the world isn't some binary settlement where technology is either social messaging or von neumann probes.
no one knows to what extent these companies will help humanity. what if the kid who dreamed of building the next fusion reactor got in early with snapchat and cashes out to build his next company?
what if Uber evolves into an automated logostics transportation company, serving as Level 3/Cogent to Amazon's time warner cable.
the world and technology is complex. naivly dismissing "pretty people" for getting into tech is borderline laughable. now more than ever technology is important. more people and capital isn't only good, but straight up fucking inevitable.
so i will support companies who fund big ideas like theranos and clinkle along side these companies i find less than appealing for my personal everyday use.
I am not arrogant enough to predict the future or try and architect it. more people building things is probably good, so i will continue to support that.
edit: I just reread the article. This is the most elitist hipster fucking thing I have seen in a while.
> The whole point of the Valley VC culture is to empower founders to change the world in their first at-bat.
What fucking founder was successful on their first go around, with a venture that changed the entire world?
* Traf-O-Data wasn't a big household name, And didn't exactly change the world.[0]
* CL 9 was a novel idea, but the world would largely be the same place without it.[1]
* Zip2 was an online version of the yellow pages. A great way to index information, but not the "big idea" we would encourage founders to do now[2]
* Facebook changed the world and was built by an upper middle class white kid, who possibly wouldn't have moved forward without prompting from the Winkelvoss twins.
Should we discount it because:
* it is a social app?
* it was founded by someone who was upper middle class?
* it was backed by upper class non-technical interlopers?
What do we want to optimize as a society?
I hope people continue building great products. Let's recall that Peter Theil was "an upper middle class paty crasher" by this definition. I think he has added a lot of value to the world.
So let's try to be less elitist as fuck, step back from our naive assumption that we know exactly what the world needs (and if you believe this, run for president, the republicans could really use some organization), and recognize that despite what tech crunch says, people are working on big ideas. They are just harder.
There will be a lot more apps than scalable renewable energy companies, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't have both.
I agree with Jon, yes it is frustrating that these companies aren't huge scientific breakthroughs. I personally have made plenty of snarky critiques of them. However, I am starting to realize that facebook, dropbox, evernote and snapchat add a lot of value to society which is why a lot of fucking people use them. A lot of great companies use slack to collaborate. Facebook allows people to stay connected with the people they may not regularly see. Snapchat let's horny 18 year olds to see nude they may not have otherwise seen. Okay, not super sure how much we need snapchat, but people seem to like it, and that's fine. Etc. So, let people keep building whatever they want. As long as they keep building.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traf-O-Data [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CL_9 [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elon_Musk