However the social impact and real innovation ( the one that improves drastically people lifes ) is lacking.
This is a good first-order approximation. One generally admirable thing about American culture is that it's not acceptable to just inherit wealth and try to rule society. Where this backfires is that it means that rich kids get dumped into the mainstream labor market and, with their superior social resources, take most of the top jobs. VC-funded startups are mostly a mechanism for taking parental wealth and influence (a socially unacceptable thing for the child to live off of) and laundering it into shares of newly-created businesses, so that the sponsee looks like a genuine tech entrepreneur rather than the beneficiary of a managed outcome (acqui-hire!) put together by his parents' friends.
There is a lot of technology work, even right now, that improves peoples' lives in immensely meaningful ways. Perhaps the people doing such work are a "silent majority" of technology. The problem is that you never hear about it on Hacker News or TechCrunch, and the contemporary crowd of Valley king-makers runs away from it.
If something is worth doing, it's usually hard to do and even harder to control. If several of the constraints are socioeconomic arrangements (e.g. Joffrey must get at least $10M and a VP-level position in the inevitable acqui-hire; and we must let Squabbling Hen Capital in on this deal, with a board seat, because we owe them a favor) then it becomes a lot harder to actually do anything useful. Instead, it becomes "tech is hard, let's go Snapchat".
Google, Cisco, Kiva, HP, Sun Microsystems, Theranos, Yahoo, Trulia, StubHub, Lytro, Coursera, Bonobos, Snapchat, and Instagram came out of Stanford in one way or another. These companies showcase a diverse range of tech that IS useful.
It's unfair too to say that social media doesn't do anything useful. Facebook reports 1.4 billion MAUs and works to bring the internet to more and more corners of the world. Snapchat's social component has given it the platform on which to innovate.
True, many Stanford students are already wealthy. True, there's a recent trend toward social media companies. But, Stanford continues to be a place where students work incredibly hard and remain motivated to do impactful work. Stanford has a storied history of entrepreneurship that begins before Snapchat and will continue after it.
lytro is actually innovative. It might not be successful, but again that's a seperate category.
Sure, you can argue that every piece of software is 'new' and thus innovative, but IMO that's a somewhat meaninglessly low bar.
If the stories are out there, this should be easy to fix. Consider this an open invitation to post everything substantive about such things that you can find. I can't tell you how happy we'd be to see them.
Fitbit is another example of a company improving people's lives but not generating a lot of press (though I do imagine they have been featured on HN and Techcrunch from time to time).
I use Dashing (developed by Shopify) for a personal dashboard to track things.
Every day I use bluetooth, video and music streaming, Kindle, the software utilities use to make sure I have gas, water, and electricity.
Sometimes the silent majority is featured on HN but receives less than reasonable responses. An example are the stories on high frequency trading which decrease spreads and thus are a benefit to anybody with a 401(k).
By "mostly," to what greater-than-50% degree to which they are this sort of mechanism do you have in mind? Are founders of greater than 50% of startups actually children of people that work at VC firms?
(In actual reality, they aren't.)
> There is a lot of technology work, even right now, that improves peoples' lives in immensely meaningful ways. Perhaps the people doing such work are a "silent majority" of technology. The problem is that you never hear about it on Hacker News or TechCrunch, and the contemporary crowd of Valley king-makers runs away from it.
This is completely false because we hear about technology improving people's lives all the time here, and usually when I see anything about snapchat or Valley kings it's because you decided to talk about it.
> If something is worth doing, it's usually hard to do and even harder to control.
Well uh, that's a nice premise, but it's actually often easy to do things that are worth doing. Especially when there's a new untapped market.
> If several of the constraints are socioeconomic arrangements (e.g. Joffrey must get at least $10M and a VP-level position in the inevitable acqui-hire; and we must let Squabbling Hen Capital in on this deal, with a board seat, because we owe them a favor) then it becomes a lot harder to actually do anything useful. Instead, it becomes "tech is hard, let's go Snapchat".
Which VP-level positions at Snapchat are held by the sort of people you refer to?
How did you come to believe that? Most of the recent presidents and presidential candidates would tell against that theory.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/mar/11/george-p-bush-u...
Why don't you post some articles about it, then? I believe this community would love nothing better than to learn about immensely meaningful technical work that they've never heard about. I know I would.
Can you provide a single example of an acqui-hire that you believe --- with any evidence at all --- to have been the result of a favor to the parents of the founders of that company?
I feel like I talk to a lot of people at VC-backed startups managing boards --- in addition to having founded such a company many moons ago --- and while I've heard a lot of horror stories, one story I've never heard is the one where a board seat was given away as quid-pro-quo. Can you help me understand your claim more clearly, for instance with an example?
I concede the point though, is what I should say.