I think that this 'world changing' stuff is diluting the power of peoples' mindsets. How could you convincingly believe that, let's say Foursquare, is world changing? And that's a successful enough example. Why not just that it's a 'money earning' idea, and have the potential for business growth be the motivating factor before you start worrying about solving real problems?
Foursquare will be world changing. Don't dismiss it because it looks small now. Keep in mind pg's thoughts on toys:
Don't be discouraged if what you produce initially is something other people dismiss as a toy. In fact, that's a good sign. That's probably why everyone else has been overlooking the idea. The first microcomputers were dismissed as toys. And the first planes, and the first cars. At this point, when someone comes to us with something that users like but that we could envision forum trolls dismissing as a toy, it makes us especially likely to invest.
Yeah, like the other commenter said, it might be a visionary 'toy', or it might just be a toy. I don't know which one it is yet, but at a guess, i'd say that it wont be world changing, because the benefit/effort is skewed too far in favour of retailers.
It reminds me of...i hope somebody can remember the name of some of these because i tried looking the other day...back in the 90's, there were a bunch of (legit, i think?) companies that gave you money if you installed a little application on your computer that showed you ads while you browsed the internet. Like, a penny per 3 minutes viewing, or a penny per 50 webpage views, something like that (anybody remember?!). This seemed like money-manna from heaven to my dumbass teenage eyes, until i realised how little i was getting out of the equation (my dumbass teenage eyes didn't factor in that it cost me a penny a minute to browse, at the time, too).
They'll need to un-chore it, if they're going to turn things around. And they'll need to come up with some big shift if it's going to be world changing...
There's been many articles on HN over the last few months saying there is. I'll try find some, but the basic gist was, there may be more users but there are a lot less checkins per user.
I'm not sure this really answers the question he originally posed. Sure, painters gotta paint and entrepreneurs gotta build, but whether its world changing or not is irrelevant. Some people want to do world changing things, some don't, and some stumble into it on accident.
Whether or not its world changing, a lot of the rules are pretty much the same.
Yes. A painter's gotta paint. Because he enjoys it. Not necessarily because he thinks his art will change the planet. But art collectively has a huge impact.
So if people built businesses because they like to do something and found out that they can make money doing it, why does it all of a sudden have to change the world? Because same as the painter example above, one biz doesn't have to change everything but collectively they can have a huge impact.
@steventruong It's not just about building. How you build and what you build are dramatically different on the spectrum from small/lifestyle to massive/global. There's a big difference between Google or Apple and 37Signals. The way a company gets financing, thinks about scaling a business, thinks about selling a business, thinks about hiring, etc. These are all core to how a business grows, how it scales, how to think about the value in the business (cash vs equity). In technology businesses, those sorts of decisions are usually made very early in a company's formation and baked into the DNA. The types of founders that want to build a massive company are usually pretty different from the types of founders that don't.
While I agree with a lot of the arguments you're saying, I disagree with the end statement. Building a massive company and building a world changing company are not mutually exclusive. It's probably more common but should not be implied.
Ususally the types of founders who want to build massive ginormous companies (that's a technical term) are different: they a) fail and/or b) don't make things; they're "idea guys" to steal a line from Signal vs. Noise.
That seems pretty inconsistent with how most companies and founders talk about their business. Amazon started with Bezos wanting to build the biggest e-commerce platform in the world. Apple wanted to put a computer on every desk. Larry Page at Google when he was doing his first round of financing told John Doerr that he thought search was a $10 billion revenue business. These guys may not have realized what that would entail exactly but once they had the earliest inkling of product-market fit they committed to it.
You don't get big by thinking small. World changing tech companies tend to have a big vision from the beginning. Manufacturing, mining, or other industries may be different. But you rarely see tech companies that touch 100 million lives without wanting to do that from the beginning.
