Comment by incongruity | Hacker News Reader

Comment by incongruity | Hacker News Reader

Technology may change quickly, but what doesn't change so quickly are the needs and wants of customers or the rules of economics. Long term viability is still essential for shareholder value – but not necessarily VC value.

But, I digress... Yes, life has changed since 2007, but many of the same fundamental problems still persist.

If I may get on a soap-box that I've borrowed from others wiser and more well-spoken, what have we done with this fast-paced technology boom?

With an exciting few exceptions, most of it has been centered around thinks like "social networking" -- chatting with friends, posting pictures, playing games, reviewing and "checking-in" at various places and things like that. What has this mind-blowing tech revolution really done to enhance the quality of life of the average user? Very little.

And that is a major reason why you don't see long-term viability in business plans – because the products themselves don't solve long-term problems and real needs.

Fix healthcare – heck, fix a part of healthcare. Improve transportation. Improve education; teach people something. Improve the looming water or energy crisis. Encourage more self-sufficency. Make products that get people jobs. Build efficiencies between businesses, between businesses and consumers. Etc, etc. etc. Become essential. Then you'll see long-term business opportunities.

The kicker is that those are all need driven – not technology driven... yet so many people, like the author of this post, are so tech focused they still miss the fact that tech is just the toolset used to deliver value to customers – by meeting their needs.

The reality is that the people investing the money don't want hard problems.

They just want scale, viral growth, network effect, more ways to sell advertising. Most of the money today is on completely superfluous crap, and that's why the economy is on the mud.

Why invest on improving individuals, when you can just distract them and reach for their pockets?

As I said previously – solving bigger/hard problems is one path to long-term success.

IMHO, this is one of the more clear cases where VC interests are directly at odds with the interests of post-IPO investors – particularly the ones more likely to be interested in long-term gains (people investing for retirement/retirement funds among others)

This is a near perfect summary of my problems with the tech business (particular the startup scene) and why I wouldn't want to get into it. People are so focused on making things that I find to be totally trivial and banal. How many more note-taking apps, organizers, and social whatevers does the world really need?

Right, there's so much rhetoric about being a producer and not a consumer, when (as you point out) the things being produced are mostly pretty underwhelming. As if it doesn't really matter too much what you're making as long as you're a maker and not one of those yucky consumer zombies.

Indeed. Ironic that "being a producer" is heralded so when the marginal cost of production of these goods really is around ~$0.00 in many/most/virtually all cases. I'm just say'n is all...

The point of being a producer is not that you have to work on the biggest world-changing idea from the get-go; the point is to get on the bandwagon of producing, practice makes perfect.

It's said that it takes 10000 hours of practice to become good at something; what's wrong with building another text app or music app while practicing? It's all experience, building up to something great in the future.

In one sense you are correct. But do we really need so many people doing what is essentially journeyman work, building trivial one-feature products with piles of VC funding that forces them to produce things that make money, rather than things that are good or do any any good? There are a lot of deserving open source projects that you can practice on, rather than stumbling around trying to figure out what you want to do while looking for an exit to justify your latest round of funding.

> what's wrong with building another text app or music app while practicing? It's all experience, building up to something great in the future.

I don't mind you practicing for 20,000 hours, but please do not publish online and do not spam the internet with "your text app or music app while [you were] practicing".

There may be a value in some early writings of Shakespeare or Tolstoy, but I cannot possibly imagine anyone willing to go through all the clutter that the brightest writers ever written, from the very first dot they've put on a blank piece of paper.

>People are so focused on making things that I find to be totally trivial and banal.

Then build something that isn't.

I disagree with your main point.

I agree that healthcare, transportation, education are vitally important areas that constant innovation will yield results for everyone, consumers, producers, governments, workers.

However, the social networking changes have enabled new knowledge pathways and relationships that simply could not have existed more than a decade ago. Sure, much of it is just superfluous fluff and inane posturing. But then, probably the majority of information transmitted over the telegraph, then the telephone, and now the internet has always been inane banter and useless chatting.

But just because telegrams were full of news about new babies, birthday wishes and promotion announcements didn't devalue the worth of the nascent communications industry.

What happens when new ways of communicating occur is that entirely new ways of working and collaborating grow out of it.

In just about every case, connecting with people leads to greater understanding, tolerance, and entirely new knowledge patterns.

Will there be high-profile social networking flameouts? Yes. Will the future of communication, relationships, production and consumption be shaped by these patterns? Undoubtedly yes.

It seems galling to many that optimising day-to-day communications between friends gets more attention than healthcare, but humans are a social species. Chatting and sharing information has always been at the core of being human. If a core function of being human improves, surely humanity itself has been improved?

I believe the parent's main point is that there are plenty of fields in which longer-term thinking is possible. I think there is a further subpoint that these fields have Real Problems to which a competent solution will bring predictable, concrete wealth to both founders and society.

It's the difference between finding a problem and figuring out what technological change can address it, vs finding a cool new technology and looking around for some sort of problem to apply it. The later approach produces a lot of imagined problems and business failures.

One weakness in SV monoculture is the preponderance of kids who have never done anything but tech; the only Real Problems they know about are basic human drives like communication and how to find the best local happy hour. Not that this doesn't produce some occasional spectacular successes, but it keeps the-best-and-the-brightest all playing in a very expensive tournament with little social value generated by 4th+ place finishers.

The contrarian in me thinks that fresh CS grads who want to be entrepreneurs should immediately take non-programming jobs in some boring old-line industry like banking or retail or government and spend a year learning the problem domain. Then sit down to figure out what software to write. Or put it this way: I really don't care about Twitter or Foursquare or even Facebook. I'd pay good money for a Banksimple invite.

Very well said! I agree.

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