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Comment by jariel | Hacker News Reader

"Everything to do with web and mobile is very solved at this point."

"640K ought to be enough for anybody." - Bill Gates 1981 (or supposedly.

So there is a long way to go in all of these areas, and there is even a longer way to go in adjacent areas, and we're not even touching all the other things startups can do - you know - the other 95% of the economy?

Healthcare, biotech, materials, energy, construction, auto, food services. You know 'everything that's not your iPhone'.

If VC were structured differently I think we'd have a solution to hair loss and possibly sagging skin by now. Those two markets are worth 2x Google and Apple put together. People will pay for their 'youth' before they give 2 cents for a mobile phone. As the tip of the iceberg.

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Hair loss is on the precipice of being effectively solved (infinite transplants via stem cells) and the price will likely go down over the next 5 to 10 years as the technology to produce hair follicles and perform robotic transplantations matures.

Skin is also a largely solved problem: use moisturizer/sunscreen/Vitamin C/Retin A, avoid the sun as much as possible, wear sunglasses, drink lots of water, eat healthy + high antioxidants, sleep well, get minor amounts of Botox occasionally for some parts of the face, microneedling occasionally, maybe a face lift (these days a more or less perfected procedure with low risk) somewhere in your 40s/50s. That plan will basically take you into your 60s looking really good. Even if you can't stick to that plan, the various restorative dermatological options will still give you a fantastic result. But most people are some combination of too apathetic, too lazy, too financially-constrained, or too afraid of more invasive techniques.

"Hair loss is on the precipice of being effectively solved "

They have been saying this for 50 years. Even the technology we use today is sketchy.

"Skin is also a largely solved problem: "

This is ridiculously false.

>70% of women do many or most of those things, and they still mostly look their age. Those things help, but very mildly. There are no 55 year old women who look 30 without airbrushing + tons of makeup + facelifts.

And 80 year old women mostly look 80.

The amount of money and effort, especially women spend on this is breathtaking, considering that most of it doesn't work better than the cheaper products.

If there was something that would make 50 year olds actually look 30 it would be would have 'infinity' market value.

You're well behind the cutting edge of hair loss science [1]. It's quite clear from your comment that you haven't read anything about the most recent developments.

If you want a good example of what's now possible with anti-aging, look at Tom Ford. He's 58 and could easily pass for a 30 year old. The techniques he's using to look that way will be further refined and become more widely accessible (economically) over the next 10-20 years.

You really have no idea what you're talking about and you're clearly not someone who's actually read any related research or studied these subjects in any kind of depth. The irony is that you first pointed out the tremendous economic incentive to solve hair and skin degradation and then engaged in incoherent contortions in order to argue that these problems have somehow magically remained unperturbed by profit-maximizing agents. A mind-boggling cognitive dissonance.

[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2019/07/hair-for-...

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