The problem with startups is that they can’t solve the big problems.
remarkedly.com
remarkedly.com
For your point #1, it's called a PHR (personal health record) and it's been done by many players including many startups, plus Google (who gave up because no one used it) and Microsoft (which still has one).
The problem is NOT the government. (In fact, find podcasts or video of the CTO of HHS Todd Park or the CTO of the USA Aneesh Chopra, and then tell me that it's the government that's holding back health entrepreneurs. Seriously, go google these guys.) The problem in healthcare is the lack of engagement from many consumer/patients plus a private industry reluctant to standardize. The Feds are trying to lead the way. If you're a vet, you can get access your medical records from the VA via their Blue Button initiative, and the government is encouraging other systems to follow (and some have).
Yesterday 1200 people attended a free Health Care Innovation Summit in DC with the heads of HHS and CMS (including Todd and Aneesh) on stage actively supporting healthcare innovation and entrepreneurship. I know because I was there as the CEO of a small health IT company that's solving some of those "big problems." Check out hcidc.org in the coming days for a video archive of the event.
New companies ARE changing healthcare. (That's actually the point of Obamacare!) Check out the many health startups from Blueprint Health, RockHealth, and HealthBox.
In other words go look before you assume that none of us are solving big problems. Not all of us make gamified, location-based, social networking buzzword bingo solutions for mobile.
Edit: fixed Aneesha's title
I don't think patient engagement is an issue -- there are gazillion health related niche disease communities/blogs on the Internet. The challenge for consumer oriented startups is to scale beyond their specific niche to become successful in terms of revenue or as a widely used App/Service.
For all health IT startups targeting to the enterprise -- Good Luck with the PBU (Payer, Buyer, User) problem.
- Amazon.com, when it was a startup, figured out how to allow you to buy just about any book in print and have it delivered to your home. They had to build or lease warehouses, contract with delivery companies, and do all sorts of things that were not just hacking or technology.
- Apple, when it was a startup (two guys working in a garage) figured out how to design an easy to use personal computer and get it manufactured at an affordable price.
Actually, I'm uncertain about whether I really want the problem of centralized healthcare records to be solved. If it is, it means that my healthcare records could easily fall into the wrong hands (look at how many data breaches there have been at banks, for example).
Making sure this doesn't happen is part of the problem definition. I'd expect something like client-side encryption to be an essential piece of the puzzle.
Dropbox is probably solving a bigger problem technically than any of the examples he gives.
It's true that big problems have to be "hard" in some way, or it would be presumed that these problems would already be fixed. However, in ordinary usage, problems can be made difficult by something that is not technologically or intellectually challenging, but by something that is just practically difficult.
I think a good example would be Dwolla. Or, you might consider deposing a cruel dictator a "big problem." But it's one that was made difficult by the "artificial" challenges of rallying the right type of support, circumventing corrupt government institutions, and so on. Dealing with institutions that have made change difficult is a real and non-trivial concern, even if it's an "artificial" one.
At the same time, the Millennium Prize problems are arguably some of the "hardest problems," but people don't run around talking about how they're the world's "big problems." It isn't implausible to say that solving problems that affect people significantly may be considered "bigger problems" or at least more worth solving those that are not.
On a somewhat related note, I think some of the most important "big problems" are those which are technologically challenging and practically challenging because of current moral fashions. Many of us here may think it important to get humans to a self-sustaining colony off Earth. But most people today don't at all consider it one of the world's "big problems." Still, I think we can do it...
The author's point is that too many start-ups are creating fun apps that give little moments of joy rather than ones that noticeably and significantly make life easier or better for people. You can criticize the author for trying to be controversial and write something he knows has a good chance of making the front page of HN; as we've all probably noticed posts with this general sentiment are definitely in vogue right now on HN, but I think it's worth moving on from that and noting what he defines as big problems.
I think all the problems he lists we can agree are 'big' in the sense that they create a lot of confusion and inefficiency in society. In the case of medical records, 'solving' that problem could literally save countless lives.
On a related note, I disagree with the author there are big problems in society that start-ups can't solve. I think there are plenty. For many I'm guessing the idea behind 'Kill Hollywood' springs to mind. For me, it's the ubiquity of advertising in society. Personally, I'd love to see Facebook, Google, and co trying to change the world to reduce the concentration of it in our lives, unfortunately it looks like they're more interested in the opposite.
The logic of the article is that great minds are working on small problems in irrelevant startups. However, these great minds are great at certain fields, like technology. They are not particularly great at politics, for example, which is necessary for many of the problems listed in the article.
Put another way, if I want to make the most good in the world, and I'm a great programmer, what should I do, build the next Dropbox (something I'm capable of), or try and fix government regulations which cause inefficiencies in parking bills? Never mind what helps the world the most, take into account my chance of succeeding.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_conspi...
I think an entirely reasonable response is: so what? Different companies have different purposes and there's no shame in actually tackling one problem instead of attempting to tackle some supposedly bigger/harder problem that you are much less likely to succeed in tackling and that you perhaps don't care for.
Moreover, the examples he gives may be annoying, but the cost to society, the companies involved or price people are willing to pay to have them solved may be lower than that of problems startups are addressing, so there is no ecnonomic incentive to work on them.
All of which reinforces the idea that business is not always the model for success - it's just the most common one.
But I think you strike on the point that big problems are relative. To me a huge problem is the lack of tech scene in my new area I've moved to, yet only a few hours away is a bustling one. But to most people that's a tiny problem.
If you're talking about ones that affect everyone, there are at least a few startups that I can name off by head (though mostly stealth) that are tackling big problems. It's quite an over-arching statement to suggest he knows every startup's mission.
Why the downvotes?
TRULY Big problems:
Every year 15 million children die of hunger. ... 1 in 5 children in Africa die of malaria ... 1 million people die of malaria
I would hardly classify "having to fill out the same form every time I go to the Doctor's office" as a "BIG" problem.
We lack the will to pay for it and the ability to distribute it effectively in the midst of corrupt/brutal governments without empowering said governments. I'd argue that solving the latter is a Big Problem although not one I imagine a for-profit company solving.
Your comment is the direct reason for this.
When you say "big," you appear to mean "severe and life-threatening". When he says it, he appears to mean something like "broad in scope, requiring an extremely complex solution."
Malaria prevention doesn't really fit the latter definition, though it does fit the unrelated definition you're using.
In a sort of roundabout delayed fashion, startups ARE leading to tackling big problems.
http://ubuntu.com (maybe stretching it a bit)
First, I honestly can't count Ubuntu.
So besides that: Gates Foundation, Startup Education, and Omidyar are essentially charity. Yeah, they are technically start ups, but...
The other two's problem domains are really exceptions in the realm of "big problems": we've been doing space travel, we've been doing electric cars—these startups just do it better, but they aren't solving any new big problems. (They are solving many interesting technical problems along the way, of course.)
It's also interesting that every one on that list (still discounting Ubuntu) was started with a pile of money by a previously successful entrepreneur. (And SpaceX and Tesla by the same entrepreneur, by the way.)
Did you ignore the words "aristocracy", "delayed", and "roundabout" in my comment?
There's Rocky Mountain Institute, Amory Lovins' energy conservation research lab. A little thin on product, but he's done a lot of the thinking that's materializing around low-energy transport and alternative energy now. There are numerous other players in the energy field as well.
I'd argue that California's High Speed Rail Commission is, if not a private startup, at least a partnership tackling a Hard Problem (perhaps intractable, though I'd like to hope not).
I'd be interested in seeing this list developed further.
But problems alone can’t take up whole of the domain of human interest. So, the second part of the question, would be, what are the most interesting problems/technologies software could solve teaming up with other disciplines? I guess, many people are already working on such things, but the tech is still not mature enough or marketable enough, to be presented to the world, e.g. Google Xlab.
For instance, here in Germany, we have what U.S. people would probably call 'socialized health care'. We invented it, basically.
But this doesn't mean it's one gigantic insurance for all people. Actually, it's a system with hundreds of insurances, and you can pick the one you'd like (with some exceptions). The only thing you can not do is to not pick any of them. And no insurances is able to reject you.
The insurances may be companies, but there are also non-profit entities. Either way, they are separate from government. Strictly speaking, they aren't even part of the state. As far as I know no one from the government is allowed to request their files without a court order.
Additionally, there's a parallel 'free' system for people with sufficient income, and some special groups. Interestingly, civil servants seem to be one of these special groups. They may opt-in into the social system, but most of them seem to use the 'free' system -- not because of fear but because it's cheaper for them.
It's not a huge deal over here but imagine trying to run for office with an abortion from your 20's in your medical history if the opposition knew about it
Or politicians 'requesting' donations from directors of big companies or else their socially embarrassing medical issues like HIV (one in 20 people in the USA!) or plastic surgery history get's 'anonymously leaked'
Medical records can actually be a pretty huge source of power and that's certainly one thing the government should have as little as absolutely required of. All I have is a couple of broken bones in mine but I'm sure there are good people who could be swayed by bad people with the wrong information in the wrong hands
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=population+of+the+usa+v...
Don't assume governments are more or less evil than companies. Losing control of your own data is the problem here.
And more directly to the OP's point, Epic certainly was once a startup (3 employees 30 years ago, 5000 today) that has tackled some very big problems.
I don't refute that there are many more startups working on products that won't quite save the world, but is that such a bad thing? P.T Barnum was organizing circus acts while his contemporaries Carnegie, Rockefeller, and Morgan were shifting the very foundation of our society (literally and figuratively). Doesn't mean Barnum doesn't have a legacy of his own though.
[1] - Here's an example: https://mychart.clevelandclinic.org/
There are also many other governmental services, mentioned in the article, that you can manage online but through other websites, using the same log-in though. For example pensions, health insurance, road-tax, car-licence and student loans.
Most of it actually works very smoothly, you can even register a company without touching a paper. But it doesn't solve the issue of all the rules you have to know beforehand and admittedly, doing your taxes on the computer is almost as boring as on paper, there is no way around that.
It's a technology issue, just one the IRS has to tackle, not a startup.
There are such things as intractable problems, but payments, health care recordkeeping and government are not among them.
I do like the fundamental point of the post, though. There should be more attention paid by startups to serious problems.
Seems less true in biotech, where VCs are willing to fund substantial R&D budgets, perhaps because the [breakthrough -> patent -> license] ecosystem is better established there; the tech startups using the breakthrough/patent/license pipeline seem to verge on patent trolls more than real R&D outfits.
Normally you would partner with some hip new entrant to (or at least, small player in) the medical or governance market, who isn't too invested in the status quo, and persuade them to use your solution via a combination of favourable pricing and the promise of a competitive advantage. But these fields are so far from being competitive that you just can't find such a partner.
VC's and advisors need to provide a platform to give startups those tools. For security using Google AppEngine or the Amazon cloud, combined with automated penetration testing tools, combined with some kind of cheap application security testing (does it exist yet?) might get enough of the way there, but would you really trust something so flimsy, run by two kids out of college who are working it out as they go, with your serious data?
So. A place to store my birth certificate? Srsly? Not really a problem.
Its as if our institutions are just now upgrading to Dungeons and & Dragons Pathfinder edition while leading-edge companies are running the Skyrim engine.
We need common semantic data formats and automated systems based on them for processing data and enforcing regulations where necessary.
We also need these data formats and systems to be designed to ensure a certain level of distribution and guard against over-centralization, both on a corporate (antitrust) and personal (income inequality) level. Another key requirement is for the data formats and systems development to be continuous and agile.
Part of the problem is the belief in, and acceptance of, not only deadly force but a monopoly on force, in the form of centralized government. Common data formats are a critical missing component which should be agreed upon, but governments currently bear too much resemblance to large criminal organizations to expect them to really facilitate innovation.
I believe we need to iterate on the core of our social institutions, starting by reexamining basic premises. For example, if nearly every group is simply competing against all of the other groups for profit, how can an individual group come to the conclusion that completely revising their data systems to handle a new common format is a priority?
I'm not saying that we can't have competition, but I am saying that we need to look very closely at the fundamentals of the way the system works and try out some different frameworks.
Right now, my company is a tiny star in the oligopolistic slow-moving galaxy of the US healthcare system. We grew 10x in 2008-2009, and grew 10x again in 2010-2011. We're still gathering steam, but we (and healthcare companies like us) are crafting the building blocks that will one day grow into the solution to this big hairy problem.
These kind of problems in 2012 should be easy to solve, and yet here we are. Why is there not a decent banking service out there that is well aligned with how we do business in 2012? Why im a stuck with the big powerhouse that are like big ships when it comes to steering direction. i.e pathetically slow.
I also thought similar things with Car Repair and servicing. I think that market is utterly ripe for disruption and hasnt had any real innovation (from an organisational point of view), in a seriously long time.
These are just two problems that come to mind since they're very fresh on my mind recently, but im sure there are many others just like they were pointed out in the blog post.
I tend to agree though: The minor inconveniences listed by the author aren't "big problems". We've got an endless list of _proper_ big problem. AIDS, global warming etc. You don't fight those problems with the same tools as one would for red tape - you need actual innovation...which I gather start-ups occasionally achieve.
Just look at the winners of this year's Microsoft Imagine Cup: http://www.imaginecup.com/blogs/imagine_cup_finals/default.a... - Apptenders, team from Croatia, built a physical therapy app for Kinect that helps children with cerebral palsy, quote: "KiDnect is a Kinect-based solution for on-premise and remote physical therapy for children, especially those born with Cerebral Palsy. This software has the ability to monitor a child’s exercises to ensure they are being completed correctly, and then provides statistical analysis to the therapist."
I would argue that the problems of the world are solved by solving small important problems, one at a time. And there's a world of opportunity for every startup to do just that!
Prisons
Retirement for not-so-rich people
High schools
Government procurement
Shipping (in developing countries)
Customs (in developing countries)
Utilities prices in Northern countries
Digital democracy (removing corporate influence on elections)It's quite depressing to see so much energy wasted on this problem, which isn't a problem for consumers, but for advertisers. I'm sorry, but finding a better ways to use mobile photo social geo to target people for ads is not changing the world.
For instance for the government taxes one; a group could build a website that handled it and offer it for free to the government.
If you want to go from New York to Los Angeles, you have a sub-5% chance of paying a fair price. Most often, you'll find yourself paying a ridiculously high price because you booked your ticket to close to the date, too far away from it, on the wrong day of the week, or in the wrong season. Then you get shitty service the whole way, including 40-minute security lines and $25 baggage-check fees. If you spring for business class (domestic first) you get service that was almost as good as what coach offered 30 years ago, when flying wasn't horrible.
Trains aren't even an option for mid-distance travel, due to the infrequent schedules, equally absurd fares, and slow speeds (comparable to cars, except on Acela, a "high speed" service that goes 120 mph).
We have good highways in the U.S., and people drive a lot in this country because it's the only mode of transportation that actually works (for a family of four, it's cheaper than air and rail, which is just fucking absurd) but it's just not safe to drive them faster than 80-90 mph average speed, and legally you can't even go that fast.
New York is the only city with "decent" (by American standards) public transit, and that's still not enough to slash housing prices to where they'd be with an extensive transit network. (Note to all: if you pay urban rents, you'd benefit from a better public transit system even if you never used it, because it would de-crowd the city.)
We're amazingly good at shipping electrons, but we've given up entirely on moving humans.
Furthermore, I think you might have a skewed sense of what a fair price is to fly 2,500 miles. A flight from Lisbon to Moscow (about the same distance) is more expensive than a flight from LA to NYC. It is a long way and expensive to operate planes. Last minute tickets and upper class tickets subsidize "cheap" fares. If you want to convert an airline over to fixed price tickets, the ticket price would likely be considerably higher than what you deem "fair."
Finally, the way cities are built in the US does not lend themselves to public transit. NYC has decent transit because the population density is so high as to make it the only viable option. There are no other cities in the US like that with the exception of maybe San Francisco which has a significantly smaller population. In Europe, many cities are high density and have good mass transit. Unless we encourage density, we're unlikely to see good urban mass transit since most people would rather drive all things being equal.
It's a little known fact that much of the Queens subway lines were built when the area was still mostly farmland. Check this article out: http://www.vanshnookenraggen.com/_index/2010/06/the-futureny...
We Americans are fond of saying that we can't have muni rail because our cities aren't dense enough. Well, reliable rail is the only thing that allows for greater density. In some cases city planners are starting to realize this and work with developers to add density and transit simultaneously. But it takes real leadership (or cojones, depending on your view) to build municipal rail that won't reach its potential for ten or twenty years -- but that's exactly what happened in New York and it has seemed to pay of very well.
There's a wonderful documentary on the NYC subway. At the end of the director's career - he basically stated he could keep building the subway for as long as he wanted - the subway would still fill to capacity.
I think one of the biggest problems was caused by the interstate system that went through cities. I can understand ring roads - but cities like Hartford, Providence, and Worcester are cleaved in two. It's just horrible.
It looks like your account was killed (maybe due to being inactive for 562 days?).
The car is the most inefficient, economically infeasible mode of transit known to human kind. For distances over 20 miles, if you can't beat car travel for a family of 4 (about 8 cents per mile per person) you suck at your job.
Airlines should be aiming for $0.05 per mile per person. If you pack people that tightly, there's no reason that it shouldn't be possible. European airlines do it. Fire deadwood (start with your 389 VPs) until you can deliver a fair price.
Last minute tickets and upper class tickets subsidize "cheap" fares.
There are the "gamey" cheap fares ($25 for NYC-LAX) that obviously exist to draw people in but don't actually produce profit, and then there are reasonably cheap ones ($150-300) on which the airline still makes a profit. There's no reason the latter needs to be offset by outright robbery (which the last-minute effect is).
The problem with the airlines is that they aren't even good at being greedy. They need to be bailed out every 3 years or so. If they were making "too much" profit, the solution would be obvious: buy their stock. But that's not the problem. The reason the tickets are so expensive is that they have hundreds of unnecessary executives paid 6- and 7-figure salaries to do absolutely nothing.
Like many other critics of cars, you seem to implicitly consider the value of travellers' time to be negligible, so that you don't need to consider it even in a context where they are talking about a cost meter ticking at 8 cents per minute or so.
There are annoying rhetorical tricks in the other direction employed by fans of cars, like pointedly ignoring the cost of pollution or pointedly pretending that expensive required-by-law facilities (notably parking) are not costs. But as much as those pro-car rhetorical tricks distort reality, they seldom seem to distort the reality of the situation as badly as the anti-car trick of treating the value of the traveller's time as negligible. Across the people who can afford to travel by car, "negligible compared to $4.80/hr" is an extremely bad approximation for the value of time.
Who says it's a panglossian necessity to spend 8+1 hours in an office and commuting 2 ways every day?
Best of possible worlds my ass.
Give everyone a Mininum Guaranteed Income, automate what can be automated with frickin' robots, turn most desk jobs into remote jobs, and let everyone else have a ROWE (Results Only Work Environment). Oh, and coddle the fuck out of everyone who wants to be an entrepreneur. (As opposed to jabbing them with bureaucratic spears and wishing for their doom as is currently done by society).
As the old saying goes, an idle mind is the devil's workshop. Productive work gives you a sense of accomplishment and purpose. People who don't have that, often turn into troublemakers of one kind or another.
Oh and read this if you're not convinced about the Guaranteed Minimum Income: http://www.xamuel.com/ten-reasons-for-guaranteed-minimum-inc...
Here's another good read: http://www.zpub.com/notes/idle.html
Also, one of the top 5 death bed regrets is working too much: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1643239
So rather than address cost, I want to see an Uber bus that transports people from residential areas downtown to replace crowded subways. The grown up version of a school bus. Market it as a fun experience and alternative to crowded trains. I wouldn't mind paying a premium for it.
The bus lanes have ticket-issuing cameras to ensure they stay free of cars for the buses to speed through. It might not be as fast as a subway on a good day, but at least there are attempts to offer new services.
Btw ... Uber is still cars. On a typical day, the NYC subway system carries 4 million riders. The estimate for taxis is far far less (probably less than 500K people).
By scanning I mean taking any object (or living form) and shoot it with some wave to obtain a matrix image (like MRI) but on an atom level.
By printing I mean you will have an .ato file just like a CAD drawing and printer will print a 3d object but instead of using plastic or some material it will print using single atoms.
This technology will ultimately solve all human problems, lets only pray that it will be developed by some consortium of civilized and reasonable countries.
Transportation will be fixed by ability to "teleport" people. your atom map will be saved and transferred over Internet to a destination, where a printer will print you out. Within the time once mastered this, we will be able to solve all health problems. You will be scanned and all your health issues fixed by an algorithm working on your image file, then from your image reprinted healthy, perhaps even without that pot belly.
Our cities will be rebuild (reprinted) from a scratch by this technology.
I know this sounds like a heavy delusional science fiction, but todays scientists are already able to change metal into gold by shifting atoms, its just process alone is extremely expensive, making it useless from a financial point of view.