Frankly, it doesn't make sense to target anyone but the top 40% of the country. Roll a 20 sided die. If you roll a 1, put in the pile that goes to the bottom 60%. If you roll a 2-20, put it in the money that goes to the top 40% of the country.
Which market are you going to get money from? I can tell you which market I'm looking at.
Now, the distribution of income isn't as disparate, but there's a reason that the bottom 60% isn't generating wealth, and it's partially because they're spending all of their money on essentials and small, low overhead luxuries.
Is it true that you can make a good amount of money in making things more affordable to these segments? Sure, but these don't seem to be the grand problems people are talking about.
First, people do talk about healthcare costs and education costs and housing costs as grand problems.
And startups can do something about those. For example:
1. Co-Abode.com which connects single moms to share houses , while getting cheaper prices and better support from each other.
2. A recent YC startup , which helps people who are getting a divorce, settle without lawyers in a relatively peacefull and much cheaper process.
3. All those new education startups who make college more affordable.
And there are plenty more , and plenty more that's could be done. One such example:
Making dental crowns is costly. There are some few large companies who built a small cnc machine who automates this, which can reduce the costs of the whole process by a lot. But they are expensive to acquire.
Find a way to make this available for cheap for every dentist in u.s./world.
Now the question is how does get into those opportunities ?
Well, i don't think it's hard. just focus on the right area , and try to join the communities which try to think about those things. I'm pretty sure they are willing to share problem and ideas in order to see solutions being made.
Your assumption that poor people are dumb and don't know how to help themselves is insulting. I'm a part of the unexotic underclass; I was doing pretty good in my life till serious health problems started in college. Being transgender played a large role too. I've been homeless, broke, been a housemaid and a sex worker, exchanged sex for housing. Before that I was top of my International Baccalaureate program class, and a National Merit scholar. I attended a well ranked state school. I just didn't have any golden parachutes when I had health problems.
From being poor though what I've ended up discovering is just how hard it is to come up from being homeless and broke, or not being from money and having serious health problems, or being black and getting a felony record from an asshole cop. There are a lot of decent poor people, that just can't come up in the world anymore. Their jobs work them like dogs, the world treats them like shit, and their spare energy left at the end of the day is zip. There's nothing left to better yourself with because everyone takes and takes from you and gives back nothing but disrespect.
Sure there are people that are just lazy too. But even among those people there's only a small number that are purposely taking advantage. The silent majority have either disabilities holding them back, or trauma from their life (PTSD). Or the simple lack of anyone parenting them properly and encouraging them to explore their dreams and interests.
Drugs, alcohol, junk food, tv and other vices are a coping mechanism for a shitty life. Make people's lives the least bit better in substantial ways, and those people will start to flower and bloom into more capable and wonderful people.
The disrespect, patronizing, and superior attitudes of the privileged upper class are a huge part of the problem.
I like this idea quite a bit, although I'm not exactly sure it would be a startup in the end because the willingness (ability?) to pay amongst the target market here must be quite low, I imagine. Just free styling here, but the way to go about it would be to bundle a sort of 'package' of tools into a couple of various tiers, from easy (low input of time/funds) to challenging (more pricey/difficult). One wrinkle is that I think there is a spectrum from pretty clearly verified IQ boosters.. such as psychologically verified games like n-back, and proper nutritions (EPA+DHA, etc etc), to ones that are much more speculative or carry some baggage that 'underclass' folks (that sounds sort of bad ha) might be extremely reluctant to participate in.. eg meditative practice, nootropics, etc. (Brain) food for thought.. :P
With regards to the Victorian study, I read through that last week and it is not immediately clear to me from the literature that reaction time is really a reliable indicator of g. Conversely, the Flynn affect suggests that IQ has really been going up. And if you've read any of Flynn's stuff you'll find that he has quite a nice explanation here, which is that the more brilliant heuristics/words/thinking tools pioneered amongst scientists, inventors, so on are slowly filtering down into the masses generation by generation. Perhaps what this suggests is that education in a new way- introducing folks to a library of new 'thinking tools' rather than just memorization etc- might have to go hand in hand with the sort of biophysical/training ideas above. I highly recommend this video by Dennett to hear a bit more about this concept- minutes 5-14 specifically: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=4...
How about show your fellow human beings a modicum of respect. They aren't your lab rats. Maybe if your upper-class, power-heavy minority would reevaluate all the patronizing aspects of their philanthropic efforts, poor folks wouldn't have learned helplessness from the futility of their situation, and would actually have the energy to lift themselves up.
Drug dealing, crime, and prostitution are sometimes seemingly the only way to actually move up in the world anymore.
I'm not interested in respecting and not-patronizing people. I'm interested in a better world and fixing the problems.
A big part of why people are poor (and/or delinquent) is, let's face it, because of how their brains work. Sure, there are lots of socio-economic factors keeping people down, but it's never an either-or issue. And I'm not saying that we should stop trying traditional poverty-bootstrapping tactics, but rather that cognitive enhancement is worth looking into also.
For instance, there was a study done in a prison that showed that fish oil can reduce violent tendencies[1]. It's also known to help with child ADHD[2].
(Actually, the interventions I have in mind would focus more around positive psychology, metacognition/mindfulness training, and applied rationality aka scientific self-help. Just using the fish oil as an example since it's well studied and is a very simple measure to take.)
Also, poor people should be happy that the "upper class" take an interest in raising them up. What do you prefer, patronizing philanthropists or corrupt elites who don't give a rat's ass as to their wellbeing at all?
To quote the article: "a cultural disregard for intelligence, empathy and respect"
Not to say its impossible. Its just going to have to be very covert. Part of a game of some sort, but not K-12 ridiculously blatant educational game like space invaders where you have to solve an addition problem to fire the anti-missile missile (I think I actually had to play that one in school...) (Edited to add EVE Online is basically a spreadsheet with a 3-d screensaver, at least as of when I played back in '05 or so... this might be the correct direction...)
Another option is it might be easier to sell to superior societies where intelligence is not considered a social disability requiring treatment. For example, Japan is a smaller market than the USA, but still pretty big and profitable. Or lets say it only sells well in Asia and Europe... well that's OK, looking at population figures, (Asia + Europe) >>>> (USA).
Given the low quality diet of many poor people, particularly the urban poor who live in "food deserts", nutritional supplements probably would be helpful. The information on those isn't really packaged for the low income consumer, or even the middle-income consumer who doesn't think about it.
Prenatal vitamins are almost certainly the low-hanging fruit, though, although with 10-30 year lag.
Judging by that list, the notion that you can't make money off the unexotic underclass seems suspect. Even excluding Oil and Gas, the vast majority of the companies are not exactly luxury brands for the upper class.
He's actually working on it. You'll notice that the Roadster was super expensive ($90,000), but they rolled the money over into R&D to make the Tesla S ($60,000), money from which they will then roll over into R&D for an even cheaper vehicle. Elon's goal is to bring affordable EVs to the masses, which I think is pretty cool.
A Tesla representative gave a talk at my company recently, and supposedly the plan is to produce an EV at around $30,000. Tesla's supply-side partnership with Toyota still gives me hope for more affordable, ubiquitous EVs.
Less than $30k? You're going to need less than $15 for the underclass that this article is talking about; and even then those people are going to have to buy used.
One too many zeroes. The unexotic underclass would not even be able to afford the $3,000 dollar hybrid battery (Prius) replacement, much less a full EV battery.
My family and my wife's family are, to a certain degree, I suppose, part of the "unexotic underclass". They usually don't live check to check, but they don't have months and months to live on saved up, usually. And the fact is, they don't have piles of disposable income, and never have.
So in order to sell to my family, you need to make things cheaper and/or more reliable and/or unneeded. For product ideas, examine these sorts of stores: Cabela's, Walmart, Costco. The target demographic is one which drives everywhere; it's wholly suburban to rural. Biking doesn't really happen, and cell coverage can be spotty. Computers might well have been bought last in 2003 and be using Windows Me.
If you can figure out how to make essentials cheaper or non-essential (by redesigning how other things work), then their standard of living goes up and their income effectively increases.
So. Things you can think about include: grills; furniture; carpets; clocks; microwaves; vacuums; cleansers; etc.
Things You Buy At Walmart, in other words. The challenge to the American businessperson is to be able to sell to the Walmart crowd, things they buy at Walmart.
I would bet that you can charge a bit more for things than Walmart, if you can double to quintuple the quality. Imagine not having things that break quickly. Or, like I said, a new product that obviates other products would also be good.
Basically, invest 14% more in construction up-front, and save 86% on space-heating costs over the long term. THAT'S FUCKING HUGE! These things are a major hit in new construction in Central and Northern Europe.
More, these things are pretty much exactly what you would want as a new, high-tech business for the bottom 60%, or at worst the bottom 80% or bottom 90%. I mean, everyone wants to save 86% on heating, and America has a whole lot of people who live in cold, temperate climates.
So here's a Big Idea for the Unexotic "Underclass", and the middle class, too: how do we bring down the up-front cost to the point where people start being able to afford investing in energy-efficiency, particularly in cold areas that can really use this kind of thing?
(Because this kind of stuff doesn't even really matter to the capitalist/upper class: their utility bills are negligible versus everything else they do.)
As per the laws of free market capitalism if a niche in the market is underserved the market will step up and supply to the markets demand.
On Wall st where the author has worked, any market inefficiency is arbitraged away. Where there is profits to be made the market will find them.
I just don't think there's any big viable markets there, it would be nice if the author could identify at least 1 product idea... As she identifies that the allergy problem stretches across all demographics so this is not really a 'unexotic underclass' problem.
The other issue I see here is allot of the b2c opportunities in the tech industry are based on having customers with "disposable income". In theory a struggling single mum probably doesn't/shouldn't have a iPhone.
Finally I'm not sure that the "unexotic underclass being uninteresting is the problem" argument holds water. Again wall street is arguably not that interesting either but they are not crying about a skills shortage.
These issues are government issues. If the government put money into solving these problems im sure the startup community would happily come and help out.
There are ways, of course. As one example, find more inexpensive ways to make goods already marketed to a higher segment. For example, 300 dollar laptops that look better, especially if you can get a few reality TV stars using them and bravo pimping it. Start a brand that is perceived as high end by the middle class, show it to them in conspicuous consumption avenues, and then tread downmarket. You can only do this so many times.
But if I'm looking at a startup, it sure wouldn't be my first market of choice.
The poor already have a more effective, less wasteful way of acquiring these goods. It's called buying used and old, either at a thrift shop or on ebay. Used old laptops are already abundant.
Most poor problems are government problems. The problem is most of the money goes towards bloat and bureaucracy and war than actually providing services for poor people as well as the rich.
Total USA household wealth is somewhere around $50T, GDP $15T. Per parent post, the bottom 60% has 4.2% of wealth: that's $2.1T, or average $11,150 per person - most of which is not "disposable" (tied up in home, car, and other nonliquid essentials). Assuming same distribution for income, that's averaging $3,343 - again, most of it not "disposable" (rent, gas, food).
Yes, there are a lot of them ("poor" still being a debatable moniker when you're making more than 15x income of half the people on the planet). A lot of money can be made there, and many manage to. To the point of the lead article, a little bit from a lot of people can add up nicely for a business. To your point, there are indeed a lot of people sitting on a cumulative lot of money. To the point of the post in between, eliciting a lot of tiny slices from a lot of small piles of money is a lot harder than eliciting the same sum from a few piles orders of magnitude bigger.
How about do something to uplift poor people, rather than just siphoning more money away. Affordable medical, dental, and legal help would be great focuses.
Before you can fix any of the problems that would require you to be a US government contractor, you first have to fix the problems of how US government IT contracts are awarded. There is an entire sub-industry of IT service firms who have perfected the art of bidding on government contracts, and win them regardless of their ability to build the best solution. They just have to present the lowest cost solution that meets all the requirements outlined. They are often monolithic corporate entities with multiple sub-entities, with so many layers of bureaucracy it's amazing anything get's built at all. I did some contract web work for on a government project, and just to get paid I had to set up accounts with 3 separate government agencies which had similar but separate account management and payment distribution software (most likely built by separate IT service contractors).
It's an industry that's ripe for disruption if you can figure out how to break down the walls, but those walls have been erected pretty damn high and solid.
Don't take this the wrong way, but .gov procurement people do notice things like the fact that both domains ( dobt.co and procure.io ) are using cctld's for non-US countries.
It's a good start, but this is a focused on the relatively low price segment. This doesn't address how some startup could come in and effectively submit a bid for something like the VA system
I noticed that devs on HN often sneer at CRUD apps because they're boring to build, but meanwhile a simple CRUD app could do something like make all these veterans' medical benefit claims paperless so that they can get filled out and approved in minutes rather than months, and they could get the care they need sooner. One could do a lot of good by just making CRUD apps for people who need them and can't afford to pay much for them.
All the technology in the world won't make those veterans' benefit claims go through any faster. The problem there isn't the technology (it's not all that hard of a problem) but getting it into the right place, past all the gatekeepers who want to keep it out.
It's not that nobody is building the technology because they're concentrating on other things, but rather nobody is building it because they know it won't sell, because it would have to go sixteen thousand layers of red tape and many tours through Congress before anything got done.
I think there's probably a lot of scope for solving problems with fairly simple apps, but this example seems like a terrible one.
From what I understand of Veteran's Affairs, the technology has been built, and it does sell. The only problem is that the government's being fleeced for all its got by the vendors in question.
VA's got no end of computer systems, where its staff hand-enter information in one system, print out its report, only to scan it, fax it across the country, where someone else will hand-enter it into... A different system.
Engineers, consultants, and Serious Business Contracts were involved in the construction of this abomination - and while they were all in compliance of the standards that the government expects from its vendors, none of them delivered a good product.
"On February 5, 2013, the Secretary of Defense and the Secretary of Veterans Affairs announced
that instead of building a single integrated electronic health record (iEHR), both DOD and VA
will concentrate on integrating VA and DOD health data by focusing on interoperability and using
existing technological solutions. This announcement was a departure from the previous
commitments that both Departments had made to design and build a new single iEHR, rather than
upgrading their current electronic health records and trying to develop interoperability solutions."
You're right, you're right. The VA thing is a bad example. Enterprise software is expensive because big companies make themselves expensive to sell to. And the government is the biggest company of all. I'm sure they spend seven to eight figures on the cruddiest of CRUD apps from companies like Oracle.
On the other hand, something like a basic CRUD app could really help out a charity or non-profit that serves disadvantaged populations, and that could be built in Rails or Django for just a few days of developer time.
Not so sure abotu the charity market. one example back in 2000 I worked on a cheap and cheerful Paperless direct debit so that any Charity could quickly and easily set up a system to take donations.
The trouble was each flipping charity/bank wanted a bespoke version some of the changes required by the banks where absoluty nit picking.
The product had some good press for the Minister but could we get charity's/banks to hold their nose and just use one form! NO
Wonder if any VC in old street/silicon roundabout want to try again I still have few contacts form my days at Poptel
That reminds me of DonorsChoose, which connects elementary teachers with people looking to donate. It's unfortunate that many states don't properly fund things like school supplies, but it's a great service nonetheless.
Plus the people who do the paper apps processing probably don't want to have their jobs eliminated and have an interest in refusing new (if computers can be considered "new") technology. Even if it means letting vets die due to the needlessly extended waiting process.
Yes, part of it is registering vets into the system. The other part is a combination of the enormous number of claims and enormous amount of documentation required.
As a physician, I worked in C&P (compensation and pension) clinics for a number of years at the VA, as a consultant.
The amount of documentation required is astronomical, likely because vets are being compensated for their injuries with taxpayer dollars. Fair enough, but a physician providing these services could find other ways to use their time productively (for themselves).
Then there's the volume. You don't just see vets who have lost an arm or a leg or have suffered traumatic brain or spinal cord injuries. You also see the guys who may have sprained a knee or ankle playing basketball in their free time but while they were officially on duty. Throw that into the mix, and you have too many people to examine so thoroughly. They tried to fix this by contracting with an agency and have vets come into a private medical office instead of doctors going to the VA, my partner did this for a while, but the reimbursement offered for the amount of paperwork required ultimately made it impractical.
To fix it:
1) screen vets better, some are clearly more severely injured than others
2) better compensate providers who see all these vets and complete all the necessary documentation.
The screening part is tricky though, as it can quickly get political.
Another possibility would be to not screen them, provide them with a high level of free care as a reward for their service, and just make the system work efficiently. Whether the government is footing the bill, or an individual is, should make no difference at all to the timeliness or level of care they receive. If the problem is paperwork, that should be targeted first.
There is a lot of medical care available (I think "stay on Tricare", etc.) with less hassle. Most of the disability claims are for ongoing cash payments to replace job income, which is more at risk of fraud (and in some cases genuinely uncertain and requiring investigation).
In part the problem arises from the interface between systems. If you walk into any normal hospital internal medicine floor you'll see about 5 different systems in use, with varying levels of interoperability: the VA, operating what is the largest network of healthcare centers in the country, takes that issue to the next order of magnitude. A lot of paper gets generated at these interfaces. Although the core VA EMR system is solid, there are multiple other systems laid atop it. The VA is attempting to address both the software and processes issue (people outside healthcare don't know this, but the VA is the place to take your career if you wish to do healthcare services research - they're, collectively, the single most innovative group of providers in the country).
The main problem lies with the paper backlog of attempting to get people into the system. I'm personally not aware of how/why military personnel's medical records don't transition directly into the VA, but what happens in practice is a gap between military med. and the VA, where vets find themselves forced to file claims. I suspect that this is in large part because the set of "Vets" and the set of people qualifying for VA care, while overlapping, are not the same (that assertion comes from anecdote: I had an ex in the military, and when she finished her tours I recall that she was not qualifying for VA care because she hadn't been disabled nor gone career, as she explained it). While it's fair to ask why this process is done on paper, it's worth-while to note that prior to just the last handful of years the portion of health records that had been digitized was nearly nil (up until about 5 years ago it was standard practice in most hospitals and private clinics to go digital-to-paper-to-digital). Essentially everyone's records were on paper, and all record transfers happened via fax (and still do, if a receiving physician is not inside the same hospital system on the same EMR as the referring physician).
source: work in hospital QI. I haven't worked in the VA, personally, so I am relating a lot of stuff second-hand, but the boundary between most hospitals' QI staff, the IHI, and the VA tends to be pretty porous, if you're in a healthcare capitol city - so I've heard a lot about the VA from co-workers that have worked there, or are currently engaged in ops research there.
The problem is on the medical records DOD uses AHLTA and the quality of records in AHLTA is highly variable. They focus much more on proving immediate care vs. great quality records, both due to the environment where a lot of the care happens and because they're not billing for it.
There are also about 5 levels of bureaucracy to manage a single system within DOD. VA is amazing in comparison (it was really telling talking to doctors who had civilian jobs in the VA but were military reservists and working temporarily in military hospitals...)
Medical records aren't sufficient to make a determination of disability, though, which is mainly what this is about. Having the medical records helps, having personnel records helps.
Another problem is the VA for a long time was focused on long-term care for WW2/Korea elderly vets, and various mentally/physically disabled Vietnam vets. The population of seriously injured younger vets (who could still work, and have long and otherwise productive lives ahead of them, but need specific disability care) is a pretty new thing. That, and the huge number of PTSD/TBI/psych issues.
I'm going to guess that they're two separate things.
Medical records keeps track of medical procedure, patient history, what medications they're on, etc. In the private sphere, this is what a hospital would use.
What's probably at cause for the huge backlog is actually getting people into the system and approved for care. In the private sphere, this is what an insurance company would use.
Or this could be just your standard set of political exaggerations.
I think I've noticed a pattern with these kinds of systems: its not a software problem; it's a policy problem.
When designing (evolving, inventing) rules, regulations, policy, exceptions, limitations, audits, checks, balances, the bureaucracy's princes seem to ignore the bigger picture of what it's all become: a mess.
It's not just government systems either. There's a reason why people joke about their phone bills being difficult to understand. Same goes for most utilities.
Now, once you have an incoherent, contradictory, thousand page mishmash set of rules, every engineer worthy of the title is going to stay as far away as possible. So, the whole mess gets dumped on an army of coders from a big consultancy.
Perhaps instead of focusing on the useless software written to fit a pile of inane rules, people could focus on the economic and operational benefits of redoing the entire policy regime with a zen-shaped comb.
Software is an enabler. It's actually covered-up a lot of really awful decision-making. The US tax code could never have become what it is if developers hadn't been able to consistently keep up with crazy new patches to implement it: nobody could possibly manage it by hand.
As someone working on a healthcare startup, a thousand times this.
More than the technical disgust of building a policy-laden system, marketing is terrifically difficult under regulation. Consumers get scarred by inconsistent regulatory rules and stop being willing to change processes because it's too frightening to possibly run afoul of policy.
This is, by the way, a great opportunity for organizing regulatory consultants. Such a service might be an important forerunner or partner to ventures trying to change heavily regulated industries.
This and all the responses to it seem hopelessly naive to me. Obviously, if there is a delay in benefits, the delay has been introduced as a cost cutting measure. The more you delay, the less you pay. This is a pretty typical measure for large organizations trying to surreptitiously reduce costs (see welfare or HMOs) and the problem has nothing to do with logistics.
In a past life I built one of these CRUD apps. The CRUD part was simple. The volumes of rules and exceptions is where the time and money went. At one point I tried to replace a DOS terminal-based system with something that would resemble a GUI. Based off the old GUI it was easy to replicate, then the rulebooks came out and I realised I was way over my head.
I don't disagree with the article, but I had 2 thoughts form in my mind while reading it:
1) I don't think entrepreneurs (and tech ones at that) have solved any problems, even for the upper classes they cater to. Instead, they have become popular and profitable the old-fashioned way, by creating and filling a need. Even a solution as fundamental as search on the internet is not really helping me lead a better life--though it does make possible the vast stores of knowledge and likely the entire tech sector (including my livelihood).
2) Given 1) above, the entire article essentially seems to encourage people to exploit the under-exploited markets of the unexotic by creating needs there and fulfilling them. I don't really see how entrepreneurs can, for example, fix the bureaucracy of Veteran's Affairs, even if they had a turnkey case-handling solution to sell to them.
Finally, the author of the article had a pedigree as long as my sleeve, but I didn't see any work in the unexotic fields.
Somewhat related thought: where are the non-tech entrepreneurs? Are there solutions that don't require computers anymore? Are there ways to get funding for such a solution?
> Even a solution as fundamental as search on the internet is not really helping me lead a better life--though it does make possible the vast stores of knowledge and likely the entire tech sector (including my livelihood).
I disagree. You can spin this many ways. I look at "search" as solving the problem of "easy access to information" - however one must understand that it is not an unsolved/solved problem (varying degrees of "solved" apply here).
Being able to learn new things, research something I'm working on beyond my direct network of friends/colleagues, and engage with others solves a lot of problems for me. All this information also makes it much easier to re-skill or add new skills to my repertoire.
You've answered him, as well as yourself... It depends on the frame of reference in approaching this... If you take a hovering big picture view, what you say is all good, but in reality, on a individual/micro level, 95% of this "search on the net" business is all about "finding deals", and assorted mindless tivia. :)
Even a solution as fundamental as search on the internet is not really helping me lead a better life.
I disagree. Maybe you are talking about yourself. Google almost changed my life. The productivity boost that it gave me helped in creating the products and shaping the learning curve.
>> where are the non-tech entrepreneurs? Are there solutions that don't require computers anymore?
You know, there are a lot of really broken processes in the world. Ones that don't benefit from computers directly, however indirectly a computer scientist willing to ditch the standard toolset (computer, compiler, etc), could probably make a big splash. We are all trained to think hard about the steps to automate a process - what order is necessary, what order is irrelevant, where can we substitute a functionally equivalent but more efficient mechanism, what constraints and bottlenecks need to be worked around and so on. This thinking usually is just about code, but really, it isn't that different for a lot of other areas. I think you end up seeing computers applied as a solution where they don't fit very well, because that is the tool that does process in our minds.
Perhaps there is money/usefulness/something, in getting away from the computer and finding other ways to apply our skillset.
Regarding your point 1) I agree, but it will never fly in a technology-centric place like this that practically worships anything "tech"! In effect, things like vaccine breakthrough, free sanitation, etc., are much more impactful, but are no longer making headlines or headway, in a way that they should. You have a good point.
As for point 2, I agree too, but that won't fly either (for the vested interest of many in the crowd interested in being entrepreneurs) :-|
Quick EDIT:
>> where are the non-tech entrepreneurs? Are there solutions that don't
>> require computers anymore? Are there ways to get funding for such a solution?
non-tech entrepreneurs? Like hedge funds? ;)
You ask a very good question, but this being HN, you won't find too much publicity on it. If you are interested, here's one guy who works on that spectrum. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Polak
I agree with your second point, that's the same feeling I got out of the article: "Look! A new market to exploit with your trivial webapps!". There are a lot of problems with this statement, first being that it's not an ideal target for capitalist/consumerist business cases. These people do not have large amounts of disposable income to waste on crap.
Honestly this seems like a largely American issue with their bias against socialist policies. The govt can step in here and improve things for this class of people, but the whole idea of that is untenable to (apparently) the majority of Americans.
I wonder how long it will take for the stink of desperation to become unbearable to the middle/upper class.
"In this life we cannot do great things. We can only do small things with great love."
Likewise, unless you have the clout and badassery of a Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, or Sebastian Thrun, it's unrealistic to expect a given entrepreneurial individual(s) to solve major world problems on their own or in their own lifetime.
All an entrepreneur can really hope for is to be able to at least get the ball rolling, in the short time he/she has on this planet, so that maybe one day someone of a future generation can in turn stand on your shoulders to achieve something great and help finish what you started.
> We need: A Paul Graham and his Y Combinator at the incubator level, to devote one season to the underclass, be it veterans, single moms or overworked young doctors, Native Americans, the list is long: “Help these entrepreneurs build something that will help you.”
I remember reading that YC recently funded "Watsi", its first non-profit. I wonder if this is just a one-off or a sign of much more to come?
It's really great to see poor white people considered as people in need. (It would have been even better if the article considered poor asians, too. They're not all rich doctors.) It's a huge demographic that's desperately in need of help, but it doesn't score you any brownie points to help the "unexotic"--just as the article highlights. As a result, many languish in poverty instead of fulfilling their full potential.
I know a lot of people who are poor, rural, and white, and they really struggle while resources are freely given to far more affluent peers of a different color. It's really sad to watch someone's dreams of college die before their eyes due to race based discrimination.
Poor people of all colors suffer much more from class-based discrimination. Rich people spend their money on trifles like ipads and gaming computers rather than trying to help their struggling neighbor. Maybe it has something to do with how separated we all are, that rich people probably haven't even really talked to a poor person in years, and operate based on stereotypes and contempt.
Yeah, most of the people who get on the PoC privilege train clearly haven't interacted with low income people for a while. I saw a girl from a $70,000+/year family say once that her family was lower middle class. wtf. One of the worst SRWs I've met, everything was racism to her. She went into social work, and the last I heard was a blog post complaining about how one of the people in a case she was working had called her spoiled. El-oh-el.
This is crossposted from my comment in the MeFi discussion of this article.
I don't buy that startups are just targeting rich people. It's perhaps part of it, but not all of it. They are targeting people like them, young, single childless generally white guys.
I see a million dating sites, but very few sites for married people, which are still a huge chunk of the adult population. Though I seem to recall at least one quick divorce app. Oh, and that dating site for cheating with married people.
Childcare is a major concern, but I can't recall one startup doing babysitting/daycare recommendations/referrals.
Where is the trending site where you get a months supply of diapers on subscription?
I see a lot of sites for young urban people, but very few sites/apps targeting aging populations and people in the suburbs. I think the closest I am aware of is health care and legal service startups.
Aside from targeted dating apps, I can't think of very many startups that are trying to serve minority populations. Though I would point out that I saw a dating site for farmers, so that's at least some rural targeting.
Married people have money. Old people have money. People with kids have money. They should be being targeted.
Now maybe there are more systemic issues... maybe products targeting these areas all exist, and just lack publicity/funding (and the two often go hand in hand), or maybe the press just ignores them. But there are a million app/site/service ideas out there.
Care.com for babysitting/daycare, etc. It runs lots of commercials on all the kids channels. Amazon.com for diapers, or plenty of other sites do subscriptions too. Diaper services are still around.
Healthcare and legal services startups sound like a great idea.
This was a fun read but we've already reached the meta-discussion of the meaningfulness of entrepreneurs so it's probably time to move on.
The reality is that entrepreneurs cannot solve the Big Problems or big problems - the investment and time horizon of these problems means that traditional structures, e.g. large companies, research organizations and governments have to step in. Disruption is for the easy stuff, hard stuff still has to be solved the slow way, with decades of hard work.
All of this moralizing and "solve big problems" talk is really getting old. On average, chances are pretty low that a particular individual will ever solve a big problem, so stop worrying about it! It's not for others to say how you "should" spend your energy anyway. The moralistic fluff is unnecessary. Those who aren't motivated will ignore it, those who are motivated don't need to be reminded, and the moralizers will use it to beat the rest of the would-be entrepreneurs into a perpetual state of indecision.
Condense the article down and you're left with this nugget of advice: You'll have a better chance of success if you target unsaturated, boring markets.
You said:
1. On average you won't solve a big problem, so don't try.
2. Other folks in your society should have no opinion on what you spend time on.
3. Don't try to change people's opinions because you can't.
4. Stop bringing up morality because it makes people think, not act.
"On average you won't solve a big problem, so don't try."
On average you won't solve a big problem, so don't worry about it. At what point did I say don't try?
"Other folks in your society should have no opinion on what you spend time on."
Other folks will have an opinion on what you spend your time on whether you like it or not. They'll talk and talk about how YOU (not they) should do such and such. It's easy to opine when you're not the one actually doing the work. So don't worry too much about what they think.
"Don't try to change people's opinions because you can't."
It's not that you can't per se, but rather that on average they won't. So don't worry if it doesn't work out.
"Stop bringing up morality because it makes people think, not act."
Don't let other peoples' moral platitudes paralyze you with the fear of acting.
I read it the opposite way - your chances of having a big impact are low, so stop worrying and start a company anyway. This might sound paradoxical, but for a lot of people (myself included) being told "don't waste your time on something trivial" can be paralysing. You end up questioning every idea and never being able to settle on one.
You can (and should) get a sense of which ideas are worthwhile, but you'll never know for sure. Maybe your potential cure for cancer won't work. Maybe your todo list app will help 100 medical non-profits each be 5% more efficient, in effect having 5 non-profit's worth of impact. With that in mind, the best you can do is pick something that you can probably make work, that people probably want, and that will probably have a positive impact on society. Whether or not you change the world is up to the gods.
Just my view: reading this is like being harangued by some irate ranter. The style will ensure minimal impact on those who should read it.
Small point: why the focus on the Roma as against non-Roma Romanians and Bulgarians who are also very poor but shut up, get down to work and obey the law. Anecdotally (I live in Romania) I would say that many Roma do just that. Plenty join the professions as doctors, lawyers, engineers and media folk or simply do an ordinary job of work but there is a criminal minority who are the authors of their own problems. However it's pointless trying to explain this to some of the right-on human rights brigade.
>>>It’s not rocket science: people build what they know. Cosmopolitan, well-educated young men and women in America’s big cities are rushing into startups and building for other cosmopolitan well-educated young men and women in big cities.
Until you've become part of the exotic underclass -- or an over-50 perma-unemployable (tick tick tick) -- you won't see these problems, won't be affected by them, and won't use your skills to solve them.
In ten, twenty, thirty years, shit will start to get done. Too late for many, but better late than never.
Stuff can start to get done now. It's just about privileged people thinking about more than themselves. There's plenty of bright people at the bottom too, just without the resources and connections to get anything fixed.
Yes, absolutely. We need to import more H1-B workers to work on these very important problems of food, fashion, 'social' and gaming. Makes me want to delete my facebook account right now.
> If you’re under 30 and in finance, you’ve definitely noticed the radical migration of your peers from Wall Street to Silicon Valley and Silicon Alley
My heart sank. I don't want those sociopathic Wall Street bros infesting the tech scene.
This has been true since the beginning of film's history, with rare exceptions. Spectacle sells, even going back to the point when the technology of film itself was the spectacle. (See for example the always-thrilling L'Arrivée d'un Train à la Ciotat: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1dgLEDdFddk)
If you want "film as art," it's generally best to avoid studio mega-corps designed to make cash.
Statistics here are easily manipulated. Usually these stats are kid centric, because that's how he census bureau tabulates the data... Nearly 70% of black children are in a household with a single mother vs. 45% Latino, 25-30% white, 15% Asian. The numbers vary when you flip it to be parent-centric, and you can cherry-pick states to some extent to find the results that you want.
If you want to decrease single motherhood, you don't need to start a company... You need to change the regulations about certain public benefits that essentially require working class people to not marry in order to raise children. A married, working couple with marginal jobs qualifies for food stamps at best. As a single mother (not required to report the boyfriend's income), you get free daycare, free formula, free healthcare for the child, housing subsidy and additional food subsidy (wic).
These benefits can be worth as much as $50k -- more than household income for a married couple. So many poor folks don't marry.
To back this concept up, check out this post[1] on Zerohedge which points out how it's becoming more lucrative to work a minimum wage job (or no job at all) and collect entitlements than it is to work a 'middle-class' job.
Caucasians (aka "White") is a pretty broad term. It does not necessarily mean that you have to be as pale as a Finnish or British person, in order to be classified as white.
As far as I understand it, many arabs are also caucasians, including most bedouins in North Africa. So again, it covers a lot of people, so logically it should (as far as I understand it) cover hispanics with 50%+ european origins as well.
This article is completely false. There has been an exponential increase in the number of start-ups in America to specifically serve the underclass. What the poor want is money, and the market has responded with almost every conceivable solution. Some examples, Gold for cash stores, Payday Loan stores, Auto Title Loan stores, increasing number of pawn stores, new high risk credit cards offering 29.9% APR, rent-to-own furniture/appliance stores, the 'short term' elimination of any standards towards an approval for purchase of a home to allow predatory 'Borrowers' to buy homes they could not afford, etc...
Building products for markets you don't understand isn't such a great idea. Yes, I'm sure there's some nice opportunities out there among the underclass, but most developers in Silicon Valley simply don't have the ability to find them, because that's not what they know.
The author would be better off looking for the small subset of potential entrepreneurs that are deeply rooted in the underclass and then encouraging them to take advantage of their cultural knowledge.
That sounds like laziness. What about deeply researching the subject , connecting with people who know about such stuff, or partnering with some domain expert ?
This article seems to have good intentions, but it does so much insulting to the audience in the first several paragraphs that I struggled to read further...
The disgraceful state of the veterans really is a problem that can be solved rather easily with automation. Unfortunately, doing business with the government is very trying. From little experience that I have first hand, keeping the status quo is also very profitable.
As to the rest of the problems, people who point out the cash flow issues are spot on. For example, most European countries file childcare right there with education as a good that cannot be left to market forces. They all tend to have stagnated or declining populations, with extremely negative views on immigration. That is hardly the view point in the US. We seem to still think that healthcare can be completely addressed by market forces. (If you are sick and can't work, how are you going to make those payment again? Oh yeas, insurance! Too bad it's tied to the employment you no longer have...)
This is a nice read. Is there any place where we can learn more about these problems? as in, a place (blog/site etc) that lists problems that are real world problems to solve, than twitter/facebook type?
You'd be going about it the wrong way if you just looked at a list. Sometimes the underlying issues are complex, or just downright a struggle to fix or disrupt. The best thing you could do is make friends and acquaintances outside of your ingroup. Have people tell you about their problems themselves. You'll get a better idea of the problems out there the more people you talk to and dialogue with.
If you want my opinion on the main obstacles against making the world a better place:
- gentrification and separation of the rich and poor
- social services being a giant wasteful bureaucracy rather than a streamlined, responsive, empowering structure
- gridlock in the US legislature as far as finding real solutions, leading to lack of regulations where they should be and mis-managed and destructive overregulation in others
Everyone towards the bottom is overworked and have no leftover energy and willpower to jump through all the arbitrary hoops to improve their lot in life. Something needs to change with how wealth, free time, and the benefits of efficiency are distributed in society, or the country will go into further decline and unrest.
Good article, mostly well written except for the painful intellectual insecurity of the writer. It is, in fact, possible to write a scathing, stylised essay without doing backflips to use archaic or obscure vocabulary. Sometimes that's what's required to get a point across, but when it's thrown in so haphazardly (my eyes nearly rolled out of my head when I saw "catholic" used as a synonym for "universal").
Take a deep breath, get your point across, and emphasise the stuff that's important. Don't drag me out of your flow just because you want to show off.
Regardless, the writer is going to be awesome once they mature a bit.
You ruined this masterpiece with the Taylor Swift reference. Actually, just kidding. You couldn't ruin this if you devoted a paragraph to explain, out of the blue, that Taylor Swift is a superior musician to Thom Yorke. And if you did, I would probably buy it. I don't praise prose often; but when I do,
completely agree, but language matters, and so : "liberal ... (who believes) ... (the underclass) ... has to pull itself up by its own bootstraps". have we lost the meanings of our words?
Well, in a great part of the world, "liberal" is still associated with classical/neo liberalism.
Some US right-wing libertarians will tell you that the word was co-opted by left statists and that it doesn't fit them, since they're not for freedom, as the word implies (their argument, not mine).
I actually agree with the libertarians there. It should be pointed out that every major party in the USA, including the Democrats, are basically neoliberals. At the very left extreme-edge of the Democratic Party they have one or two social democrats.
Who is C.Z. Nnaemeka ? Is this a pseudonym of sorts? Born to Nigerian parents, she has a philosophy degree and has worked in the finance industry. I did some googling to find out more, but there's very little information available.
We actually pay dearly for what's happening to the so-called Unexotic Underclass.
1. Many of us will join them. Most people who join VC-istan and Wall Street in 2013 aren't going to make any money. By the time they're eligible to sit at the table, the money will be elsewhere. The vicious culture of VC-istan (with extreme deadlines, fast firing, and little investment in doing things right; so you end up not learning not much) comes out of this "get rich before the ball drops" culture, especially prevalent among young people.
2. Real estate. Why's it so expensive to live in the star cities? In large part, because the rest of the country is dying.
We're in 1927 territory. In 1927, there was a deep rural poverty problem (see: Mad Men flashbacks) but urban elites thought there was no way it could reach them. Some of those elites were in New York, which recovered. Some were in places like Buffalo and Detroit and Harrisburg, Pa.
Five years later, that cancer of rural poverty was metastatic throughout the whole economy.
Replace "rural" with "suburbs and small towns" and you see what's going on today, and what the risks are.
VC-istan is actually very top-down, despite its PR, which is why I don't think it's that stable. Most VC-istan companies are more vicious and hierarchical than the archetypal corporate dinosaurs; but also, to get funded, you have to live where the money is.
What's bizarre about all this is that the money often comes from elsewhere. The VCs don't get their money from local sources, and they sure aren't going to put their own money in it until they reach a nine-figure net worth, so the money that's often funding these "anti-problem" startups is from the Iowa public school teacher pension fund. Shouldn't they have, at least, the option to fund local talent and revive their own economies, instead of having it all sent West into an investment vehicle that hasn't earned its keep since the late 1990s?
At any rate, I don't know how to solve this problem, but kudos to the OP for drawing attention to it.
Michaelo Church or Michael O. Church, I don't know who you are, but this is a great comment on the article. Thank you for this perspective. As someone once in VC, I laughed when you said what is true: most VCs are not actually putting their own money behind the investments. Indeed, it's only the 9-figure celebrity ones.
My only quibble was your line about not making money. Your first year associates/analysts are pulling in 6 figures which I think is pretty decent dough, even though it may feel like a middle class wage in the "star cities" you rightly mentioned.
Your first year associates/analysts are pulling in 6 figures which I think is pretty decent dough, even though it may feel like a middle class wage in the "star cities" you rightly mentioned.
Rent burns it all, and VC-istan and Wall Street both have ageism problems.
It's the same thing as for athletes. A typical major-league professional athlete (which means we're already in the top <0.1 percent) making $600,000 per year isn't really that overpaid when one considers that he has a career that lasts about 6 years, and that his job has extreme physical demands. (Most people pay attention to the celebrity assholes, but the average professional athlete has to be a disciplined in-bed-at-9 type of guy to maintain peak performance.)
When you consider how tight our window of employability is (as soon as we're not "shiny" anymore, we're thrown back into the regular economy, and the locals out there have good reasons not to like us) and how much nonsense we have to put up with, we're not that privileged. Most of the VC-istan hotshots making $175,000 per year will see a 30-50% salary drop (in addition to a -100% ROI on their startup equity) when the bubble goes out.
In addition to rent, there are high taxes on income (making $150 for 10 years means you pay higher taxes than if you made $75k for 20 years, particularly if your $150k is earned in California vs. $75k in Texas), and other high cost of living issues.
I liked this comment , but instead of funding local talent ,wouldn't it make more sense to fund the best solutions for important problems ? Yes the direct financial gain might be a bit less(specially with today's thin startups), but better products and services might offer a lot more value.
I agree with you. I also think it's somewhat pointless that a bunch of people have to move to a high-COL area when they really don't want to be there.
There are plenty of people who'd love to have the same jobs as they can get in the Valley in smaller towns. They move where the jobs are. That'd be fine, except they get taxed to death by the landlords.
Location should, in truth, be completely irrelevant. It's not so much that I see a virtue in funding "local talent" as I'm averse to the conditions that require such talent to be elsewhere, in a place where they have to compete with housing against Russian oligarchs and parentally-funded dipshits (i.e. "funemployed" hipsters) with effectively infinite resources.
What about Texas (with lots of job growth) or North Dakota (with really low unemployment)? There's been mass migration back to the South too.
Maybe (NY, CA, DC, etc..) are dying, and maybe they'll bring the rest of the country with them, but there are other places in the US which seem to be OK.
The employment in north dakota is mostly due to oil/gas drilling. These are not long term jobs that pay well. These are very hard, dangerous jobs that can be performed only for short durations. Besides this is not good the country because of the pollution and damage caused to environment.
Texas is having a somewhat similar problem, but the economic boom is masking it a bit - the suburbs are now the place where a lot of the poor live, and the cities are getting expensive.
We have clear ideas of what the exotic underclass looks like because everyone is clamoring to help them.... The exotic underclass are poor Black and Hispanic children (are there any other kind?) living in America’s urban ghettos.
Yeah, they're wiping their asses with the money that gets thrown at them. What a fucking joke.
The Unexotic Underclass Doesn't Have Cash.
In 2007, the bottom 60% of the country had 4.2% of the country's wealth. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:U.S._Distribution_of_Weal...
Frankly, it doesn't make sense to target anyone but the top 40% of the country. Roll a 20 sided die. If you roll a 1, put in the pile that goes to the bottom 60%. If you roll a 2-20, put it in the money that goes to the top 40% of the country.
Which market are you going to get money from? I can tell you which market I'm looking at.
Now, the distribution of income isn't as disparate, but there's a reason that the bottom 60% isn't generating wealth, and it's partially because they're spending all of their money on essentials and small, low overhead luxuries.
Is it true that you can make a good amount of money in making things more affordable to these segments? Sure, but these don't seem to be the grand problems people are talking about.