Comment by dakrisht | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dakrisht | Hacker News Reader

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Might have to print this out and paste on a wall in the office. Awesome

Unfortunately, a lot of young kids are wired to look for the next Yo and or spend their energy and talents on things that don't really matter. It's crazy out there - the whole "make an app, get users and cash out quickly" mindset. It's very bad and is a major reason why we see so many crap companies and apps launching all the time. But this won't last. Andreessen had a good tweet today "your startup is not the next WhatsApp." And it isn't. The 0.01% chance of this happening, already happened.

There are so many exciting and important problems that need smart people to solve them. Everything you've mentioned from the downright garbage that are EMRs at hospitals, to massive medical devices that can be shrunk, to endless paper work for cops and so many other industries who still use scanning and OCR software to organize their databases. Large but seemingly not-that-complex (from an engineering standpoint) problems. These - these need to be fixed.

I see a bunch of startup listing services springing up, e.g., Product Hunt and at least three others that have landed in my mailbox in the past couple weeks, which send out a daily list of new / newly discovered startups.

It's kind of amazing that these services can find 30 or 40 new startups every single day -- a thousand per month, 12,000 per year -- and, even more amazingly, I suspect they're only capturing a small percentage of the real total.

From what I could tell after a couple of exhausting weeks reading these emails at least 99% of these startups are almost completely unnecessary. I'm not using "99%" and "completely unnecessary" as rhetorical bludgeons; I mean quite literally that less than 1% of these startups have anything more than the tiniest smidgen of utility or innovation to justify their existence.

I stopped reading those "startup news" emails because it was depressing to see so much talent and effort being squandered. I don't know exactly what else all these people could/should be working on, but if they can't find some genuinely useful ideas for startups then they (and the world in general) would be better off to just spend their spare time volunteering or reading books or hiking or having coffee with friends.

> they (and the world in general) would be better off to just spend their spare time volunteering or reading books or hiking or having coffee with friends

But those aren't the viable alternatives! These aren't typically wealthy people with time on their hands, they're people trying to find a good place for themselves in the economy by working on something that they think people will like. The real alternative is working for a bigger company, in which their marginal contribution may or may not be more useful to themselves and society, depending on the company, and on their role in it. It's possible to do something useful either as a big cog in a small machine or a small cog in a big machine, but there's no guarantee either way.

What I'd really like to see would be more "small businesses" and fewer "startups", but the economics of the software industry at the moment don't seem to encourage that.

"What I'd really like to see would be more 'small businesses' and fewer 'startups', but the economics of the software industry at the moment don't seem to encourage that."

My guess is that there are currently many more small software businesses than startups, but we don't hear a lot about them because (1) they're targeting business segments that we're not familiar with (e.g., writing accounting software for law practices, or creating web-based front ends for legacy COBOL systems) and (2) the media doesn't find them compelling enough to report on.

That definitely has the ring of truth, thanks for giving me some perspective!

Isn't it better to solve tough niche problems while being on a salary or already rich and experienced instead of adding that to an already hard problem of starting up a business?

That's somewhat true, and to the extent it's true, it's an argument for why most people shouldn't be doing startups -- if you're not yet able to start a business that solves a genuine problem, then don't start a business.

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