Bread and Circuses: The State of Web App Startups
jolieodell.wordpress.com
jolieodell.wordpress.com
It's pretty easy to find ways to criticize this post. It's not particularly well written, it's not inspirational, and of course you can poke holes in any kind of argument this vague. But if you don't agree, I think it's worth it to stop and be honest with yourself about whether you really think it's complete bullshit, or if there is maybe a tinge of guilty defensiveness mixed in.
I'm not claiming that this article is anything close to the whole truth—after all, we can't make a difference if we can't make a living—but if there wasn't at least a seed of truth here then I don't think "changing the world" would be part of the standard entrepreneurial goals.
I half-joked about it with friends before, saying that people should only be allowed to do jobs that weren't "bread and circus" (to borrow a phrase) from 5-9, then after work hours could do what they pleased. Realistically though, this poster probably contributes to the bottom line of many bread and circus businesses. And so do I.
Today I bought a box of hot tamales (the candy) and a cherry coke - these are all bread and circus and only serve for my enjoyment. I ate a steak dinner on Saturday night - totally bread and circus, as I could get my nutritional value through better methods. The people who work to produce these things could be put to work doing something better, while the government provides a tasteless, odorless, white paste for all our nutritional value.
Some of the most enjoyable parts of life tend to be surrounded by bread and circus. But if they were never invented in the first place, I guess I wouldn't know what I was missing.
Now, for the sake of debate, let's agree there are lots of fluff start-ups. But does that mean there are fewer non-fluff start-ups? I don't think so. It's a false dichotomy. Just because you have more Zynga-like companies does not mean you don't have more start-ups today than a decade ago going after cancer.
This is the most common flaw I find in arguments related to this.
Obviously not the case.
The fixed number could be going up for both. At once, there could be more web start-ups and so-called serious start-ups than previous years.
I agree, I was just stating what "zero-sum thinking is".
Let me quote the author again:
They’re creating "bread and circuses" ... apps that are wildly popular, infinitely entertaining, and exactly what people want.
The only problem is that they don’t really do anybody any good. They’re not doing what technology is intended to do: Solve problems.
I'm ringing the bell on Silicon Valley. It's days are not up, but they're numbered. Because it doesn't understand this, it will begin its slow descent to become part of Hollywood. And real innovation will happen elsewhere.
Also I would guess that the prominence of silly start-ups that are based on "game mechanics, addiction, self-reference, and narcissism" is made to appear larger because these sorts of companies need large numbers of people to be aware of them. Start-ups that create products that are not used by the general public probably will not seek publicity and thus you are less likely to read about them on tech crunch.
I have interned at three start-ups over the last 4 years and none of them have ever been mentioned on Techcrunch, despite one of them being involved in some serious M&A action. But why would they be, since readers probably are not hugely interesting in moving silicon wafers around a fab and companies are unlikely to find customers for their protein analysis hardware.
So before you lament that lack of "real" start-ups, consider the possibility that you just are not hearing about them.
What about nerds who want to change the world, but know they'll have to get rich to do so?
"These products feed and profit from our bovine adoration of mindless time-wasting."
That said, to address her point, I don't understand why tech start ups would be the answer to everything, especially a complex problem like homelessness. Homelessness isn't going to be solved by some RoR hacker creating a website that matches the homeless with available space. Rather it is the challenge for social workers, mental health practitioners, etc.
The same with education, the problem with inner city education isn't technical, its that vast swaths of the population do not respect education. My wife taught in an inner city, had amazing technical resources thanks to grants and well meaning donors, but had parents who were totally checked out.
Furthermore, because some people use tech in a frivolous way doesn't mean there aren't noble uses. e.g.
Foursquare - Learn about resources in my town and places I visit I wouldn't have otherwise. Lets me provide info about areas I know well to those who don't. Makes my consumption choices visible and potentially incites me to make better decisions for the community and my health.
Groupon - Helps support local merchants who have difficult challenges marketing against national chains. Reduces risks for customers to try new things.
Twitter - connects me to people and bodies of knowledge that would otherwise be hard to tap. Lets me connect job seekers with job holders.
Zynga games - Creates a meeting place/activity for friends/family. Sure, at its worst it has "junkie" characteristics, but used sparingly it gives me a way to say hi to a friend and keep a little social bonding going.
Commerce isn't bad and tech isn't the solution to every problem.
I think you're missing the larger point: when the best and the brightest technological minds are chasing the instant riches of social networks for dogs, they're not creating new antibiotics, energy efficient cars, cheap building materials, or any of a thousand other different things that people with big brains might be doing to better the world.
People who are smart enough to be writing social networks are more than smart enough to be doing pharmaceutical research or inventing solar cookers for the third world. There's just not much of an economic incentive to do it, when it's easier to sell to the vices of the first world.
That said, I realize that I'm a hypocrite on this point: I'm in this wacky social-network-hoo-hah business as much as anyone else. I just wish the economic forces were aligned differently.
Speaking as one of those people who took a nice little detour from the world of money to live on the edge of technology, let me assure you that it wasn't a smart financial choice. Most of the people who are smashing atoms and charting the cosmos are economic martyrs. Most of the ones who aren't martyrs come from places where an advanced degree at a US school will catapult them into higher social classes. That doesn't really happen in the US anymore -- people think it's more sensible to drop out of college to make websites, and I can't really argue with them.
Irrational or not, my opinion is that the world would be 1000% better if we could somehow create an economy that rewarded young people for doing research into antibiotics half as well as it rewards them for creating social-networking widgets.
Baloney. Here in the Netherlands, scientists working at universities and research institutes get a pretty decent salary. Sure, they don't get filthy rich, but fortunately there are more than enough people who don't care about that. The thing is: if getting rich is your primary objective, you're not going to save the world anyway. People working on antibiotics just because it's the best paying job, will leave as soon as another job gets them more money. You can't solve that by fixing the system, because it's not the system that's broken.
Maybe it's baloney in the Netherlands, but it's not baloney in the states. I do happen to know what a post-doc makes in the Netherlands (I had a job offer there), and it wasn't anything to get excited about (it was about on par with the earning power of a post-doc in a mid-sized city in the US -- which isn't much). But you're right about one thing: nobody is in danger of getting rich.
That said, I believe you're overlooking one incredibly important difference between life in the US and life in the Netherlands: we don't have a robust social welfare system to support us in old age. Taking 10+ years to do a PhD and post-doc in the US eats into your prime earning years, and puts retirement at risk. From this perspective, the "system" is indeed broken; there's a much stronger financial incentive to start saving while you're young.
€ 2800 per month is definitely not a bad salary. You're right, I can't speak for the US, but here you can live a comfortable life with that (and if you keep rising through the ranks, you'll have a nice retirement when you're done). And I should probably mention that getting your PhD is a paid job here as well (at least the first four years, in which you're expected to obtain your PhD). Anyone who thinks that is economic martyrdom isn't going to solve poverty, no matter how the system works. You just don't get to be a businessman and a hero at the same time.
That's my point: it's not economic martyrdom. Sure, it's limiting, but it's not some huge sacrifice that you can't possibly expect people to make.
It just sounds as if TFA is saying "Woe me, I am smart and talented and I want to make the world better, but society expects me to do that for less than what I can make somehwere else." Well, boo hoo. How about you (the writer of TFA) be thankful for being "just" smart and talented and be satisfied with a decent salary? Or else, just quit claiming that you want to save the world.
(Disclaimer: I have a master's degree, not a PhD, and I make considerably less than 2800 pre-tax with a job that requires that master's degree. This is not abnormal. And yes, I live a comfortable life)
Then again in the UK anything "technical" doesn't get a lot of respect. Engineers do a bit better than scientists, but nowhere near lawyers or accountants. Science and engineering are not even considered among "the professions". IT is one of the few niches where meritocracy at least prevails, not even there is it guaranteed tho'.
I agree. It's also a shame that a professional basketball player makes around 100 times more than a professional school teacher. That's just how it is.
Hundreds of thousands of people are willing to pay $25 - $1000 for a ticket to a basketball game to see those professional basketball players play, which earns them their 100xTeacher salary.
Even more people want to pay less taxes which go to the pay of professional (public) school teachers.
But wouldn't it also be a shame if professional basketball players were being paid $30,000 and the left over billions of dollars were split between the 30 owners of those teams? I'm willing to bet that the rich basketball players give back more dollars to their communities than the even richer basketball team owners do (or even would if they held back that extra money from the players).
People not getting paid for doing something that other people pay for them to do is a shame. Right now, people are not willing to pay for professional (public) teachers to teach. (Some people are able, and do, pay for professional private school teachers to teach.... if they aren't getting paid enough then they are in the same position that an NBA player would be in if their team owners were keeping all the money for themselves.)
If teachers want to improve their lot, they'll disband their unions. A pro athlete can lose his place on the team in a heartbeat...
While not being able to easily remove (or identify) bad teachers is a problem, the solution to that issue will not increase the pool of money available to pay the remaining good teachers (unless the solution involves removing but not replacing the bad teachers)
A teacher's salary is less "an average of the salary of their colleagues" as it is a division of the money allocated to education from taxes (and fundraisers).
Like you I am a hypocrite in that I know this and I do what I do anyway. But it's only partly for the money; the other part is there just aren't the jobs to do this out there. A lab or whatever would rather have a grad student hack something up on the side than hire professional developers (and fair play to them, they've discovered a way to get smart people to work for peanuts, but with the best will in the world, someone who got into this to be a biologist is going to see administering a database or whatever as a chore that gets in the way of their real work, and they're not going to do a fraction as well as a professional).
What about techies doing pro-bono work. I interviewed with a group associated with the human genome thing, and one of the biologists was bragging about using a stack -- as if that was some sort of hyper-uber-esoteric data structure.
Although I have a CS degree and I absolutely love CS, I did "just ok" in my life science courses and viewed it as necessary evil to graduate. Life science is just not my thing. Just because I can write software doesn't mean I want to be in pharmacy :/
It's just that people don't typically do startups in those areas, because you need massive investment to even get started, let alone succeed. Tesla for example has had $783 million in investment http://www.crunchbase.com/company/tesla-motors
Pharma's actions are dictated by the same financial reporting as tech so even if smart people moved from consumer web to pharma, its not as if we'd end up with a better world. Maybe just one with thinker, more lustrous lashes...http://www.latisse.com/
I guess my take on the "bigger point" is that the market seems to work. We are much better off in almost every area of our lives now compared to 50 years ago. Walmarts goal of keeping their shelves stocked for the "bovine masses" has led to a revolution in logistics. People who invented cellular phones as yuppie status symbols have saved millions of lives through better communication. And a couple guys who made devices to get free calls on pay phones ignited a computing revolution that has reshaped the world in the most grand fashion since Gutenberg.
My larger point is that toys have a way of becoming seriously useful and that socially engineering people to go into "valuable" fields could lead to a glut of mismanaged resources that don't necessarily yield benefits.
Ten years ago, one would very frequently come across essays decrying the alienating nature of the internet, how it dehumanized us and isolated us. They would argue that online relationships are inveterately shallow but displace our fraying real-word relationships with friends and family. But: Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, etc. alongside broadband, wireless, cell-phone cameras, etc. seem to be doing something very meaningful to reverse the (real, though possibly exaggerated) problems those essays described. And by correcting these problems and strengthening the social fabric, we may be indirectly reducing problems in healthcare, education, and poverty.
Again, the problem with the article is not really misprision of social networks, the problem is analyzing social impact at a level where Twitter = Zynga = LinkedIn.
This is the lament of the unhappy programmer. If only I didn't have to work my soul-less yuppie job tuning database queries for youface.com I could be curing cancer. It might be therapeutic to think this but it's mostly just a strange form of depressive narcissism. After years in this business I've come to exactly the opposite conclusion. All the people working here are doing exactly what they were meant to do. It's good society has Yahoos and Facebooks in which to employ all these self styled geniuses, because otherwise they'd be fucking up someone else's pharmaceutical research. If only I would have made Facebook I wouldn't have to sit at the crappy desk next to the fume hood.
Ah, yes...the world is so much simpler when it's in black and white, isn't it?
Aside from the fact that it's entirely possible to enjoy a career and still see its deficiencies, you're just making assertions and pretending they're factual.
Unless you believe that all of the people who are coding social networks today were absolutely miserable with their careers a decade ago, your typical smart person could be happy doing many different things. Just because they're writing flash games today doesn't mean that's automatically the optimal job for their happiness and the well-being of the world. Capitalism doesn't optimize for what you seem to think it does.
This mindset has recently expanded into the popular consciousness, with opinion pieces by every jowly conservatively liberal political columnist, and even stated by the president of the united states, who publicly lamented the fact that all these engineers are engineering themselves more money in the stock market instead of engineering up some new fuel sources. (The messed up part about that, is all those talking heads have degrees in journalism and law. Fuck you and get back to me after you pass freshman physics...) I just don't believe the notion that any somewhat smart person can be successful at anything to be true. People tend to self-select into careers they think they'll be sort of good at. I've worked in both science and e-commerce, and most of the e-commerce people would be bad at science, and most of the scientists would be bad at e-commerce. I just happened to be able to work in both fields because they both need big databases. I honestly don't believe we've lost any great scientists or nobel peace prize winners to Zygna.
The notion that skills are fungible at such a high level is like saying that if only Americans cared about soccer, the members of the Yankees would be winning the world cup instead of wasting their time playing baseball. It's ridiculous.
I don't really get your example, though. A decade ago, the people who are coding social networks today were 12. I don't think they had a lot of financial angst driving them away from their 6th grade research careers.
Why do we always assume that techies are "the best and the brightest"? A lot of tech problems are just not that hard.
It's like the finance articles where they assume the best and the brightest are all going into finance. Everyone wants to think their peer group is the smartest.
I started University 3 years early. Okay. There were kids in elementary school who consistently did better on Math contests. They became doctors and lawyers.
If you want to feel dumb (and learn a lot), hang out on some rocketry or other hard-engineering mailing lists. Again, a lot of programming is not that hard. It's easy for a lone wolf to start a project that eventually becomes extremely complex.
This need to prove that we're the smartest kids in the class is juvenile.
Funny thing is, what you are saying has a lot of truth to it. Funding for basic research is low, very competitive, and thus, dominated by nepotism and politics within the scientific community. Although politicians love to say that we need more scientists, as a scientist, I disagree. Until we decide to better fund the scientists we have, please please, no more!
But yes, economic forces, as it were...
For example, homelessness can be solved to a large extend by the ROR hacker. For a start, a webapp for the health practitioners, volunteers etc. to better organize would make it all more efficient - let's say by 20%. Webapps that create greater efficiencies in the housing market add another 20%. Add in a webapp to organize homeless advocates to lobby politicians, and you've gone a pretty large way.
Software creators don't realize just how much of an impact they can actually have on the world.
I think non-profit and for-profit ventures have this in common: they help those that wish to help themselves, help themselves even more.
There is an entire world of startups focused on societal betterment -- some with the stated goal of just being self-sustaining rather than profit centers.
in finance: kiva, prosper, even greendot which is now worth $2b, banksimple, etc. etc.
in energy: bloom, kitegen, blacklight energy, etc. etc.
Facebook and the various other social apps do in fact address serious societal problems and needs.
There's been a trend for several decades of people in modern society growing further apart. It's been lamented at great length in numerous studies and publications. It's a natural consequence of the other choices our societies are making, becoming more mobile in both work and home. People move more than they did, they change jobs more than they did, and thus they change social circles more than they did.
Social Networks compensate for all that. They do in fact bring people closer together than they would be otherwise. Certainly much of the interaction appears superficial, but if you think that indicates it's meaningless, that's because you don't understand social interaction. Even casual, seemingly superficial interactions bring us closer. They help us define our communities.
On Facebook I'm friends with people I haven't seen in 20+ years. Yes, most of our interactions seem superficial. But they aren't just that, they're tying us all closer to where we came from. And sometime it's more than that. That friend of yours from high school struggling with cancer? It means something to them that 50 people post well wishes weekly. It helps them. It's meaningful.
I lost track of many people in my life, without really meaning to. It's just how things work. Facebook et al help me correct that. They keep me in touch. Sure I have my "real-life" friends, but it's also nice to have the extended group.
I lost track of these people. My 13 year old niece will never lose track of someone unless she wants to. Think about that. Tell me that's not transformative.
Shallow thinking.
Many of the apps we have nowadays — the successful ones, at least — revolve around game mechanics, addiction, self-reference, and narcissism. Even apps I use and actually like quite a lot fall into this category."
A more charitable reading would take it to mean that the problem of social connection is important, but it's been adequately addressed by Facebook, and /new/ startups shouldn't focus on it.
And were this written in 2004, would you have said social connection is adequately addressed by Friendster and MySpace?
Just as Alta Vista was not the last word on search (nor is Google for that matter), Facebook is not the last word on Social Networks.
I think there's something to be said, however, about digging by following your own sense of curiosity and intuition about good problems to solve, instead of seeing where everyone else is digging and just digging there.
Use your noggin and explore. If it happens that no one else is digging there, so be it. And if that's what the OP is encouraging, then I'm all for that. But I don't feel there's a need to discount the current range of problems being solved.
Facebook, as I've said, restores and maintains social connections. This is absolutely not a minor thing, it's life-altering. Perhaps it's too early on in the process to understand that, but 10 or 20 years from now, everyone will get it when they look at who has been around and what they've shared as experiences.
Twitter is the global hive-mind. It tracks what everyone in the world is thinking about, or at least it or its successor will when extends its reach that far. Yes, most of that is shallow, because most of what most of us think about is shallow. Duh. That's sort of by definition if you think that through for five minutes. If we were all deeper, then the norm would be redefined and we'd all seem shallow again. Twitter succeeds at capturing the hive-mind specifically because it is so short. Your immediate thoughts are immediate, they're bite sized. The format matches the format of your thinking. There's value in knowing what people are thinking, though of course that value will be applied in different ways.
Foursquare is a few things. One, it's designed as a universal customer loyalty system on its primary level. I suppose if you think commerce is of necessity shallow, you can dismiss this as meaningless. Of course, it does give the small niche businesses a tool to level the playing field, but even that's probably not enough for some. But what about this- it's also restoring a sense of place to urban and suburban environments. There's a trackable history of who was where and when. It's not as disjointed as it was, there's a throughline. "Oh", you might say, "Bob goes to the same coffee shop I do, but three hours later". Now you're closer to Bob, and the coffee shop has more history for you.
Yeah, ok, none of this is curing cancer, but it does matter, it does make a difference, and it does improve people's lives.
You can tell me it's meaningless, but you're wrong.
I think her point was that it doesn't track what everyone in the world is thinking about. It tracks what everyone wealthy enough to have the free time to commit to maintaining their social network presence is thinking about.
> universal customer loyalty system
2.4 billion people (about a quarter of the planet) make less than $1000 year. Only 500 million people's income exceeds $11,500 a year. (http://ucatlas.ucsc.edu/income.php)
It is extremely significant that the businesses she picks on (not saying it's fair to call other folks' life's work pointless) focus on creating narrower and narrower slices of the 500 million. The 90% of the planet (!) that lives on less than $11000 a year is completely untouched by customer loyalty programs and social connections apps.
To be clear, I'm not arguing that the businesses you mentioned aren't doing the things you say they are. My life is richer because of the internet and specifically social networking. I am arguing, similar to the author, that the work Silicon Valley seems to be dedicated and that seems to get the most attention is not solving problems most of the world has.
I'd argue that this is similar to the car going from "new sector of transportation, economy, and way of life" all the way to "now with rust-proof undercoating with 0 down, 0% APR and $1000 Cash back", just much more quickly. If you were to look at the automobile industry after the arrival of the used car salesman as a solved problem due to the abundance of its superficialities, you'd miss the opportunity to build the hybrid car, the Smart car, the electric car, the hydrogen car and more, and all of the smaller incremental yet meaningful advances in car safety and technology over the years. In the larger scheme of things, Facebook is probably the model T of social networks...
I doubt that you'd get many of the 7 million small and mid-sized businesses in the United States to agree with this. Many of them have an unquenchable thirst for information: more, better, faster, in order to survive. Thousands of developers (and start-ups!) are working furiously to provide it to them. In fact, they're so busy that they don't have much time to tell you what they're doing.
Which may be why OP doesn't realize they exist.
Except, that's not the point - on anything beyond the personal scale the question is not, "which of these two do we want?" but "how much of each do we want?" She asks: "How well are our resources allocated?"
I think there's a strong case that we're under-invested in some of the largest problems of society - personally I'm working towards reforming government http://votereports.org/, and I can tell you the government directly spends some 40% of the GDP, and indirectly affects every other bit of it. Do we have anything close to 40% of developers working on disrupting our stodgy old government? How about 5%? 1%? I know of 3 good folks I work alongside (including these folks: http://circlevoting.com/), and a handful of other part-time, side-job efforts. But is that a proper reflection of the relative return of the problem, when compared to hundreds of facebookers or dozens elsewhere?
Health care is 17% of GDP. What are the big, disruptive health care startups? Who is going to build the tool that enables doctors and patients to circumvent the worst of the system? Or something that serves the economic purpose of insurance while avoiding the onerous regulations thereof? I've had the pleasure to meet with Jay Parkinson of http://thefuturewell.com, and I'll bet he could put the 30-some foursquare developers to better use.
Again, this isn't an either/or question, but a question of resource allocation.
Perhaps what we've done so far has made sense because those are the easy questions to answer - the money is there and the consumers are willing. But sooner or later we're going to have to recognize that the biggest problems of society deserve more of our attention.
I can't quantify the amount I've learned from wikipedia articles over the years, but I'm quite certain it's an awful lot. If I had grown up with access to it I'm pretty sure the impact would be far greater.
Sure, when I was a kid we had an encyclopedia, but A) a lot of kids don't, and B) wikipedia is thousands of times more powerful than an encyclopedia (and reading one article will often lead one down a path through various other articles too).
Is it going to replace public schools? Obviously not. But it has and will change education for the better.
I think Jolie's right, to some extent -- we are selfish, and the demands of selfish people make us think we are creating things of value. It's easier to create something for pleasure and gratification or to solve an obvious problem than to entirely overhaul a nationwide, endemic problem with hundred year old roots, red tape up the wazoo and a severe shortage of cash.
Same goes for Facebook, yes of course keeping up with your friends has no direct impact on real issues, but the fact that 110m went to public schools in an area that really needs it - that is a pretty big impact.
The same goes for any other person who creates wealth from web startups or any business in general - I don't think that web startups themselves are going to do much directly but when you take the knowledge and potential wealth that you acquire in the process and put it toward a good cause, that is one way that you can fix a social or human problem with your app as the author challenges.
Just my take on it.
I'm arguing that the applications doesn't have to be directly focused on a particular issue, and it still has legitimate uses as you pointed out, and make real world changes that are on the scale that the author thinks that technology apparently should be used for.
"It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_in_the_Arena
Edit: at least the gladiator image in the post is apt :)
FWIW I tend to agree with the opinion.
I don't know who roger ebert is so I can't comment on whether he is useless, but I guess he has no relevance to me.
Stage 2: Give back
at Stage 1.5: Jolie complains that we aren't doing stage 2.
Well for most of us we aren't at stage 2. Didn't Zuckberg who has just finish stage 1 give 100 million to education? Didn't Bill Gates, another stage 1 success, get 40 billionaires to give away most of their wealth to charity?
The question arises why don't start at stage 2 first. Well, sequence matter. Think of stage 1 as taking off your clothes and stage 2 as bathing. You do stage 2 first you end up without your skin being washed and wet clothes.
So far there isn't much technology that has been successful in those areas Jolie think start-up should focus, but with the apps you criticize, they have been making loads of money. In terms of risk, it is better to choose the latter type of business and then seek to help solve the other problems with the money generating from the first, same outcome but lower risk.
As Jay-z would say:
"And the music i be makin
I dumb down for my audience
And double my dollars
They criticize me for it
Yet they all yell "Holla"
If skills sold
Truth be told
I'd probably be
Lyricly
Talib Kweli
Truthfully
I wanna rhyme like Common Sense
(But i did five Mil)
I ain't been rhymin like Common since
When your sense got that much in common
And you been hustlin since
Your inception
Fuck perception
Go with what makes sense
Since
I know what i'm up against
We as rappers must decide what's most impor-tant
And i can't help the poor if i'm one of them
So i got rich and gave back
To me that's the win, win"- Moment of Clarity
Paraphrase, if solving homeless problem made money that is what entrepreneurs would be doing, but since it is not they choose problems with lil significant and give back that is the win,win. They are still changing the world but in a different sequence that reduces risk and ensures changing the world is more likely.
Programmers start companies that solve their own problems because they understand those problems. Few programmers understand the problems in health care or education, and it's not a market to screw around in when you don't know what you're doing.
Let's use facebook as an example. Here's a problem: The internet and modern society drives people apart and increases isolation. Facebook's effect has been to greatly decrease this problem, but it's not the problem that Facebook set out to solve. The web app that Zuckerman copied and extended was designed as catalog of who was in a dormitory (house) at Harvard. It just so happened that adding on messaging features and massively scaling this over time created a startup that also helps solve a larger social problem.
The problems the author presents as "real" problems are so ill-defined that it is impossible for technology startups to solve them. But, for people who actually work in those areas, I'm sure there exist problems web-apps could solve.
Here's an example: the problem of "Many Americans can't afford medical care." The cause of the high cost of health care is complex, relating to R&D at pharmaceutical companies, patent law, government regulations, and market incentives. Programming won't solve that. However, a problem that programmers _can_ solve is "electronic medical records suck." To that end, there are programmers working on that, and, hopefully, their work will uncover smaller problems also solvable.
I see large, ill-defined problems like this as a bit like the beginning of a recursive problem. The big problem needs to be broken down into a large series of smaller problems, some of which we, as programmers and entrepreneurs, may be able to solve. The hard part is knowing how to break the large problem into smaller ones, and the acknowledging the efforts of those people working on the smaller problems.
Baloney. I worked in the CA community college system. It's $26 per unit. TWENTY SIX dollars. Oh, and if you're poor, it's nothing.
A college education is accessible to just about everyone in the US who wants it.
Agreed. And even throughout the world thanks to small startups like Khan Academy.
Jane doesn't want to go to some stooooopid lowly community college, she wants to go to USC because ahem, it's better!
The $26 per unit isn't the problem. It's paying for textbooks, housing, food, reliable transportation, medical insurance, and daycare while you're going to school and studying. Or trying to concentrate after a 50 hour workweek. I'm not saying that we shouldn't offer inexpensive community college courses, but pretending that it's anything but a small start is silly. If we really wanted, as a society, to get people through college, we'd pay for the full price instead of something that often represents only a fraction of the true cost of college.
Er, not sure where the author has been since the November 2008 election, but President Barack Obama made tackling this decades long problem a signature issue of his presidency, and actually got the problem addressed comprehensively. Sure, there is still work to do, but health care which makes up 1/3 of the economy was never going to be solved by programmers building web apps. And there are projects pushing technology forward in this area to increase efficiency.
Here’s another problem: Many Americans can’t afford a decent education, and many parts of our public school system suck.
There are technology projects working on improving this, both within the school system and in the tech arena.
Here’s another, even more pressing problem: Many Americans are homeless. Many can’t afford to eat.
I'm not sure how technology might solve homelessness, but there are actual real world answers like food banks and soup kitchens to address the hunger issue. The homeless experiment posted on Nev Blog shows how relatively easy it is for real homeless people (not those that panhandle, then jump into sports cars, or those with addictive habits to feed) to acquire food. (http://www.nevblog.com/homeless-experiment/)
The author reflects on some problems in America -- where even the poor are really not that poor by the standards of many other nations -- and seeks solutions in technology because technology is good at solving certain kinds of problems, especially ones mechanical in nature. This doesn't mean it can solve any kind of problem. Large, longstanding, complex socio-economic problems can't be solved by Twitter type applications. The kinds of problems of which the author speaks require a combination of educated people, politics, and economic focuses for making any real difference. Technology may certainly help, but it's not the sole answer.
"Getting together with your friends? Not a problem. Staying in touch with people you care about? Not a problem. Trying to find information about businesses and products? Not really much of a fucking problem." -- and 640K is enough for everyone, right? It's pure arrogance to think that just because you don't use something it's valueless. LinkedIn is incredibly useful for me.
If you save each of your users a minute everyday and you have 10 M users, you'll save 6944 man-years per year. That's more than the life-time economic output of 70 people. The point is, incremental improvements matter. A 0.01% improvement over millions of people add up. So go for the 0.01% improvement -- you are changing the world.
Her problems: Many Americans can’t afford medical care....many parts of our public school system suck....
The real problems: Many Americans are unhealthy, many Americans lack the skills necessary to get a job. When you prematurely narrow the problem, you can't identify all solutions.
Jolie's premature narrowing of the problem makes it impossible to think of some solutions. If you think the problem is affordability of health care, you'll never think of a healthier lifestyle. If you think the problem is that public schools suck, you'll never think of scrapping them and replacing them with some alternative.
You just did the exact same thing Jolie O'Dell did - you picked an action, identified a problem that the action solves, and declared that new problem to be the original problem.
More importantly, the possible root cause could conceivably be mitigated by a variety of solutions we know how to build - webapps for improved meal planning, recipes, health information, and so on.
As to the school example: if dissatisfaction with schools system won't lead to improvement or replacement, then what will? Certainly not satisfaction.
I don't see anything ironic in that post. Both the high cost of health care and (objectively measured) low quality of school system are real problems that affect almost all americans. The fact that there are other problems that affect them as well doesn't make them any less problematic.
Premature narrowing of the problem also leads you to solutions that might be counterproductive. For example, to reduce the cost of health care (or at least prevent further increases), we could deliberately stifle innovation. This would reduce costs because instead of spending $250,000/person on the (to be invented) Alzheimers cure, we just spend $10k/year warehousing them and waiting for them to die.
This is a partial solution to the stated problem of high costs. It isn't a solution to the real problem of poor health.
Two days before that, I spent probably 20 minutes of my day playing around with a flash gravity simulator somebody posted over here.
Why? Am I to be in charge of hand-manipulating the orbital mechanics for dozens of bodies any time soon? Probably not. Because the interface has become the app.
It's not about value any more, it's about stickiness. Tens of millions of folks spend hours on Farmville each day. Is this because they are just technically inept people who would be wasting their time doing something else anyway? I know this is what some folks would like to believe -- it makes them feel better about making more of the same stuff. But I don't buy it. Even if it were true for 90% of Farmville players, that still leaves 10% of the remaining users who would have done something that had more long-term value to them. Taking self-perceived long-term value away from millions of folks for days or weeks should be at least very noteworthy.
Many web startups have found the magic equation: stickiness beats value. Expect to see more of the same.
That is, it is not a technology problem, it is a problem of regulatory capture.
That is, for each doctor there were perhaps 1.5 admin people doing paperwork. While they are cheaper than doctors, that is a still a large expense (figure $60K per person as a minimum, thus $90K per doctor per year in additional expense).
However I do agree that obesity is a problem in the US.
The founder, Dr. Garrison Bliss, does a great job summarizing his approach in this talk: http://www.tvw.org/media/mediaplayer.cfm?EvId=2008030136C...
Why hadn't anyone gave a damn about it? Because it's hard, take time and you simply don't know how to start and how to monetize.
I'll give you another problem: Google don't happen to give the best search result. You'll (in many cases) get SEO spammed results. Why not re-invent a new search engine? Sure there are SE startups, but not enough for the solution to get solved.
Personally it struck a chord with me.
In a previous life I worked at a non-profit aimed at doing 'R&D' in a social context (yes, this is vague and that was just one of the things making me leave...). Although I've left this organisation disillusioned and a lot more cynical about non-profits and their methods / goals, I still strive to use my skills for the betterment of all. Not that I always succeed (I'm by far not a saint), but I try to give something back. In my case I do this by offering a lot of my stuff under a open source license or Creative Commons license. Still, I sometimes wonder if I could/should strive to do more in the real world with tangible / physical results. Staring at a screen all day long and hoping my virtual work will lead to some positive results in the 'real' world and be meaningful for people occasionally makes me feel like I'm fooling myself. Therefore I think that the gist of Jolie's article hits the nail right on the head and asks the difficult question (for all of us regardless of skills or area of expertise): what have you been trying to do not just for the betterment of yourself, but also for the betterment of other's? Trying to combine this in your work is something I belief is worth striving for, even if we cannot always achieve it.
They’re not doing what technology is intended to do: Solve problems.
But by and large, these apps do not exist to solve problems. They exist and thrive because they feed our individual vanity.
Let's take Dailybooth (YC Summer 09)which was mentioned in this article. Whilst the creator may have just created the site because it sounded like a "fun" idea the value of the website is with the micro community that thrives.
Heck, I'll even go as far as saying Dailybooth has helped to save lives. It's dedicated users consists of a subsection of society that may be outcasted in real life. Lets take a teenager who lives in a small town, whom may feel more accepted in a city but has no similar peers within a small town. Dailybooth facilitates this teenager to connect and belong to like-minded individuals people whom they have never met before. Over time real friendships are created over a shared connection which is the website and community.
I heard of actual stories where a teen attempted to commit suicide due to being perceived as an outcast. In this case Dailybooth has facilitated friendships and connections with similar peers which in turn reduces the feeling of being outcasted in a small town, thus indirectly reducing the chances of suicide.
There are even a number of Dailybooth users who travel across different countries to facilitate in real friendships and connections. It allows for boundaries of prejudice to be broken.
So Dailybooth may not be solving a direct problem. But does it have value in our society? I would argue is certainly does.
(I have researched extensively into the userbase and mechanics of Dailybooth and have been involved in it's community)
For example: Twitter is a powerful platform for sharing information. This could be leveraged for dissent or education, and it is in some ways. However, most people just follow Justin Bieber and Lada Gaga. "Bieber Fever" allegedly consumes about 3% of Twitter's entire infrastructure. (Source: http://mashable.com/2010/09/07/justin-bieber-twitter/) Take that stat with salt, but it's certainly not improbable.
The argument put forth in this post is older than dirt and completely false. I'll wager a bet that this argument is just slightly older than it's cliché response, "You can lead a horse to water, bu you can't make it drink."
There are plenty of web apps that are truly kick-ass implementations of "doing good" (http://mycharitywater.org comes to mind), but they aren't going to ever be as popular as something like Farmville, because of human nature. Making your "do good" web app kick more ass won't make people want to do more good.
Many of them are already out there for those motivated to seek them. With MIT's stuff online, you can learn from them for free. A lot of more basic stuff is also out there if you know how to look for it.
But there are a lot of teachers out there who have their education budgets spent on crazy toys and scoreboards that don't do the kids a whole lot of good. Educational software is a mixed bag, though I have fond memories of Number Munchers. I don't know if that led me to learning as much math as I did, but it sure didn't hurt.
Right now, a lot of money is wasted on new versions of textbooks. Most of the underlying material hasn't changed and isn't really going to, except for the meddling of various government types who want to add or delete things they disagree with from the curriculum. Most of the publishers have been around for ages. I have to think there's some opportunity for someone to automate certain kinds of tests.
For example, simple math tests could more easily be randomized and each student could have their own set of problems (no more photocopies with kids cheating off the guy next to them). Word problems can be autogenerated. Stuff like that.
Unfortunately, most of my knowledge comes second-hand. My mother was a teacher, but she's dead now, so whatever I know about the problems they face has probably gotten out of date. But I have a feeling that education money, especially their tech budgets, getting spent on things that do little good is something that probably hasn't changed. I have to think that there are still quite a few things that could be improved.
That benefit comes from making savvy use of everything from (now) cheap digital cameras and video editing, to carefully cultivated email lists, dedicated web-pages for outreach teams, and growing profiles on social networking sites.
All that seems like basic stuff, I know, but that's what's so amazing. Five years ago it was either much more expensive, or nonexistent. Today, it's ubiquitous (Facebook, for example, had 1% of its current base in 2005, and today I can shoot a better picture with a $5k camera than a $75k camera could capture back then).
That massive and very sudden shift has allowed organizations to do things (real, saving lives and avoiding death things) that simply wouldn't be imaginable - let alone possible just a few years ago, at least not with the limited resources they had for outreach.
So, Jolie O'Dell, if you want to see homeless people getting help, stop waiting for 'tech to do it'. Instead, just go out and talk to some homeless people. You don't need an app for that. Nor, you'll find, do they. And when you do figure out what's most likely to help, you'll probably be pleasantly surprised at how helpful all these new resources can be - provided you're creative enough to use them imaginatively.
Separately - all of you working on this 'pointless' stuff; you're awesome. And thank you. You're making vital connections. You've helped tremendously. The world is a better place because of you. Please, by all means, carry on.
Anyway, this "bread and circus" discussion reminds me of all the authors -- Tolkien in particular -- who were accused of wasting their talent in escapist works.
This person has no clue what it takes to solve really hard problems.
PS: "Bread and Circus" is a form of Roman wisdom. Quit trying to give it a bad name. "Idle hands are the devil's workshop" and empty bellies are worse. In times of crisis, I practice a policy of "bread and circus". Making sure my sons and I are well fed and have something entertaining to do so we don't go stir crazy and can mentally focus on something other than our overwhelming problems has been critical to our track record of success.
You've probably seen the Nathan Myhrvold quote: 'the old Silicon Valley was about solving really hard problems.'
While a Web App Startup may not be able to solve every problem, we can do more than offer empty self-gratification.
It felt good to work on projects like that. Everyone was so excited about making change. As an example, a few months back I worked on one trying to reduce youth offending by providing a really usable sms gateway for young offenders to get in touch with local experts on certain problems.
The problem I've seen, is that it's not always easy to get people to follow up on them after the excitement of collaborative change has passed. Once people are working from their desks again, personal success seems to be once again the key motivator.
I don't know how to solve this.
Since Yelp makes it easier to tell lemons from businesses that shine, it makes the market more efficient. This means your money goes further. Which means you have more of it to spend on education, health insurance, etc.
Smart people should figure out what they're good at and what they're interested in, and do that. If you have a good idea that has worth to some group, you should try to implement it. A good idea is a good idea.
And while we're at it, things like Google and Facebook, in addition to facilitating wasting time for those with no motivation, can also be used by, oh I don't know, medical research companies or nonprofits trying to feed the hungry to get the word out.
> Here’s another problem: Many Americans can’t afford a decent education, and many parts of our public school system suck.
> Here’s another, even more pressing problem: Many Americans are homeless. Many can’t afford to eat.
I agree with the whole article, but this stuck to me. (except the "American" part... European here). It's a problem, a big problem waiting to be solved. And I found I'm itching to give it a shot.
Like somebody else already said in this thread, this kind of problems can usually be approached only with a ton of money and prior experience - but on the other hand, there should be much less competition then in writing the next killer Android app.
Here’s a problem: Many Americans can’t afford medical care.
Here’s another problem: Many Americans can’t afford a decent education, and many parts of our public school system suck.
Here’s another, even more pressing problem: Many Americans are homeless. Many can’t afford to eat.
...
I would like to propose that technologists apply their ample skill to solving the real problems of humanity, not just the perceived problems of their very privileged social set.
How about we broaden our scope to beyond "Americans," which I believe she actually means "United States Citizens." Don't forget all the other countries and continents doing much worse than we are.
People like entertainment. People like socializing. Whoop dee doo. How is that any more self-serving than telling the world you're seeing "Waiting for Superman with the Facebook crew".
Problem: People in developing countries have to work for 3rd world wages, selling products and services to people who really can't afford to buy anything. Thus, they are doomed to remain poor by western standards.
Solution: Jason's website that lets them teach Spanish online to rich Americans, and doesn't let them pay themselves less than ten bucks an hour.
Dodged a bullet there!
2) "This guy" is actually a lady. =)
A site where people who normally make less than $1/hr can sell their services online for less than $1/hr doesn't really help anybody.
On the other hand, requiring people to charge the fair market value for their service forces them to compete on quality rather than price, which has the added benefit of making the service better, as well as getting people paid a fair wage.
Tall order.
Also, can personal success not align with more humanitarian goals?
Edit (corollary): therefore Farmville is actually healthy.
After reading the article only hope nobody came with a social network for homeless...