The Echo Chamber of Silicon Valley | Hacker News Reader

The Echo Chamber of Silicon Valley

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79 pointssethbannon30 comments

How do we know which problems are fake problems and which ones are real problems, though? Sometimes it's obvious, sometimes it might not be as clear.

Twitter probably seemed like a fake problem at its inception (post 140 characters to a personal blog from your phone), and yet it's been adopted and used daily by many, many people outside the Valley. Google's founders weren't thinking about ads when they first built their search engine, but apparently the ads they serve are considered lucrative enough by their customers to turn the company huge. (Of course there are the data privacy issues, but on a more cynical note someone's needs are being served.)

On the other hand, Better Place seemed like a useful idea. EVs presumably aren't more widely adopted because of range anxiety and charge times, so why not create a business model and technology to swap out batteries and make recharging as painless as filling up at a gas station? But Better Place is dead now and Tesla is building out its fast charger network and selling more and more cars.

Does the problem directly cause death, injury, or disability? If so, real problem. Everything else is just a matter of optimizing your level of comfort in the absence of real problems.

We can then talk about grading problem importance by its distance from death, injury, or disability (e.g. it's a problem in the solution to a problem in the solution to a real problem), and the probabilities and amounts of death, injury, or disability it does, can, or might in the future cause.

Under that definition ... there's hardly anyone working on "real" problems. Even Nasa.

Space travel can be viewed as a very abstract indirect approach to "real" problems, for a variety of reasons, depending on your views of NASA's role in technological advance and the future of our planet.

Just to be a devils advocate, perhaps it is important to let NASA know that you will be 5 minutes late for a meeting. No, the single instance may not present a life or death situation, but maybe at some point the cumulative effect of solving these first world type problems can have a trickle down effect on making the world a better place for everyone.

I saw this as someone that doesn't use uber, twitter, twist or any of the other referenced products.

Let's take education and NASA: It's fairly obvious that bad education, on a mass scale, eventually, causes death and/or disability on a mass scale. It just takes time.

It takes more time for an existential crisis to emerge because we paid no attention to getting off this rock. But it will surely come.

Exactly. It's something to think about when looking at the world that is and the world that might be.

NASA Earth-observing satellites address a range of very "real" problems affecting people's lives: hurricanes, severe weather, fire, earthquakes. In the longer term, climate change and the many variables that affect it.

I would consider improving education a 'real problem,' and that doesn't directly cause death, injury or disability (unless you want to call those uneducated 'disabled').

Ditto AirBnB spun as "renting out air bed during large conferences and other events" is solving a big city problem. Spin it as "renting rooms and houses to visitors", and all of a sudden it's applicable to a large market.

No such thing as a fake problem. Just make something people want, and as long as you're able to extract enough value from your users to continue making that thing, you're likely creating more value than you're capturing, making the world an incrementally better place (excluding gross negative externalities).

Maybe it'd be helpful for founders to spend some time in other areas of the country, especially the interior.

> How do we know which problems are fake problems and which ones are real problems, though?

Which ones will people work on? Which ones will they spend the fruits of their labour (their wages) on? There's your answer.

Twitter and Google search are presumably very good for their customers (the advertisers).

One data point: my mom (in Minnesota) has repeatedly tried to get me to use Twist when I head home to visit her and my dad. I had never heard of the app, and I live in San Francisco.

Hmmm. Where else can we find an echo chamber ...

> "As George Packer wrote in The New Yorker last week"

Maybe enclosing the New York media?

Seriously, though, we are all products of our environments, and we leverage the opportunities we have on hand. I don't see this as a problem for SV. If the ideas get tired and the solutions are too myopic to generate revenue, then the next wave of entrepreneurs will realize that they need to reach beyond the Bay Area to find problems that software can help solve. Ideas feed other ideas, and solving trivial problems can sometimes lead to solving bigger ones.

Twist seems to have a nice, if somewhat infrequent usecase. But this seems like a function that could very easily become part of an iOS update...is it being too cynical to say that whatever the merits of the Twist app, that the $6M funding is fueled by the expectation of an Apple buyout?

Not a bad use of $6M...it's a useful feature, and how much time/money would it otherwise have taken to light the spark in Apple to have it become a built-in function to iOS?

You mean like something besides Find Friends or Google Latitude?

Find Friends is probably one of the least usable location services out there -- it is so slow to find a location so as to be unusable. Latitude is so complicated to get set up that I find that unusable as well.

Twist, on the other hand, is fast to use and reduces number of taps to do things using a number of smart tricks, and was clearly crafted with a lot of thought to making it so.

My comment was in direct response to this:

> But this seems like a function that could very easily become part of an iOS update.

Regardless, Twist is essentially banking on both Google and Apple not improving the quality of their products that do the same thing.

I agree that the investment into Twist is probably banking on an 'acquihire.'

So Twist is an app that says "i'm an asshole who can not plan my time and do not value your time" in an intelligent way?

Yes. Those are the only reasons someone might be running late.

If one is late enough that one uses an app to tell others that one is late, then yes.

If one needs to be somewhere half an hour away, one does not leave 30 minutes beforehand; one leaves 35-45 minutes beforehand, or even more, depending on importance (e.g. one probably leaves for one's wedding very early indeed, just in case a bridge drops and one's engine drops on the same trip).

Arriving late says, 'I either did not care enough about you to leave early enough, or I did not care enough about you to accurately model the journey duration to anticipate delays.'

I'm biased because I thought of about making an app similar to twist, but I think this is a great app, and not just something that appeals to "techies" or whatever we are calling nerds now. In fact, I think it has the potential to reduce road accidents by reducing unnecessary phone calls while driving.

The quote at the end, explains a little on how SV nurtures the entrepreneurial spirit: “One of perhaps the most compelling things about Silicon Valley is that it is a place where you can fail, and if you do, you can raise money and try again,” said Mark Leslie, a retired entrepreneur and lecturer at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. “It’s a miraculous place; the streets are lined with gold here.”

Yeah, that says it all. Rich people can blow millions down the toilet, and still be ok. Then do it again and again forever! Real people are lucky to try even once. If they fail, they're homeless.

If you've already got millions to burn, you've already succeeded. Surely you must have something better to spend it on than building silly apps.

The only thing that jumped out at me is why Twist needed 6 million dollars worth of funding and why they have 10 employees.

Really?

Because funding is not always about the idea, sometimes it's about the people. VCs make bets hoping that some of them will pay off. A good bet is to bet one a guy (2 in this case) who have succeeded before.

So Twist sounds ridiculous, sure. But so did twitter.

Twist isn't solving a fake problem anymore the many services trying to solve the problem of hailing a cab.

That said, sometimes I think it would be nice if a lot of these micro solutions could be aggregated into macro solutions ;)

New York journalists sure are interested in software developers on the other side of the continent. They can't write anything serious about the tech industry because they don't understand it. But they've perfected the art of link-bait titles. How many so-called 'real problems' has this writer solved? Zero.

Not only is this a troll comment, but it's based on false assumptions. Nick Bilton lives in San Francisco. Also, he knows how to code and used to work in the NYT tech development arm.

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