

Battle of the Swans: Why Is Nobody Talking About Solving Tough Problems? - npguy

As long as early foodchain players (YC etc) focus on the next AirBnB and DropBox, the world would get AirBnBs and DropBoxs. Nothing against that - they are wonderful profitable entities (and great efforts from the teams), but not the next Google.&#60;p&#62;Why Is Nobody Talking About Solving Tough, Interesting Problems?
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lingxiao
By 'tough problem', do you mean something that requires a lot of 'breakthrough
new science'? And or has a huge impact on the world? As far as the former
goes, how technical a company is may change throughout its lifetime. For
example, at its inception, Google's algorithm was definitely an improvement
over what Yahoo did, but didn't exactly not come out of the blue ( the story
doesn't really bear repeating here). I think as these companies grow, the need
to improve their service and just its sheer size imposes high demand for
developing 'new stuff'. So maybe a lot of companies that are deemed 'trivial'
today just havn't grown to the point where they need to solve some 'tough
technical problems.'

A second note about just the ability to tackle hard problems. I think there's
a deeper cycle going on here: discoveries in the traditional sciences that
fundamentally change how we see the world, and manipulate more parts of it.
Most of the tech advancement in the 20th century ( in the field of computers
anyways ) can be traced to new ideas in physics developed in the early 20th
century. So I hypothesize that we are a in a lull period where 'nobody' has
figured out how to apply what we know about the world in drastically different
ways. ( I don't read enough literature to say that no one in the last x
decades has made discoveries as significant as those made in the few decades
prior to that )

As far as impact on the world goes, sometimes at a company's inception, it's
not so obvious that it'll change the (1st) world in significant ways. A pretty
computer for the select few who knows what a computer is? A website to buy old
books? which by the way looked like this:

[http://library.corporate-
ir.net/library/17/176/176060/mediai...](http://library.corporate-
ir.net/library/17/176/176060/mediaitems/132/first_gateway_page.jpg)

So I think when a company has a potential to shift the world into a different
( yet to be conceived ) state, then it is hard to measure its significance by
standards of our world.

To bring the ramble to its final stretch, I think the bar to start a company
nowadays is a lot lower. And despite how worldly a late teens early 20s person
may be, if (s)he had the time and resource to learn programming (or some other
discipline), then (s)he probably spend his/her entire life in school, and the
problems (s)he experienced, though significant in the context of his/her life
thus far, may appear 'trivial' to the greater world at large. So the space of
problems (s)he is motivated to solve is just far smaller than an older dude.

And with that I finally shut up.

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thelongrun
You should read Paul Graham's essay 'Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas'
<http://www.paulgraham.com/ambitious.html>

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npguy
Thanks for the link. I had read that before, very good post.

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lsiebert
Well, for one, many really tough interesting problems lack a clear way to
monetize the solution.

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APuschilov
I couldn't agree more: It's either no clear way to monetize or very hard to no
access, such as the healthcare market. In healthcare everybody agrees that it
is "ripe" for disruption and that to do well you need to do good. But there's
just no access to it, with all the bureaucracy. This implies that investment
need is high and iteration periods are long. (Note: I'm from Germany. But
while the US system is much more open than over here, it also super tough in
the US to launch a "meaningful" (read: not a fitness/recreational) healthcare
business.)

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yrashk
They are talking, they are just not that loud... or may be you're "listening"
in a wrong place.

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true_religion
Can you give me an example of a tough, interesting problem?

