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Comment by damnusername | Hacker News Reader

I submitted this to slashdot a few weeks ago, but it got declined:

"For some time now, I have been following the "startup scene" and frankly, I am left with a sense of dismay. How many of the startups actually do anything of any real value to mankind? It seems to me that the startup ideas just keep getting more ridiculous and stupid by the day and I think I would go as far as to call the whole thing deeply broken.

I am not going to name any specific startup, but I would like to ask the readers of Slashdot a question.

I know this is not how the world works, but I am still curious to know what kind of ideas would prosper if the primary aim of a startup was not to make as much money as possible as quickly as possible. So, if your startup idea would be judged by the amount of good it would to mankind, what would it be?"

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Where has this concept of "world changing is important, and a business must be of real value to mankind" come from in recent years? Who gives a shit how incredibly, ultimately, world changingly seriously important the work is of a business?

Since when did this become some sort of measure of the worth of a tech company?

Sounds like misguided hippy shit to me.

Bill Gates, Larry Ellison and Steve Jobs didn't set out to change the world and "do something incredibly important for mankind", despite what the message might have become in later years. They all set out to do things they were interested in, pursuing technology for its own sake, as most people were back in the 1970's.

These days startups seem to need to feel that to justify their existence they need to be "changing the world" or "doing something important for mankind" or "giving back to the community". There's no need to justify the existence of a business. Do it for the cash, do it for fun, do it to scratch your sense of ambition, do it because you think it's a good idea, even if some pompous git stands on a high horse and looks to the sky and proclaims "this business is not changing mankind for the better, I am dismayed at the trivial nature of this endeavour, I deem it of little value".

Well, that's ok, we all see things differently. And I guess, I don't have a problem with that. If that is what you want to do, go for it. But I would rather not be called some pompous git, I really think that is as far from what I am as possibly can be. Ok, I can be an asshole sometimes, but I try not to be.

It's pompous to judge the startups you see against some measure of "importance to mankind". Sadly many startups seem to judge themselves against the same standard and seem to have some sense of guilt if they aren't creating clean water for millions in the desert.

Perhaps you should rejoice in the fucking incredible explosion of energy and creativity and effort that the entire world is putting into trying to find uses for the Internet.

Just relax with your hippy ideals. Have fun.

Trying to find uses for the internet? Oh well. If you think it is pompous to "judge the startups you see against some measure of "importance to mankind"" I think there is a problem, and you are probably part of it. I don't want to argue. Just go make lots of money and find some use for the internet and all is well.

It's exactly because all these startups pretend to be "changing the world" that they become measured by these promises. And obviously most come up short.

But that doesn't need to be a bad thing. Paying lip service to "real" progress, especially when it concerns poverty/environment/democracy etc, may actually lead to actual progress down the road.

Where has this need come from for startups to feel illegitimate unless they are changing the world, giving back to the community, bringing world peace blah blah

Well, if you start pitching this to everybody and their mom too, people will start to measure you up based on this.

At first it was pretty rational to present yourself in a way that gets you that 15 minutes. Now, I don't know, but HN is full of startups trying to revolutionize something instead of incrementally "disrupting" a set of incumbents.

Interesting. I don't think there is such an explicit need. I blame Google and their "Don't be Evil" tagline.

On the other hand, two other popular startup mantras "making products that people love" or "fixing a problem that people have" are quite easy to spin to be worthy and good.

Take heart, and don't lose too much cynicism. People feel like they have to include all this "hippy shit" because of the exact reason this question was asked - "if only I could find a good company who's mission I believe in!"

Too many companies making incremental BS apps or IT pipeline tech that delivers cat pictures 0.1 ms faster. And both groups ("we're bringing Utopia to Earth", "we'd mug you for cash") are still doin it cause it looks like it makes money, or people advise them they need to say these things to make money, or it'll get chicks / dudes, whatever - no matter what they say out loud. "Silicon Valley" is pretty spot on in that regard.

It's just a pendelum swing. In a little while we'll be back to "greed is good" while we help people 'connect' with high school friends they never actually liked.

> Who gives a shit how incredibly, ultimately, world changingly seriously important the work is of a business?

I don't give a shit about how world-changing a business is, but I do care that companies should be driven for more than just making money. Most companies aim to be profitable, but if that's the only goal then they're primed for corruption (even on a minor scale). Who cares so long as profits keep growing, dog eat dog, right?

There's a difference between 'Can I do something?' and 'Should I do something?', I see no harm in wanting companies that consider the latter.

Wasn't putting "a computer on every desk and in every home" Microsoft's mission?

I think a lot of startups are solving important problems that might not be obvious.

Any Musk startup - Tesla (electric vs. oil consumption), SpaceX (building space "colonies"), SolarCity (alternate energy), Paypal (payments).

You also have Uber (limiting cars on the street & oil consumption), AirBnb (better utilization of current buildings rather than building additional hotels). Even stuff like meerkat, etc could potentially be used in lieu of expensive meetings across country (further travel & ancillary costs).

I do agree that "change the world" is an overprevalent mission statement & too broad to be useful, but many are solving problems in a way that might not be obvious at first.

If Meerkat is a productivity enhancer, then surely Yo is one as well - when people don't have to write text messages, it saves time for something else.

Live streaming tech can certainly use push forwards.

Communication methods that people laugh at (AIM instant messaging) can be reappropriated into something useful (hipchat, slack) years later.

AirBnB is more about exploiting cost differentials by avoiding regulation, isn't it? When i use it, and the people I know making money on it, are exactly taking advantage of this versus "better utilization". In fact, it's actually the opposite, at least in places like SF, because units that would otherwise house residents are now being used to house hotel guests.

> AirBnB is more about exploiting cost differentials by avoiding regulation, isn't it?

That's a story one-side uses and in SF that can certainly be the case.

But, in some cases, I think people would rather stay in places that are less "developed" or taken over by hotels and stay at local BnBs.

For the purpose of "better utilization" there is no difference between residents and tourists. Airbnb puts more people into the same space.

Oh, FFS. Tesla has done a fine job at showing electric cars are feasible, for sure. But without real innovation and progress in emission-free baseload electricity generation (i.e. fission or fusion) it has negligible effect on reducing GHG emissions.

Anyone care to explain why I get downvoted for stating an accepted fact? Take e.g. the IEA Blue Map scenario (50% reduction in GHG emissions by 2050), which depends heavily on electric vehicles. It also requires a 320% increase in nuclear power generation.

I feel like at least in this thread, you're forcing a square peg in a round hole. It's asking for technically challenging startups- there are plenty of startups doing amazing, world-changing work that isn't technically challenging, but more socially challenging.

You are probably correct. I just get a little frustrated sometimes. Sorry :)

No worries. It's easy to get disillusioned when the tools to surround yourself with better options aren't very well developed.

This is because startups are not supposed to be working on these "seemingly big" problems. If a problem looks big and looks like it potentially has a huge market, every other large company in the field would be already working on this. As a startup, it is stupid to try to tackle something that obviously big. That's why most successful startups start out as something that doesn't look threatening. Of course, there are genuinely ridiculous ones like "uber for clowns", "kickstarter for baristas", "airbnb for prostitutes", etc. but I can guarantee if you look back in a decade, what actually changed the world will have been what you now consider ridiculous.

In Berlin, there is the 'Social Impact Hub'

http://socialimpact.eu/

of which I am not affiliated with nor won't endorse here in any way. Sadly, in Germany at least, startups that aim for maximum positive impact and less so profit, are called 'social startups' which outside of Germany probably has a completely different connotation.

The news websites I usually frequent, are not very full of news; they are rather SV & VC company theory megaphones. Avoiding those websites sometimes leads one to people with a bit different entrepreneurial mindset.

This having said, would you work for such a company? And which compromises would you accept (on the ethics-, but also wage-scale)?

If you are asking me, my answer is yes. I do not care very much for money. If I make enough so that I can eat and not have to live in complete misery, I am ok.

Ethics, that is harder. I guess if you look hard enough you can find problems with anything, but that's probably just the way the world is. If it does more good than harm, it's ok in my book.

Value is ultimately a subjective term. Your perception of value is different than my perception of value, which is different than millions if not billions of other people's perception of value.

There are countless startups which were perceived as having little value only to be praised and hugely successful years later, yet nothing changed– only people's perceptions.

I guess my point is that before asking a question like that, we would have to define what you constitute as "doing anything of real value to mankind". And who's to say your definition of value is the right one anyway?

A few ideas below. You mention startups trying "to make as much money as possible as quickly as possible" - I personally quite strongly believe that companies that focus on long-term profitability also happen to do a lot of good for mankind.

- cure for cancer

- cure for malaria

- cure for aging

- cheap fossil fuel extraction from low-quality deposits

- safer nuclear fission

- nuclear fusion

- lower-cost space travel

- space elevator

- space colonisation

- intelligence augmentation

- safe artificial intelligence

- desktop nanofactories

- nano-machines

Of these, fission/fusion/fossil fuels are the only ones start ups might touch. And even there, it depends on a lot of physics turning out favorably.

At least the Helion guys believe they have a good shot at it http://www.helionenergy.com/

See my post above about what we're trying yo achieve with Graphistry. Unlocking 20 years of infoviz research by letting anyone run on 1000 real-time GPUs helps move some of the most important sectors forward, eg, biology, security, and finance.

What do you mean, real-time GPUs? And: what interconnect are you running on? How does your scaling look? Is this just for embarrasingly parallel stuff? Just curious; I'm running multi-GPUs myself for molecular dynamics.

Imagine moving a slider in your viz to change a filter, physics setting, etc. and have cluster start to immediately feed back new results.

We started on building fast-start multitenant access to single GPUs and approaching peak on those (full-GPU barnes hut, 10X over Keshav's work). We're now focusing on distributing, and as we are more interested on running on many GPUs for scale out, focusing on communication avoiding. This makes a path to giving companies time on 1000 GPUs (think Pixar-levels of compute) rather than shipping small 8 GPU boxes with infiniband. Via elasticity and time sharing, the analyst hour pricing is unprecedented.

The titan guys run on 20,000 GPUs for similar astronomy codes, so doable. We're making it in more accessible, big-team, and analyst-focused ways. E.g., load, interactively analyze with smart defaults & streamlined common paths, export/report, and share.

Ok, I see, so your approach makes sense for problems where throwing some GPUs at it gives you a solution in O(10) seconds? Sounds nice if you know you hav problems that fit into that category.

I found the Graphistry webpage lacking in answering the question "which specific problem does this solve?" Infoviz is too broad/vague.

Yep, except think magnitudes bigger & faster. Right now, we're applying this to visual graph analytics problems in a few key industries. If you do infoviz, email us and I'm happy to share more!

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