
Is Silicon Valley only interested in the problems of twentysomethings? - sethbannon
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/05/27/is-silicon-valley-only-interested-in-the-problems-of-twentysomethings/
======
ritchiea
The title is deceptive because shortly after asking that question in the
article, the author comes to a resounding "no" and goes on to talk about why
it is our impression that SV only works on the problems of 20-somethings. The
core of the author's comment comes at the end:

"Imagine how odd it would be to read an article saying that the people who
work for manufacturing firms are really just out to make money, or that they
don’t seem interested enough in current events. It is only because Silicon
Valley has done such an extraordinary job branding itself that articles about
their social conscience, or lack thereof, seem completely reasonable. But the
tech sector is, on the whole, much more like other sectors of the economy than
it likes to believe, or than it likes anyone else to believe."

~~~
seanlinehan
Here is a strategy that I have heard repeated a few times: When you see a
rhetorical question in the title of a news article, the answer is no. The
answer is always no. The article may say maybe. But the answer is no. Just
like that you've saved yourself a few minutes.

~~~
logn
I've come to count on another thing too: someone on HN comments will always
point out the answer is 'no' and then point out this generality, and then
you'll often have a comment like mine point this out. :)

~~~
moron4hire
omg, I can create noisy posts, too.

------
destraynor
That's not true, every time a founder becomes a parent they build shitty
solutions to all those problems too :)

But seriously this whole angle frustrates me.

Who decided that Silicon Valley had to be held over hot coals for building
software companies that solve problems and make money. Why does it always read
like "they alone inherited the problems of the universe, and are choosing to
build dickpic apps instead".

Everywhere in the world there are smart people working on dumb things. In SV
there's lots more smart people, but the percentage doesn't change. Also some
things look dumb but are actually genius in hindsight, so it's easy to
criticise these as problems for twentysomethings today, but fast forward a
decade and they're 'problems for the masses'

~~~
mhurron
> Who decided that Silicon Valley had to be held over hot coals for building
> software companies that solve problems and make money.

It would appear that Silicon Valley did. Every mundane piece of software is
going to 'change the world.' People are just waiting for that to happen.

~~~
mjn
A recent example of that: Google's Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen just wrote a
new-agey sort of book explicitly taking that "we're here to change the world"
angle.

They _could've_ written a different book, more like one Warren Buffet might
write, about the business of software and online services, and running a
profitable company in the industry. But they don't appear to consider that to
be the bar for success.

~~~
tensor
At least some of Google's work has the possibility of changing the world: AI.
Between self driving cars, natural interface methods, and data understanding,
the future looks interesting.

On the other hand, yet another social network, photoshop filter app, todo list
app, instant messaging app, advertising app, these are not going to change the
world, though often heralded as such.

~~~
NegativeK
Google's social network and list of apps are an attempt to stay relevant so
they can change the world.

Doing expensive R&D without a money maker generally requires government help.
I don't think Google wants to go that route.

------
rverghes
It's hard to design and create software for subjects you don't know much
about. It's not really a surprise that people create software for their own
lives.

A lot of open source is focused on programming languages, libraries and things
to help you code. It's what most open source people know, and thus what they
create.

I wonder if it would have been better for CS to have been only offered as a
minor or double-major to another field of study, at least at the Bachelor
level. We would have fewer pure CS people, but a lot more people with training
in another domain.

~~~
qzxt
I second this! or something similar, at least. Having not really gone to
college, myself, I was lucky enough to have had so many varied life
experiences and interests before I took up tech; so when talking to my
colleagues who are cs-equipped, I find their methodology is often very CS
oriented, and focused more on the tech than on the problem. I think that's why
"design" has become such a big fad these days - it's almost as if we just
figured out that people buy products, not tech.

That being said, after speaking with quite a few tech-inclined people, I feel
they would be a lot more comfortable with less technically inclined subjects
if they were stripped of the general cultural pretensions that they come with.
There is a very strong resistance to "acculturation" among techies, as it is
usually seen - rightly, for the most part - as a mechanism of enforcing a
"cool kids' club", so to speak, rather than an actual venue for intellectual
exploration.

I think, that as techies, we are in a unique situation, as far as intellectual
development is concerned. The vast majority of the population can't appreciate
technical phenomena because it is culturally viewed as "too hard" or "robotic"
or "blah blah, boring". We, OTOH, actively refuse to engage with humanistic
pursuits, but not out of any perceived difficulty so much as discomfort with
the pretensions that come with "cultured society". If effort can be made to
induct some history and philosophy, and heck, maybe even theology into the the
techie culture, we could have the best of both worlds and possibly even have
some truly fresh ideas put out.

In short, it's easier to teach a physicist to write essays than it is to teach
a poet Diff Eq

~~~
mc-lovin
You characterize the situation very well.

It reminds me of the parody of the academic left in sci fi such as the novels
of Neal Stephenson and Vernor Vinge. And the parodies of religion and
philosophy are even worse.

It certainly came as a shock to me to realize that much of academia is
simultaneously incoherent and pretentious, and full of deep insights.

------
kyllo
If so, it's probably only because young adults are more likely to use the
internet and therefore have problems that can be solved by the internet.

The internet can't really fix your problems if you don't use it in the first
place. Or maybe it could, but you will never know better.

~~~
davebindy
Twenty years ago, this might have been true. I don't think it is today.

I'm 60 years old, and while I'm somewhat unusual in that computers and tech
have been part of my life, both personally and professionally, for half my
life, I would have to think pretty hard to come up with someone in my circle
of friends and relatives in the 50-80 age range who doesn't use the Internet.
My 80 year old aunt has a desktop, an iPad and an iPhone. My 81 year old
landlady spends an average of 4 hours a day online. Just examples.

We could debate their "expertise" in using the Web or software/apps in
general. On the whole, given the kinds of questions I end up fielding from
them and others, it isn't particularly high. But then again, that may actually
be the fault of the software itself, much of which is difficult for someone
for whom tech is not an abiding interest to understand. I spent 10 years
reviewing software full-time, and it was often a struggle for me to forget
what _I_ knew and judge it from the standpoint of the average Joe.

At any rate, I think it's a canard to say that older adults (or even senior
citizens, since I guess I am one now) don't use the Internet. They may not use
it the way someone younger does, but that doesn't mean they don't use it.

~~~
kyllo
You're probably right. But SV's startup culture is pretty unfriendly to 50-80
year old enployees with family and financial obligations and less risk
tolerance.

I suppose SV companies are going to tend to solve young adult problems because
they are composed of young adults. It's what they know.

~~~
davebindy
Your description of SV startup culture isn't unique - it seems to be pretty
much SOP for virtually any company these days. Lose your job after 50 and
finding an equivalent position can be daunting.

>I suppose SV companies are going to tend to solve young adult problems
because they are composed of young adults. It's what they know.

It's not only what they know, it's what they think is _cool_ as well. And
that's okay - I think a lot of the software I look at today is cool, too. But
is it useful to me? Nope.

I'm no student of business, but it does seem to me that historically an awful
lot of companies have been started by young people who saw a market or niche
that needed to be filled, and filled it. How hard would it be for a start-up
(or existing tech company) to get a couple of panels of 50-80 year olds
together and find out what _they'd_ find useful, and then produce it? You can
make the argument that 20-somethings have more disposable income, but I doubt
a couple dollar smartphone app or ten buck piece of desktop software is going
to break any senior citizen's budget.

~~~
johnjlocke
It sounds like there's actually a few untapped markets out there that no one
is even thinking about. That's a shame.

------
joejohnson
"[Packer]’s clearly onto something in the way the experience of continuously
solving seemingly insoluble technical problems can lead the technocracy to
dismiss the challenges of actual societies or, worse, decide they’re simply
above them."

This rings true for a number of issues in San Francisco. Let's underfund our
public transportation and make taxis inefficient and hard to find -- we'll let
the free market solve those problems! Corporate shuttles and a thousand taxi
hailing apps will make up the difference.

Except they don't. I can't take a corporate shuttle to buy groceries or go out
at night, and the cab situation in San Francisco is embarrassing. How do
people here think they're living in the future when they can't even run basic
infrastructure?

You can order food or hail a cab with your phone in any city. I only know of
one city where idiots who will tell you this is revolutionary.

~~~
rogerclark
i just looked at your comments on a hunch and i was right: most of your
comments have to do with shitting on san francisco. cool hobby

------
spullara
I think this is a by product of 20 somethings being the most sought after
group by advertisers combined with them being the most likely to try new
things without a lifetime of bias towards the status quo.

------
tyre
The best part of Silicon Valley is brilliant people solving hard problems. In
the beginning, there were a lot of talented, bright you people with not a lot
of business sense. And it showed in their draw towards 'sexy' problems. But,
as that space got incredibly crowded and, to a large degree, 'solved', people
moved on.

I am a 20-something and was drawn to Silicon Valley to work on payroll
specifically because I saw it as a sign that SV was 'growing up.' Not every
company is working on social-local-mobile-freemium-gaming, and that is
incredibly refreshing.

------
politician
Well, it's probably harder to meaningfully shift the way older consumers live
in general. Between regulations and routine, business has an increasingly
difficult time selling to us as we age. For all the dollars in pharma, grandma
still won't take her pills and grandpa won't get rid of that old beater. Etc.

~~~
doctorpangloss
There's an article on HN right now about setting up a MacBook for grandma. And
everyone talks about how great an iPad has been for the elderly.

I don't think they're stubborn, they're just different. I also don't think
they're cheap either, because an iPad (let alone a MacBook) is still a
consumer electronic luxury.

------
coldtea
A similar question I wanted to ask: "Who are all this skaters, hip hop singers
wannabees, surfers, brooming indie artists" and such BS that 99% of ads,
videos and startup media material seems to target to?

I've been all around the US (literally: the 48 states), and those are like 1%
of the youth population, if that.

------
DeusExMachina
I think that the assumption of the New Yorker that Airbnb is only for
twentysomethings is not correct (I can't speak about Uber).

I'm 33 years old and living in Europe. Between my passions there is dancing
tango. This actually involves a lot of traveling to international festivals
where to meet and dance different people. There are many of these events and
many dancers are really dedicated, traveling around a lot, sometimes almost
every weekend. In this situation it gets really helpful to travel on a budget,
even if there are not many people in their 20s in the community. As a result
Airbnb is getting the de facto choice for the community of the 30-40 years old
international traveling dancers.

------
ChikkaChiChi
What is more frustrating to me is that so much of the startup focus is in
Silicon Valley and ascertaining viability for these disruptive service is
wholly dependent on the SV set's adoption rate.

Some of these businesses should spend more time planning the logistical and
strategic side of rolling out satellites to other markets (maybe even as a
franchise model) to see if uptake rates change based on cost off living,
regional preference, different geographical factors, etc.

What plays in tech saavy SV, the NW, New York, and Austin might be different
than in Tampa, Pittsburgh, St. Paul, and Phoenix.

Does anyone agree?

------
jiggy2011
Today's 20 somethings are tomorrows 30 and 40 somethings. Get them hooked
young and you can milk them for a lifetime.

It's probably easier to persuade a 20 something to try something new. I know
middle aged people who choose smartphones by waiting for their kids to each
buy different ones and then choosing one of these for themselves.

------
ChuckMcM
Its useful for the non-tech press to point out that no, we're not only solving
problems for young people with more disposable income than they know what to
do with. It does suggest that there is a very good business to be had 10 - 15
years from now as these people mature and now _do_ need to do something with
that income but that is a different article :-)

One wave of things I'm looking for (and it's seems to be foreshadowed with
things like the maker movement) is spontaneous manufacturing. Places where you
need something built and a bunch of people, using tools in their garage or
workshop, contribute parts where a co-ordinator assembles into widgets.

------
eli_gottlieb
Speaking for myself, I can perceive a few problems with the tech industry: one
more (but not entirely) individual, one more (but not entirely) cultural, and
one more (but not entirely) legal/economic.

The cultural one is simply that Silicon Valley and the tech sector in general
currently constitute one of the last remaining vestiges of the upper-middle
class and the petite bourgeoisie in an otherwise recessionary and degrading
Western society. Others refer to us occasionally as the "Tech Sector Master
Race". Forgive the 4chan slang, but that _is_ how we come across sometimes: as
a little nerdy subculture that smugly walks through a world we don't quite
belong to, demanding coffee and consumer electronics and thinking about our
investment accounts while other people think about making rent. And the worse
the rest of society gets, the worse this effect will become. See below.

The individual one is that, frankly, I have too easy a time contenting myself
with my gadgetry to see wide-open markets, and when I do see an idea, I expect
the corporate behemoths to colonize it first. An undergrad here at Technion
once came and talked to me about starting a groceries-delivery service here in
Israel. I immediately thought of Stop&Shop's Peapod, before realizing we don't
have anything like that here. Then my next thought was, "What, people can't be
bothered to go to the market?" It's easy to overlook opportunities to solve
others' pain points just because _you personally_ don't have a lot of pain
points (which ties right back in to techies being so massively fortunate!).

The legal/economic one is that productizing technology has gotten _very hard_.
I'm always glad to see more hardware start-ups and such, but people often
hesitate to commit money to unknown companies. Then software is more and more
functionally impossible to sell in a shrink-wrapped box as a product (due to
piracy and upgrades), people hate advertisements, non-corporate users hate
paying subscription fees for software because they think they bought their
copy, and people are still demanding ever more quality for fixed or shrinking
prices. Lastly, technology has gotten less and less "do it yourself" and more
and more "black box", pushing all kinds of things underground. Overall, the
path from tinkering to a product to a sale to tinkering again has gotten
longer, and that's what drives the endless rounds of "social-mobile-local Big
Data cat-picture analytics apps". And of course, this also goes right back to
large parts of society being unable to afford innovative luxury goods produced
by the tech sector. A game console that costs $400 now instead of $200 ten
years ago wouldn't be that much of a problem if the cost of living had stayed
the same or if wages had doubled (before inflation, even). They haven't.

So until we find some ways to fix this stuff, Silicon Valley is going to be
stuck catering to the one audience who will consistently buy into Silicon
Valley, that being Silicon Valley.

~~~
precisioncoder
Minor nitpick. Video game consoles and games are equal price or cheaper than
old ones when adjusted for inflation. Here are a couple articles I found to
support that. [http://www.g4tv.com/thefeed/blog/post/706637/video-game-
infl...](http://www.g4tv.com/thefeed/blog/post/706637/video-game-inflation-
the-price-of-a-console-part-one/) [http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2010/10/an-
inconvenient-truth-...](http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2010/10/an-inconvenient-
truth-game-prices-have-come-down-with-time/)

~~~
eli_gottlieb
Wow, thanks for letting me know. I hadn't realized that.

(Though admittedly, that makes the financial outlook of games companies _even
worse_.)

~~~
precisioncoder
Yeah it's one of those things that is really counterintuitive, probably
because we tend to underestimate inflation. I thought the opposite as well
until I ran across an article a little while back.

------
speeder
My startup was made to solve problems of older people that has children...

But maybe, like the article theorises in the start, because the person that
had the idea was in that group himself (my associate, and CEO of the company,
had the idea to make apps for children after not finding enough apps for his
own children and hearing comments from his similarly-aged friends about the
same subject).

------
allenu
I would say yes, it is biased towards twentysomethings because 1) they have
disposable income and more easily part with it, and 2) they are more likely to
create a tech solution (and surrounding business) to a problem they are
familiar with. Disclosure: I'm in my 30s but had similar wide-eyed dreams in
my 20s of creating some big piece of tech that would net me millions.

------
samfisher83
I think software tends to favor the young. In general the biggest companies in
tech were founded by younger people.

Google - Founded by 20 somethings Apple - Founded by 20 something Facebook -
Founder by 20 something Amazon - Founded by 20 something

So they solve problems for a younger generation.

~~~
mhurron
The problem with this is they are not run by 20-somethings now. If they were
working on 20-something problems because they were 20-somethings, why haven't
they moved on?

Also, I wouldn't categorize Amazon as solving problems for a younger
generation.

~~~
allenu
A lot of the problems these companies cover are interesting to everyone.
Search is interesting to everyone, maintaining a social network is interesting
to everyone, buying stuff online is interesting to everyone.

Cab-sharing is not interesting to everyone. Staying in strangers' homes
instead of a hotel isn't interesting to everyone. Taking photos of your meals
and sharing it with friends is not interesting to everyone.

------
alanh
Apologies for the self-promotion, but at NoRedInk, we are funded, have
traction, and are hiring while improving the _status quo_ of grammar
education.

------
LordHumungous
Silicon Valley is interested in finding solution to problems that make money,
just like every other industry.

~~~
johnjlocke
Silicon Valley is more similar to Wall Street than it cares to admit.

------
acchow
twentysomethings are interested in the problems of twentysomethings.

~~~
Fomite
One thing that seems to be lost between the article and the comments - it's
not just twentysomethings. It's twentysomethings "with cash on hand".

That adds a degree of self-indulgence to the description. It's not just
twentysomethings solving the problems of people their age, tackling the
questions of their generation, but solving the problems of (at least
culturally) affluent, employed tech workers with disposable income.

------
_pius
Betteridge's Law of Headlines applies.

~~~
asveikau
To disprove this all somebody needs to do is write a headline:

Is Betteridge's Law of Headlines correct?

------
yarrel
s/problems/money/

------
wittysense
The hypercompetitive culture makes SV a series of silos. We may be working
workstation-to-workstation, but just as you drive along the interstate, it's a
series of anonymous silos of farmers loosely affiliated, if that.

And any shoplifting guide worth its weight will tell you that those farmers
are screwing you over in at least 3 different ways via strict affiliations
with government and taxation, price gouging the market, and transportation
costs, along with manipulative garned relationships with the
GroceryStoreCartel(tm), all while you fancy the philosophical scenario of
whether they're interested in your problems.

You as a driver should move along, or learn the road.

The only response to "Does some large group X care about me?" is Hanlon's
Razor.

------
andyl
Most new companies fail, but not all. Apple and Google were founded by twenty-
somethings, and in the early days, nobody was certain what they would become.
The key is to keep trying stuff, even ideas that might seem unusual.

One group that displays much 'irritating self-regard' are east-coast pundits
who write on subjects they don't understand.

------
snambi
good point. most of the startups are working on trivial problems faced by
20somethings.

~~~
outericky
Startups tend to try to solve problems they are familiar with. So 20something
founders, are likely working on something 20somethings face.

