Comment by IgorPartola | Hacker News Reader

Comment by IgorPartola | Hacker News Reader

> We are living in a time of Great Change, and also a time of Not-So-Great Change. The tidal wave of innovation that has swept out from Silicon Valley, transforming the way we communicate, read, shop, and travel, has carried along with it an epic shit-ton of digital flotsam. Looking around at the newly minted billionaires behind the enjoyable but wholly unnecessary Facebook and WhatsApp, Uber and Nest, the brightest minds of a generation, the high test-scorers and mathematically inclined, have taken the knowledge acquired at our most august institutions and applied themselves to solving increasingly minor First World problems. The marketplace of ideas has become one long late-night infomercial. Want a blazer embedded with GPS technology? A Bluetooth-controlled necklace? A hair dryer big enough for your entire body? They can be yours! In the rush to disrupt everything we have ever known, not even the humble crostini has been spared.

This. It feels like we are just trying to solve the smallest problems that will make us millionaires. With the resources available, why not tackle something a bit more fundamental than laundry?

It may come as a surprise to people who read lots of startup news, because you tend to only hear about the successes, but generally it is not very easy to disrupt any business, or even become a millionaire. Achieving those for e.g. laundry might not make the world a much better place, but it is still quite an achievement.

The other side of this "wholly unnecessary"-business, is that with rising standards of living, necessities are already fairly well provided for, so it is quite obvious that any future desired consumer good will be mostly in the unnecessary category. A funny read about these types of things is "The Idea of Luxury: A Conceptual and Historical Investigation" by Christopher J. Berry, where he describes 18th century philosophers discussing what is luxury (i.e unnecessary) and what is necessity. They end up with a paradoxical example regardning the scant clothing of "savages" (that is non-europeans in warmer climates), and cannot resolve the fact that despite this clothing being really primitive by their standards, it is not strictly necessary for survival, or even most other activities, so they must conclude that even that is just luxury.

But this stuff applies only in the narrow echo chamber of SF, LA, NYC, etc. Fresh water is a necessity, and more people don't have that than will ever be a customer of Washio. I am all for people innovating anything and everything, but let's put things into perps practice: this particular service provides a luxury version of an already luxury service for the richest parts of the world.

Option 1: Split a few hundred developers into groups of 5-10 each, and throw money at them until you generate a few hits (we'll assume hardware costs are negligible because for this group they are). Offer low salaries and 'equity' in return, putting as much risk on the shoulders of your employees as you can - after all, for the successful ones you can always screw them out of their shares later. For now, if you do this at scale, you can be reasonably certain of profitability.

Option 2: Form a single company where you have to manage that entire group toward a single goal, take all the risk, probably pay some non-negligible hardware costs if the problem is interesting enough, etc. Then you either solve the problem or you fail utterly, and even then you still get to find out if anyone really wanted the problem solved in the first place, so you can still fail utterly. Then once you get past that, you can deal with patent trolls and copycats, and for each case you have about 50% probability at best of getting any kind of justice at all.

Option 3: Do the first to fund the second. Sadly there is only one Elon Musk, though.

You could do a lot worse than laundry. It's something everyone does that takes up a non-trivial amount of time to do. Free up 20-30 minutes a day for millions of people and you are talking about real value.

If you try to guess what's "fundamental" you run into all the problems of a planned economy. If you stick to what will make you a millionaire then you know you're producing something people actually want, and the invisible hand keeps everything efficient.

We have a fairly new bunch of technologies with the internet. We're still at the point where people are exploring the problem space, what our technology can solve, what it can't solve and suggesting future directions. We're looking at the "adjacent possible" to quote Stuart Kauffman.

To put it another way, we have a new tool, all of this is just testing this new tool against the world to see where it works and where it doesn't.

Or, instead of making it so those with disposable income no longer have to do laundry, innovate laundry itself so that no one is burdened by laundry.

Making it easier for someone else to do your laundry so you don't have to is not moon-shot innovation. It's not worth doing.

Food, clothing, shelter are as fundamental as it gets

Washing clothes for those with money to spare is not the same as providing clothes for those without. It's tangential rather than fundamental.

By "washing" I think you mean driving dirty clothes a small distance so that immigrants can wash them for you while you take a cut. Much cushier gig than actual washing.

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