
I’m Done Pretending SF Tech Is Visionary - dmitrig01
https://medium.com/startup-grind/im-done-pretending-sf-tech-is-visionary-9d0e91bfacfb#.ve2jm5sic
======
shruubi
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 "disruptive",
despite how stupid it is, or how viable a market there is for what is being
made.

The funny thing is, organizations that are actually trying to make the world a
better place by helping the homeless, poor, disadvantaged etc I've never even
heard of.

The way I see it is that VC'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.

~~~
pascalxus
Entrepreneurs and companies that get started are utterly desparate for
solvable problems to solve. The ideas may seem "stupid" to you, but that's
only because biggest problems have way too many barriers to entry and are
typically guarded by rent seeking government lobbying legislation.

Take homelessness. I'm sure there's a technical way to build housing for cheap
enough to get people back into houses. But, the government legislation makes
it a complete non-starter. There are so many rules and regulations, a
potential entrepreneur or existing Company couldn't even begin to dream of
creating a solution. It's all Locked up. Homelessness is a problem that is
illegal to solve, as so many things are.

Trust me, if it were legally possible to create housing that was profitable
(low enough cost to cover expenses), I'm sure there would be dozens of
builders lining up around the block to do it.

~~~
forgetsusername
The building of cheap houses isn't the problem. Who maintains them? Who
enforces the code? Who insures them? Who is liable for them? These are things
that "SV" sometimes ignores. That's why these are bigger problems.

~~~
toomuchtodo
Google "Tiny homes homelessness". The project I'm fond of "A Tiny Home For
Good" in upstate NY purchases cheap city lots (or takes land donations), has
volunteers build the tiny homes, and then provides them to the homeless to get
them back on their feet.

The regulations aren't hard. Simply put down your JavaScript framework of the
week and go out to do real work that effects change. Prepare to work long days
and not get rich, but make people's lives better.

But people won't, and that's SVs problem.

~~~
Animats
That's in Syracuse NY, an emptying city with lots of vacant real estate.

How could this work in California? Build a town of tiny houses somewhere with
low-value real estate, like San Bernardino or Lodi, and ship the SF homeless
there?

Add-on feature: free drugs and free training. 1 in 1000 doses is lethal.
Everybody is clearly told this up front. In three years, the druggies have
been filtered out and the rest have useful training.

~~~
toomuchtodo
It doesn't work in high cost of living areas without government subsidies;
them the breaks of capitalism.

I'm not against giving drug users a safe place to use with a roof over their
head, as long as they're not a danger to others; I _would_ like to see
dedicated social, mental health, and addiction counseling services provided
for those who want the help.

How do we make land less valuable? That's the question. Where you live should
not constrain or restrict your quality of life.

~~~
NoGravitas
You can't make land less valuable, because it's scarce, and some locations
really are better than others. That said, you _can_ make sure that the extra
value of particular locations is captured by the community, rather than by
speculators and rentiers generally. The standard method of doing so is the
[Land Value
Tax]([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_value_tax](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_value_tax)).

~~~
toomuchtodo
This describes better what I'd advocate for. Thank you.

------
brandonb
I hear this sentiment a lot, and don't entirely disagree with it... but it
oversimplifies our community massively.

If you want to work on big, meaningful problems, here are some compelling
options.

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).

Want to save lives? There'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).

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't a coincidence Airbnb was founded in the middle of a housing crisis.

I don't know green tech well, but surely somebody here will have good
suggestions on what technologists can do about the environment.

~~~
ubernostrum
_Clover (building a Medicare Advantage health insurance company from scratch)_

I've been at Clover since January. Cannot recommend enough.

If you want to learn why, I'm always open and willing to chat about it.

~~~
otps22
Have wanted to learn more about Clover for a while now--down to chat sometime?

~~~
ubernostrum
Sure. Email my HN username @ gmail.

------
cbanek
This may be a silly question, but why do we think that SV startup mentality
must solve every problem?

Like the article states, there are lots of "big" 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
/ methods, I'm not sure that entrepreneurship solves everything.

I'm just not sure you can make a working business out of any problem. But I
may just be a quitter.

~~~
M_Grey
There are plenty of people who think that governments need to be smaller,
often for ideological reasons. Those people won't or can't accept the scale of
problems which require those governments, and are too involved in their own
mythology of "bootstraps" and the like to see beyond that. This is often also
the reason why people who in no way stand to benefit from the status quo, deny
AGW; the solution is ideologically repugnant to them.

Bottom line: people believe what they want to believe, most of the time.

~~~
candiodari
The economic counterargument would be that any solution to a problem that is
not a Nash-equilibrium cannot be implemented. Pretending otherwise is popular,
expensive, painful, and doomed to failure as consuming all economic resources
on the planet (or any finite amount) cannot fix the underlying problem.

But a government can grow, grow, grow while pretending to solve the problem,
failing, and "correcting" for the problem that caused them to fail.

The moral counterargument is that people should be allowed to decide for
themselves and for their own government what is and is not a problem. If,
under those basic conditions, no policy can work, then those policies are
still immoral.

And the moral hazard counterargument is that "qui bono" often fits both sides.
In this problem, there is certainly merit to the argument that the IPCC,
politicians and scientists involved, the governments, and ... stand to benefit
as well. Increased budgets, more people, bigger organisations, more
experiments, more things to manage, more power to tell others what to do.
Worse, this money and power will come at the expense of the "bootstraps" folk.

Bottom line: usually people on both sides of an argument believe what they
want to believe. Exceptions exist, but not nearly as much as I thought when I
was 16 years old.

This is why science should work in the hard, provable only, way. That any
result can be duplicated by anyone who wants to do so, and anyone should be
given the tools to convince themselves any given theory works. Climate science
is a bit lacking on this front, to put it mildly.

~~~
Retric
Depends on what problem your solving. If you want the oldest 10% of the
population not to die in poverty that's actually fairly easy to solve. In you
want ~0.00% deaths from starvation that's also easy to solve. However it's
cheaper to provide basic heathcare to everyone than it is to provide top
quality heathcare to the elderly.

Reducing drug use to some significantly lower level is very possible, ending
it is not. Going to Mars is easy, colonizing Mars is a pipe dream. Governments
can solve a wide range of problems reasonably efficiently, but open ended
goals without a clear stopping point become unbound problems.

~~~
M_Grey
>Going to Mars is easy, colonizing Mars is a pipe dream.

I can't tell you how much I appreciate hearing this position from someone on
this site. I've tried to make that argument here and elsewhere, and it's met
with an almost religious fury. I really appreciate that I'm not alone in my
intense skepticism of this "colonies on Mars: coming soon!" nonsense. I'll
believe it when we've solved, or at least even begun to address the big
problems involved.

~~~
wtbob
The oceans are orders of magnitude more hospitable to mankind & human life
than is Mars, and yet we have, to my knowledge, absolutely no undersea
colonies. The idea that we'll colonise Mars before we colonise the oceans (a
full three-quarters of the globe) is, simply, _insane_.

~~~
Axsuul
Supply & demand. There's just more people who want to colonize mars. if you're
going to make the argument of living underwater, then you might as well live
in the desert where it's probably even easier. Just because something is
easier doesn't mean you should do it.

~~~
yongjik
> There's just more people who want to colonize mars.

Completing the circle of comments, this is exactly what this SV adage warns
against: Don't trust customers promising to buy something once it is built,
because they may not.

The "demand" on Mars colonization is essentially unproven.

------
samysaadi
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.

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..

~~~
a13n
Which is why most people shouldn't found companies straight out of college,
they should join organizations with impactful missions that align with their
goals.

~~~
WalterSear
Except those won't teach them what starting companies with small impactful
goals would. Joining something large (larger than you could start) is the
opposite.

------
partycoder
SF is the hot potato economy.

Just take a company, hire lots of people that fit into the western "strategic
genius" 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's time to actually make revenue, sell it really expensively.

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.

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.

------
anindha
Nearly all big companies started as small companies solving more trivial
problems.

Facebook was a way to find people you met at parties at Harvard.

Apple was a company that made computers for hobbyists.

The idea is that you learn to become a good entrepreneur solving the smaller
problems.

------
danblick
Just something to think about: everyone who gives advice has their own goals.
Sometimes those goals align with yours and sometimes they don't. The economics
of VC make it so that they need their companies to be _big_ successes or not
succeed at all (Thiel's "Zero to One" talks about the power law distribution
of VC returns on investment). So it makes sense for a VC to give "take huge
risks" as advice. That may be good advice, or it may not be, but if advice is
in someone's economic interest you should probably take that into account...

For that matter "Zero to One" also argues that people should aim high and do
important things.

------
Manishearth
> 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?

I'm kinda apprehensive of what would happen if SV got a hold of these problems
and tried to "solve" them.

~~~
toomuchtodo
You get the US Digital Service; well intentioned tech professionals slamming
on the accelerator pedal of bad policy using tech. Example: healthcare.gov
works well now, but the ACA is falling apart financially due to being
untenable in its current form.

The solution is not startups. The solution is people organizing for better
government policy (single payer healthcare, etc).

Full disclosure: I interviewed with the USDS but declined the job offer.

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

~~~
fjdhcjjenxncnd
If our economic system as we know it is no longer capable of delivering
innovation, then something is seriously wrong and we should be reevaluating
why we are still using that system.

~~~
oldmanjay
Has anyone actually made a serious case that innovation has stopped? The
closest I've ever seen are people asserting that things they feel are obvious
in retrospect aren't innovations, but that's just a silly bias.

~~~
internaut
Stopped no. Stagnated, yes.

I've made at least a dozen posts explaining the Stagnation Hypothesis, there's
a long list of people in Silicon Valley who take it seriously. The basic idea
is that since '73 the rate of change has slowed down. This excludes
computation of course. It is an explanation for present day economic stresses
in the West that I believe hangs together far better than the mainstream
theories that get news headlines.

~~~
JBlue42
What happened in 1973 to cause this to kickoff?

~~~
internaut
I suspect two connected factors.

The first is economic. Look at this graph:

[http://www.prep-blog.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/oil-
pric...](http://www.prep-blog.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/oil-
prices-01.gif)

We are paying exponentially more for energy than our grandparents even when
the prices plateau.

That acts as a halter on the whole economy because clever young men and women
can't get their gig together and do something different to their parents.

Anecdotally I know I'm poorer than my parents, despite achieving things they
never did such as successful stock market investing, elite university and
winning science prizes. The truth is that if I worked a min wage job from 16
to my present age I'd be rather more well off. This realization is going to
occur to more people over time, which means we're going backward. Remember
that former civilizations have gone from mostly literate to mostly illiterate,
and this is how it happens. It is a sort of creeping thing. It does not get
headlines except incidentally as the symptoms develop.

The second is cultural. It is worth taking seriously but also with a grain of
salt at the same time.

This harder to prove empirically but society in the West went under a change
around the time of the oil shocks. Today this is change is represented as
_progress_ when it may be sign of the opposite. It is political dysfunction
caused by wrongheaded cultural ideals. After all, if you have the wrong idea
and there is no feedback telling you you're wrong, it takes a while for the
consequences to catch up.

This concern with battery technology (very poor results) and renewable
technology (mixed results) while completely ignoring the source of energy
(fusion and fission). Very curious.

This concern with the evils of colonization in Africa, but a complete neglect
of the stagnation it sank into after the colonizers left it. The richest
states are now failed states on any objective metric but this is not
acknowledged. Curious and curiousness.

This concern with this nebulous outside threat of 'terror' while our
infrastructure is crumbling. Roads with potholes, poisoned water, falling
bridges. Curious and curiouser!

These are all classic signs of a civilization in decline. Bemoaning the past
wrongs while ignoring present problems while the barbarians sneak around the
peripheral as they sense weakness. Ignoring reports from the outlaying
provinces. It is just classical. The Roman empire had a lot of high technology
just before the lights went out. Not many people realize that.

There is a list of people in Silicon Valley as long as your arm, in fact it
might be most of the people who own or run the corporations and institutes
believe in some version of this. If you're interested in finding out more from
their perspective I'll provide a list of sources.

I know very well the newspapers don't believe in this. But journalists have
short attention spans. I know that most of the middle class believe we're
'progressing', but they take their opinions from opinion forming organs. They
all think the same things and are synchronized by mass media. The Internet of
course has shaken this up, or I wouldn't have the views I hold today.

Ask those people to name a single technology outside of computing in the past
30-40 years. I repeat: outside of computation. Electronics, AI, robotics are
out.

They exist, but it's not very convincing because most of them have not had
serious qualitative and quantitative effects. I like that solar has improved
in performance and price, yet my island nation imports 98% of its electricity
from a power with nuclear stations. It claims by the way, to be a nuclear-free
zone. It is a curious tying together of the economical and culture failings.

~~~
JBlue42
Thanks for the reply.

I know that in the 70s (I was born in 83 so only know from history) the oil
crisis occurred but I've never really grasped the that one moment in time (vs
any of the other tumultuous ones in the 20th century) has led to economic
issues of today. I'm guessing Nixon's visit to China, opening up that economic
gateway, and other movements of that time led to globalization and lot of
issues we're coping with now. Usually it's the chart for wage stagnation that
befuddles me most about those years - why did that start then?

Questioning out loud here but curious for any sources/reading.

~~~
internaut
> Questioning out loud here but curious for any sources/reading.

Sure. I'll practically throw the book at you.

An essay to read on the subject by Neal Stephenson, the author of The Diamond
Age and Snowcrash.

[http://www.worldpolicy.org/journal/fall2011/innovation-
starv...](http://www.worldpolicy.org/journal/fall2011/innovation-starvation)

Startup founder and venture capitalist Peter Thiel on stagnation:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NMpmfaE9bII](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NMpmfaE9bII)

Put your thinking hat on stuff and it just gets 120 views which is horrible.
Of all the things I'm posting this is the one you really need to pay attention
to.

Tyler Cowen, economist, well known marginalrevolution blog:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TIHGOo7OC8c](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TIHGOo7OC8c)

Another economist Robert Gordon has made this subject his life's work, it's a
monster of a book if you want to dive deeply:

The Rise and Fall of American Growth

[http://press.princeton.edu/titles/10544.html](http://press.princeton.edu/titles/10544.html)

Bill Gate's review: [http://qz.com/742686/bill-gates-recommends-this-
economics-bo...](http://qz.com/742686/bill-gates-recommends-this-economics-
book-so-long-as-you-skip-the-last-two-chapters/)

I believe Elon Musk (who started Paypal with Thiel) started SpaceX and
Teslamotors partly because he agrees with the hypothesis and thinks it quite
likely. If you think of it the last visit to the moon took place half a
century ago and there hadn't been a new motor company in America since '56.

~~~
JBlue42
Excellent. Thanks!

------
KirinDave
One nitpick I have about this: the peninsula tech scene is huge. It leads in
all sorts of places outside of what you'll read about on tech crunch. SSF is a
massive hub of Biotech (as is the rapidly expanding UCSF-centered campus in
Mission Bay).

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's where we can recruit the
top talent away from people bored on working on Adtech.

There are LOTS of great places to work, not just in the Peninsula & Valley of
California but all over the country. SF is just nice because it'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.

~~~
arcanus
Good point, but I'll note that many cities have technology companies that just
don't get the press and hype you see for VC backed software companies in SF.

There aren't that many articles about biotechnology in Boston, for instance.

The software paradigm has captured a great deal of mindshare.

~~~
astrodust
Oh, don't worry, in twenty years we'll all be talking about the Good Old Days
when computer tech got respect and money, not like all those biotech firms
with their trillions in funding and ridiculously hyped valuations.

Genetic engineers will be the new software engineers and software engineers
will be the new plumbers.

~~~
sidlls
Plumbers can do significantly better than software engineers even today. We
are paid relatively poorly for the economic value the companies we work for
receive from our labor.

------
teuobk
Societal problems are not necessarily business opportunities.

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 "solving" the current
trendy non-problem.

------
grondilu
> And we can all name a lot of things that are broken: healthcare, education,
> homelessness and poverty, food waste, climate change...

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're not happy with public ones,
they're neither homeless nor likely to become so (by hypothesis : they're
successful), and they're not poor.

So basically, the subjects that are mentioned are really problems only for
people who have a high sense of altruism.

Why are people not as altruistic as the author? I don't know, but it's
probably just a fact.

~~~
HillaryBriss
healthcare is really difficult to fix because of laws that get in the way. how
can an app or a website change, say, FDA regulations, physician licensing
rules, and the insurance rate approval boards?

do other countries and health care markets have lower costs and better results
because they have better websites, apps, data sets and machine learning
algorithms?

------
Xcelerate
An important point that I think is missing is that solving small, "useless"
problems is a good way to get enough money to start solving big, "impactful"
problems. Elon Musk didn't just start SpaceX out of the blue; he used his
profits from Zip2 and PayPal to fund his more grandiose ideas.

~~~
floatrock
I don't disagree. A while back I met a founder of a respectively successful
startup who was pulling an Elon and was saying he hopes to cash out so he can
follow his true passion and start a space rocket engine company that will
provide infrastructure for the beyond-satellite-orbit space journeys.

I think the problem is this guy is the only person I've met who describes his
current venture as a stepping stone towards a grander vision. Most people just
see the dollar signs right in front of them.

------
objectiveariel
Strong, much-needed words here:

"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…"

Damn right. Those are real problems.

But then the author praises Elon Musk for sending people to Mars. For
prioritising space exploration over alleviating famine, poverty, illiteracy,
whatnot.

The author's utter inability and unwillingness to distinguish between
frivolous and meaningful is _precisely_ the problem he's denouncing.

~~~
jvandonsel
Well, one could argue that spreading humans outside this single planet is a
requirement for long-term survival of the species, and thus as important or
more important than those other causes you mention.

I don't personally subscribe to this belief, but many people do.

~~~
drakonandor
The primary obstacle of the "real problems" mentioned is people.

For example, consider that:

Sometimes people don't want to be helped (see: many homeless)

Sometimes leaders don't want their people to be helped, because they gain from
keeping them down (see: African warlords / government leaders embezzling aid)

When faced with SOCIAL problems like these, it's no wonder that someone of a
'hacker' mindset like Elon instead prefers to devote his time to solving
problems which instead have technological roadblocks (well, maybe not entirely
applicable in the case of Tesla or SolarCity).

------
mailarchis
Elon Musk'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.

Sometimes, its all right to work on smaller problems until you are ready for
the bigger ones.

------
woah
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.

~~~
epistasis
Corner grocery stores don't fluff the press with stories about changing the
world and grand visions.

~~~
sardonicbryan
Are soup kitchens assholes because Daniel Patterson and Roy Choi are making a
big deal about "changing the world" through Locol?

------
pascalxus
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's not many innovative companies going after
the trillion dollar housing market.

~~~
astrodust
Not everything can be _solved_ with technology, but many if not most things
can be _improved_ with it.

It's important to be specific here that "technology" does not necessarily mean
an app, or code, or even computers. It means taking advantage of the rich
ecosystem of products, services, and talent at our disposal today and
improving something.

"Disruption" should be a positive change: Removing the old and replacing it
with something new that's better in every respect.

Sadly "disrupting" companies often replace the old with some new thing that's
not as good, but is more convenient, or is exactly the same just minus the
middle man. That's not innovation, that's just optimization.

------
fjdhcjjenxncnd
And this is precisely why I'm a mechanical engineer instead of a web
developer, despite being very very good at the latter.

~~~
woah
What are you engineering right now?

~~~
fjdhcjjenxncnd
My work is a bit meta at the moment. I'm making software that can take part
designs and optimize their physical shape for better performance.

So the end result is more fuel efficient cars, faster planes, etc.

~~~
angersock
Oh, so you're _optimizing_ and not _innovating_.

~~~
fjdhcjjenxncnd
Actually no. I'm making the software that did not previously exist. Others
down the road can then use it to produce better performing products.

Passive aggressive word games aside, you really can't compare "reducing the
global need for oil" to "snapchat for cats".

~~~
user5994461
> Passive aggressive word games aside, you really can't compare "reducing the
> global need for oil" to "snapchat for cats".

Actually. By reducing the consumption of oil, it becomes cheaper to travel and
people will travel more... increasing the consumption of oil.

Game word in point: You might be having the opposing effect of what you think
:D

~~~
fulafel
It's known that we can't dig up and burning all profitably extractable
hydrocarbons, if we want to avoid the worst case scenarios of global warming.
See eg.
[https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/sep/27/fracki...](https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/sep/27/fracking-
digging-drilling-paris-agreement-fossil-fuels)

------
bootload
_" Find a problem you really _care* about solving and pursue that. Even if the
likelihood of success is slim, put your head down and go."*

I'm interested in startup idea patterns, _Care_ isn't one I've seen or heard
before. Are there any examples of startups using this pattern and succeeding?

~~~
simplemath
What's your definition of success?

~~~
bootload
_" success"_

Not dying.

------
derricgilling
Startups are not easy and there is only so much bandwidth. Many startups ideas
can be visionary since it'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's going forward? There can be
both technical and business innovation. Uber (and especially it'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't have a license or reducing drunk driving. Vision isn't
something that is built and realized on day one but rather grows organically
over time.

~~~
collyw
>but now Uber solves real problems such as mobilizing senior citizens that
don't have a license or reducing drunk driving.

Taxis existed before Uber.

~~~
aianus
Taxis are 2.5x to 4x (if you pool) more expensive than Uber where I live.

Uber definitely changed the economics of dropping in to visit your grandkids
or using a DD vs driving drunk vs ride sharing.

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

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woodandsteel
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.

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jwatte
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.

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jvandonsel
Relevant article on YC and startup culture in last month's New Yorker:
[http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/10/10/sam-altmans-
man...](http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/10/10/sam-altmans-manifest-
destiny)

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

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

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aarao
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 "visionary" by definition of the premium over current earnings. People may
be "realizing their potential" 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 "dumb" companies may do that tomorrow.
That's what people putting their time and money on the line believe, at least.

