Ask YC: Why aren't you thinking more about water?
Do any of you geeks give a shit about the water problem? Seriously. You know, the billion people who's life is a day to day struggle to find potable water. I was thinking what an xkcd style comparison of "time the self styled smartest and most ambitious young people in America waste each day checking twitter and circle jerking on blogs" and "time the smartest and most ambitious young people think about the 1 billion people with a water problem each day" would look like. This graph would illustrate an efficiency problem on Spaceship Earth.
It seems obvious to me that if the water problem is going to get solved over the next few years, entrepreneurs will have to be the ones to get it done. In order for entrepreneurs to solve it, they have to be thinking on it. Are you thinking about it enough that your unconscious mind is working on it while you are doing dishes? Probably not.
Most entrepreneurs seem to be dumb-shit smart kids who read Ayn Rand at the right (wrong?) time during puberty and confuse her ego-inflating narcissistic bullshit about selfishness with reality because of the confluence of hormonal effects on cognition in teens, social isolation, misdirected anger at mediocre school institutions, and large doses of the industrial chemicals that turn mountain dew yellow. I'm not talking to this group, the greedy robots blindly running a cosmically suicidal program flashed into your brain by reading Ayn Rand during a time of imprint vulnerability. We already know you're inhuman fucks who only want to have money because there are other people that don't have it.
I'm talking to the few people who realize life on earth doesn't have to be a zero sum game.
There are a lot of (few?) entrepreneurs who both aren't dumb shit smart kid Rand robots, and who nonetheless aren't thinking of water a little each day. I'm asking them: Why not think about water a tiny bit more? Just have it a little more in your head? Spend five minutes you would of spent clicking through pics on hotornot each day to read or think a tiny bit about water?
Why aren't you thinking more about water? If I'm wrong, and entrepreneurs aren't the ones to solve it, who will? How can people help with time, with money? What can you do to help or help other people help? Why not spend 5 minutes a day thinking about it on the off chance you might serendipitously find a way to contribute something cross disciplinary or be more likely to give $$$ if you do get big?
Or do you just completely not give a fuck, since you don't have to either see their faces as they struggle to decide if a third day of dehydration is better or worse then drinking contaminated water that might make them sick, or listen to their little kid cry for days in a row until being shipped off to an abusive orphanage when the parent dies from the choice a week ago?
Paul Graham, do you encourage your entrepreneurs to think on the water problem, or your successes to contribute to it with some of their financial rewards?