'To change the world' is a terrible reason to do a startup | Hacker News Reader

'To change the world' is a terrible reason to do a startup

overnumerated.com

26 pointsdlf26 comments

Become a startup entrepreneur if you "want to change the world" is not the same as "to change the world". I also would not block on the word "change".

To me it means providing a significant contribution to the world evolution. There is some liberty degree in how we would contribute to its evolution and how much.

Another point is that I feel we shouldn't take this at 1rst degree. To me it means the initial author is talking of a life goal, not an objective. A goal is something we try to achieve, tend to, but it's ok to fail. An objective is something we have to achieve and it is bad to fail. In french there is a third level on top of these but I don't know how to translate it. It is a life ideal. (idéal de vie). This is just a general direction we define for our life. Whether we want to do good or bad, make significant contribution to the world evolution or help and support others to live their life and achieve their own goal.

The initial author is himself confusing objective, goal and ideal, but the post author too.

What I retain from the initial author is that beeing a startup entrepreneur is very hard, unsure and we have false assumptions on what it could yield to us : power, money, ...

You should do a startup because it's what you're meant to do, because you can't think of anything else you'd rather do, because you are driven to solve tough problems, and/or you're passionate about the problem you're trying to solve.

That's the part of the post I agree with.

I say if you want to do it to change the world, go work for an international non-governmental organization or UNICEF. What you do will actually have a greater chance of changing the world through those organizations.

Maybe you should plant trees or study migratory patterns of marine life or dig wells in Africa.

These are the parts that I don't agree with, and they come up a ton in these conversations. How is working at UNICEF more world changing than doing a start-up that solves tough problems? Same goes for the other examples. What the author describes in the top paragraph I quoted has the potential to be significantly more world changing for the subset of people who are facing that same tough problem.

To me, Libin's general thought was to be driven by the right reasons, and it's in line with what this author says. A large amount of responses to Libin's talk picked on his wording, but in the end the responses are saying the exact same thing, but without the exact phrasing of "change the world", as that is seemingly reserved for projects involved solely with charity, Africa and cancer.

Great Article. It is Ye Olde Reductio ad absurdum though. No rational peron goes into business just to change the world. No rational person goes into business just to make money. No rational person goes into business just because they are fed up of their current boss. As ever, it is a combination of all of them. A point in a high-dimensional cube, if you will.

"work for an international non-governmental organization or UNICEF. What you do will actually have a greater chance of changing the world through those organizations."

Citation needed!

Working for a charity will NOT change the world, since charity places are already oversubscribed. There's an interesting Oxford-based thinktank that works on the most effective forms of making a difference called 80,000 Hours. They're quite a good read, I'll leave the link here.

http://80000hours.org/

OT: I find very funny that 80K Hours singles out "banker" as a positively socially impacting career. I guess all those people that were evicted after the housing bubble collapsed don't count :)

Still, being able to borrow money to build a business used to be considered essential for a working economy...

Great resource. I generally agree and spotted that flaw in my logic as I wrote it, but it wasn't the point of the piece so I left it. There's plenty of ways to change the world, not all relating to charity. My point was that if you want to have a certain positive impact, don't tie it to a vehicle that has a 10 percent chance of success.

I might revisit the topic in another post of what it means to change the world, so I appreciate your contribution.

Well, helping at least 1-2 human beings is far more "changing the world" than making a "Facebook for pets", an "Instagram for police mugshots" or a "Dropbox for people literally dropping boxes".

I disagree with the logic behind this piece and I believe it's conflating expected value with utility.

Basically, if given a 0.1% chance of earning 50 billion dollars or a 50% chance of earning 3 million dollars, one could convincingly argue that the most rational choice is the latter because the marginal utility of money diminishes rapidly.

However, if given the choice between a 0.1% chance of saving 50 million lives vs a 50% chance of saving 30,000 lives, one could argue that the former is better since the marginal utility of saving lives is much more linear.

Except that's not his general point. It is not about economics or balance of probabilities. Economics is just another barrier to overcome for a startup.

That would be the case if there were any for profit startups that were actually saving lives, but most startups that are relevant to this forum are making life, at best, marginally better for the privileged class, which can conveniently be delineated by the fact that they have access to technology in the first place.

TLDR: (Using Phil Libin's own logic against him) Startups are likely to fail, so it's just as absurd to say you're doing it to change the world as it is to believe you're doing it for the money. You're still better off joining an organization that has momentum and resources.

This invites inevitable argument though, since: 1. It's endlessly debatable which companies are actually changing the world. 2. The ones most people think of first are based on charity, which is again arguable and limited to very short term gain.

1. Yes.

2. I don't think of the ones based on charity. The ones that come to mind are Google, Facebook, Twitter, Apple, and AOL (in its day).

My point was just that there are other ways to change the world. I used a poor and overdone example by work seemingly related to charity (how come no one is picking on the marine biology example), but you could very well have a world changing impact and be an author or a professor or a painter. Heck, you could be a mechanic or a stay-at-home mom. There's no reason changing the world has to be tied to profession at all.

I should have been more clear that I personally thought your article was spot on. I was only trying to summarize the debate brewing on HN.

Great blog post and really thought provoking.

Thanks! As were your comments!

I admittedly glossed over these issues in the post, but I didn't want to dwell on them because I thought it might detract from the overall message. I kind of did that anyways though.

I like HN because the quality of responses is so much higher than elsewhere, and because you have a forum for fleshing out the glaring issues left in the article. I might delve into the topics you mentioned a bit in future posts. One thing that I think drives people crazy is the whole "change the world" rhetoric in general. It might be useful to explore what that actually means.

A very cogent article. Having had my own experiences of startups this is the best takeaway:

"innate driving force that is intrinsically tied to doing the startup."

This applies to all types of startup, not just software/tech.

The author of this article seems to be confusing "changing the world" with helping people. UNICEF and similar organizations are great at helping people, but they really aren't meant to change the world. They just make the existing one a little less terrible for those who are worst off. I can't imagine a compelling argument saying that digging wells or tree planting has changed the world more that Facebook or Google over the last 15 years. Whether those changes have been for the best is open to discussion, but the fact that many startups have in fact changed the world in significant ways is hard to dispute.

No, I think I quite understand their world changing impact, but those are two examples of the very few companies that have reached the sort of scale where they actually change the world. They represent the vast minority of successful startups, which are a vast minority of all startups.

In any case, what is changing the world if not helping people? Or, as I phrased it in the post, improving the circumstance of mankind?

There are plenty of ways to do it, and it need not be charity (marine biology or journalism, the other examples from the post, are not charity) and it need not be altogether altruistic in purpose, but to change the world in a desirable way necessarily means helping people. For example, Google helps me find information. Facebook helps me stay connected with friends and family.

Everything we do changes the world, even if it's only a little. Our influence is small but it's all we've got. Use it in the best way you can.

And if by chance you're a giant success, all the better.

The "change the world" rhetoric that most of these startups use is marketing copy to get naive engineers to work for them for half market salary. At most of the hot VC startups, the rank-and-file tend to believe in "the mission" but the higher-ups don't.

It's like many religions. The peasants believe it and work dutifully, but the high priests know it's bullshit but keep it going because it works.

For the record, I think the 2009-12 "social" startup boom is Over. The economic bubble might stick around for a couple years, but we're already at the point where VCs and management have laid down their terms and figured out where to draw the lines, and going into (or trying to start) one of these "hot" companies makes no sense. You're not really better off (from a career perspective) working at a hot VC-funded company than you are taking the stable, boring job at an insurance company in the suburbs. Not anymore. If you're not rich (and 99% who got involved in that racket aren't) you missed the opportunity. Time to let it go and move on.

What I hope to see is more of a movement into Real Technology. That's where we should be doubling down. Things that might make you crack open that linear algebra or logic textbook. There are real problems worth solving, and creating the next build-to-flip IUsedThisToilet.com is not one of them.

>The "change the world" rhetoric that most of these startups use is marketing copy to get naive engineers to work for them for half market salary. At most of the hot VC startups, the rank-and-file tend to believe in "the mission" but the higher-ups don't.

So, mostly like any political party!

I agree with this. I am a college student and I recently left my part time job at a start up. It went from trying to change how people interact across the globe to trying to put anything out there that would help the company survive. Got tired of seeing failed prototypes and never would be too soon for hearing the word "pivot" again

Why not start a startup simply because you're curious what would happen? You don't have to change the world. I think it's fine to just have an adventure (with the understanding that it may be a huge number of hours, fraught with frustration, etc).

I disagree. Fred Wilson puts it much more succinctly than I could:

http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2012/04/can-the-crowd-be-more-patien...

And yet he seems to argue that the sort of world changing things we need aren't in the wheelhouse of startups, in the internet/mobile sense, which are the sort of startups that Phil Libin argued should only be done if you mean to change the world.

Fred Wilson's post seems to advocate crowdsourcing the funding of big, world changing ideas like curing cancer. Tackling these sort of problems is hardly prevalent among startups, but as far as it goes it's fine. But then changing the world is still an extrinsic motivation. You're not intrinsically driven to the idea of a startup or an obsession with the problem your trying to solve. I tend to think this is more problematic with the really big, world changing sort of problems with a long time horizon. It's also unclear to me how crowdfunding these sort of things would work. Would you need to renew funding annually? Would people continue funding you if they didn't see marked progress? ...maybe that's the point of his post, but in any case it's tangential at best to the present discussion.

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