want to be doing, so you look for other problem solving
outlets instead (which might pay more).

