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Comment by cmsmith | Hacker News Reader

It is sad that with all the would-be entrepreneurs flocking to Silicon Valley and looking for startup ideas, they all shy away from 'hard' problems like disrupting the current ISP model.

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There are many types of hard problems. Some are hard because the data just isn't there, and someone needs to connect the dots.

The ISP model is hard because it just requires fucking shit tons of money to solve, and there's no getting around the tragedy of the commons problem. With telecom infrastructure, you can either use wired (expensive and with a heavily fragmented regulatory environment) or wireless (expensive with extremely limited spectrum - see the $12+ billion spectrum auction happening now).

Disruption is well and good, but it requires new technology that delivers similar services for a fraction of the cost. Until someone figures out a way to bring the economics of delivering content to end users down by a factor of several hundred, we're stuck with the current ISP situation.

BTW, speaking of gigabit disruption in San Francisco: https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/gigabit-wireless-to-the-h...

Even technologies like this face many of the same challenges as traditional wired or wireless solutions: operating at any sort of scale is tremendously expensive. I wouldn't call this "disruptive" as much as a local workaround to an ineffective local regulatory system.

This is full of problems as far as i understand. Google and read more about it?

What problems?

Requires line of sight, is expensive, has high latency, and is somewhat flaky.

I know someone who has this service in San Francisco - they only have it because it's literally their only option besides ADSL.

I think that smart people in both business and technology are attracted to hard problems that are intellectually challenging. Dealing with the corruption and the entrenched bureaucracy of local, state, and federal governments doesn't qualify as an "interesting" problem for these types of people. It's why you don't see many scientists in elected office.

I used to feel the same way, except that this really boxes "intellectually challenging" into a fascinatingly narrow set of problems.

The meme that dealing with problems of physics and mathematics is somehow harder or more noble than dealing with problems of people should probably be considered harmful.

I don't think my definition is narrow or restrictive at all. You're forgetting all the other fields of human interest, like the humanities, healthcare, transportation, engineering, the arts, etc. That's a pretty wide swath and only a small subset of the "interesting" problems in those fields are dependent on getting your hands dirty with politics.

It couldn't have anything to do with the fact that those fighting corruption are so often tarred and feathered and hung up as examples?

Just take a look at Aaron Swartz, Chelsea Manning or Edward Snowden.

I would say that fighting corruption is the opposite approach to getting things done politically.

It's easier to write a javascript framework than it is to solve the hard problems.

If by easier you mean "doesn't require vast amounts of capital" then yah.

I don't think you can claim that it's "solving" the problem if you can throw money at it. That's the business-world equivalent of "brute forcing"... and what we've learned from technology is that you're required to throw ever-larger amounts of resources at the problem until it eventually overwhelms any real-world capacity to "solve" it.

The problem is that ISPs don't need disruption- local politics does. As hard as starting a new bank or writing a new OS is, who wants to sign up for disrupting every local and state government in the country and incur the cost of laying all that fiber? This is why only Google is doing it. They have the money to burn and the clout to get municipalities to cooperate through all or nothing deals.

It's not too surprising. Look at the crap companies like Uber and AirBnb get, even on HN, for disrupting government rackets. I would shy away from that as well, even though there's obviously big opportunities there.

Only to become yet another racket. And maybe even more harmful than the last one.

Well, I wouldn't say they _all_ shy away from it.

But I agree with your premise, that hard problems with large rewards require a different sort of VC pitch and may take longer to see a payoff. And are completely worth pursuing!

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