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Comment by steveklabnik | Hacker News Reader

Not your parent, but I come from a pretty rural area, which is what a lot of people would call the "real world." The people who live there certainly would.

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.

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> which is what a lot of people would call the "real world."

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.

I don't disagree. At the same time, the long tail is something startups claim to be good at, generally...

I moved back to the "real world" in the last 6 months and couldn't agree more.

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 don't disagree, what I see the parent doing is agreeing with this sentiment:

> 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.

> That's not inherently a value judgement

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.

Yup, that’s the trick! I don’t know either.

I think you somewhat hit on this when you mentioned Facebook and Twitter. It seems to me that any business that connects people in more rural areas with the masses is a potential winner (consider how rural areas grow quickly when they're connected directly by rail or an interstate). Maybe some sort of marketplace app or website that expands the reach of rural businesses; Etsy for the best mom and pop shops across the country?

"Not your parent, but I come from a pretty rural area, which is what a lot of people would call the "real world." The people who live there certainly would."

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.

Sure. That was the framing of the parent, so I kept it. I agree with you, personally.

Isn't that true of most businesses that aren't Facebook/Twitter/Walmart size? I agree with what you're saying, but it seems more applicable to the economy in general as opposed to just startups.

> the economy in general

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.

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