To me it reads as an eclectic mix of academic, governmental, business and technology opinions in the guise of startup ideas. Not that there's anything wrong with that... ycombinator is free to invest in the areas it cares about. But it is very isolated from my own cultural experience of what matters and makes a real difference in the world.
Could you elaborate?
- Managing relationships This is a hard thing to do especially for us on the spectrum. one of the most "obvious" things that the personal surveillance of the iphone / echo provide is the ability to get feedback on ourselves. I call this MOOP (Massive Open Online Psychology). I joke that my iPhone needs to be like the MS Paperclip "Paul, you seem to be about to start a fight with your wife. Can I help with that?" But there are huge areas where simple data can improve my own decision making - from personal finance, to how often or quickly i respond to people in my life (am i responding to ones i care about - can you measure that across email, facebook, slack phone calls, text and me just sitting in the living room talking to my kids? Then rank which ones i need to work on this day?
- parenting tightly related to the above is how i behave towards those most important to me. Simple data could be a good start - time spent, tone of voice, agreeing goals or sticking to them. Just make it easy for me to review the day and make more considered decisions.
- Workplace helper so the most likely place to see the above technology is in the corporate workplace. the quality of the manager is a major component in quality of work output. So things that suggest ways to improve a managers relationship with their workers is likely to win a huge amount of value. and it's not just "corporate training". It could be a significant leveller - Weinstein was in a position of unaccountable power and an app won't help that, but most workplace abuse is more tractable.
- Home PA So my house has bad insulation in places - we should fix that, and thermal camera startups will be there. but light bulbs and tvs are power hungry so let's buy efficient ones. and now my room is frankly cluttered - use object recognition to identify them all and then show me where they can go or which ones i have to get rid of, and now get me recipes, arrange a dog walk this weekend with my sister in law and remind me i should get off four stops early to go for a run.
(OK, look. According to Rory Sutherland There are two ways to increase value - either make the Eurostar train run faster between London and Paris or have supermodels serve Moët for free so no one cares that it is slow. My startups are in the category of make life seem better. We are all dead in the long run)
Ultimately I want anti-marketing startups - that give me more deliberate choices in my life - options to choose better.
Many startups are 100% irrelevant there. Take huge poster children like Uber, for example: everyone has a car already, as it's basically mandatory. Or smaller startups, like Slice, for example. I live in NYC. I have lots of pizza options. I love pizza. In my hometown, there are two pizza places. You don't really need reviews, you order from one, and if you don't like it, well, you have the other one.
Now, that's not to say that there are zero startups that do; not that Facebook or Twitter are exactly "startups" today, but when they were, they still had a big impact. But a lot of startups are focused on "upper middle class people who live in population centers". That's a lot of people, but it also leaves a lot of people out.
https://www.citylab.com/equity/2012/03/us-urban-population-w...
80% of the population lives in urban areas, and this fraction is increasing, so it's unsurprising that most companies target them.
But, I think that the issue is just that startups, by their nature, aren't a good fit to less dense environments. If the focus is to grow, grow, grow, I imagine that the density of major population centers helps that significantly.
Granted, they have a couple ideas on the list that would help:
- One Million Jobs
- Transportation & Housing (I have a dream that the combo of self-driving ai and low earth orbit satellite internet will bring a resurgence of rural opportunities)
- Diversity (I'm reading this generously on the hope that more companies will consider using remote work to bring in non-urban perspectives)
- Future of Work
- Underserved Communities (they're probably not thinking of rural communities here, but they should)
> I think that the issue is just that startups, by their nature, aren't a good fit to less dense environments.
That's not inherently a value judgement, but also, many people don't want to see the long tail get ignored either.
This is a great way to look at it. It's not that startups not being more as useful to rural people is bad, per-se. It's just that it'd be nice if there were some alternative set of new, innovative businesses that are good for them.
Though, I'm not really sure what a business like that looks like.
I'd invert what you'd say; it's true of most businesses that are that size, or are trying to get to that size. The two pizza shops in my town are happy to be an individual shop, and a regional chain. They're not getting bigger than that. Same with most of the businesses there, though many of them have died out as the bigger stores moved in within an hour's drive.
Startups explicitly aren't happy being a mom and pop shop, otherwise, they wouldn't be startups.
I have to say, I absolutely abhor when anyone tries to say that one part of the country is more "real world" than any other part.
People matter. Community matters. Relationships matter. Family matters. Helping people who ask for help matters. Small businesses that provide a livelihood in the context of relationships matters. My neighbors, my street condition, my local stores matter. Work and paychecks matter. I guess one way to say it may be things that don't scale matter.
Suffering is normal. Health problems stink. I love when medicine can help people. Most health problems seem to be difficult and medicine sometimes can help, but sometimes can't.
Putting people on the moon matters. Putting a tesla in space doesn't matter. Fortune 500 companies don't matter. The stock market doesn't matter. Fake videos don't matter.
More concretely on the list, taking "Education" as an example: "Scalable solutions in these areas should now be doable thanks to advances in brain science and technologies such as smart home devices, wearables, and mobile." My immediate thought: No way tech helps more than 3%. Education is "solved", just _very_ difficult to do. Quality families with quality teachers and a good professional support structure (esp for disabilities etc...).
Overall as I looked at ycombinators list, Job's quote comes to mind:
"The problem is I’m older now, I’m 40 years old, and this stuff doesn’t change the world. It really doesn’t.
That’s going to break people’s hearts.
I’m sorry, it’s true. Having children really changes your view on these things. We’re born, we live for a brief instant, and we die. It’s been happening for a long time. Technology is not changing it much – if at all."
> Putting people on the moon matters. Putting a tesla in space doesn't matter.
Wait, what? The USA didn't just launch people to the moon in one go. They also hauled up hunks of useless metal first. It's a step. SpaceX is going to be colonizing Mars with new families and new biology and a new chapter in multi-planet life. Do you not think that matters?
> Fake videos don't matter.
Sure they do, especially at scale. We are currently witnessing the large-scale attempts at altering American's realities by forceful propaganda from foreign countries. I've been told by the moderators here not to call out any specific countries, but Americans and others are reading false text with false attribution to their rural neighbors and they are getting confused. This helped enable a culture of hate and racism that is rising in the US, and this is not a stable or okay thing. Fake video will accelerate that enormously if not combatted - this stuff really matters, especially if your focus in life is community, family, love, people, and real things of that nature.
Second-guessing a choice of test payload for a new, risky rocket design definitely doesn't matter.
Cheaper and better weather and communications satellites, that matters.