Requests for Startups Refreshed

Regarding the agriculture you bring up, the real issue here is contracts. Suppose you lend a bunch of Kerala palm oil orchards $1M, hoping to make $5M over a decade. Do you really trust the Communist government of Kerala to enforce your contracts and transfer wealth from poor local farmers back to the rich (likely foreign) capitalists who made them loans?

That's the problem to solve. If you can solve it I don't see a reason why anyone wouldn't fund you.

I agree that it's harder to solve a problem that you're not experiencing, but, by the same token, underserved communities will tolerate an even lower threshold of quality as long as you're helping them :)

For the approach on how to solve their problems, the main goal is empathy.

Look at the Design Thinking theory: first step is to emphatize.

When I was taking a marketing course, they told us to shadow a consumer. You have to "walk a mile in their shoes" For example, I've been very impressed by the use of artificial impairments to simulate the experience of people with real disabilities.

Once you -really- understand their problems, I'm pretty sure any sharp mind here will come up with interesting solutions.

Edit: Design School

http://dschool.stanford.edu/dgift/

Look for the Bootcamp material too:

https://dschool.stanford.edu/sandbox/groups/designresources/...

HOW to empathize To empathize, you: - Observe. View users and their behavior in the context of their lives. As much as possible do observations in relevant contexts in addition to interviews. Some of the most powerful realizations come from noticing a disconnect between what someone says and what he does. Others come from a work-around someone has created which may be very surprising to you as the designer, but she may not even think to mention in conversation.

- Engage. Sometimes we call this technique ‘interviewing’ but it should really feel more like a conversation. Prepare some questions you’d like to ask, but expect to let the conversation deviate from them. Keep the conversation only loosely bounded. Elicit stories from the people you talk to, and always ask “Why?” to uncover deeper meaning. Engagement can come through both short ‘intercept’ encounters and longer scheduled conversations.

- Watch and Listen. Certainly you can, and should, combine observation and engagement. Ask someone to show you how they complete a task. Have them physically go through the steps, and talk you through why they are doing what they do. Ask them to vocalize what’s going through their mind as they perform a task or interact with an object. Have a conversation in the context of someone’s home or workplace – so many stories are embodied in artifacts. Use the environment to prompt deeper questions.

State run media is actually very good at solving the problems you find aggravating.

99% of useful news has nothing to do with the things you imagine state run news will be bad at informing you about. It is a world without sensational click bait. The 1% of the time some journalist goes missing, well thats what WeChat is for.

I don't see "spotify of media" really solving the problem with low-quality mass media.

A subscription with pay-per-view revenue share cuts out advertisers as the money middle man, but it still rewards clickbait headlines and easy to consume top lists over deep investigative journalism.

The core problem (or "problem"?) of journalism today is that what people actually want to read is very different from what is "good for the society" for people to write and read. You can't fix it with technology that optimises based on market economics.

Some of the ways newspapers financed deep journalism in the past were classified ads (now split into separate businesses like craigslist) and the inability to track the readership of individual articles. Now that each click is tracked, it is obvious that a Top 10 List article costs $10 to write while bringing in more revenue than a $10000 months-long investigation.

So to "fix" it, you first have to decide that you are going to deliver people journalism that is "good for them" rather than what they want, and then find a way to subsidise producing that content above its natural market value. I think that a "rich billionaire owner" willing to lose money to earn reputation as an owner of a serious newspaper is actually a more promising funding model than spotify for media.

I would argue that solving the problem of contract enforcement is beyond the scope of any entrepreneur.

However I do see your point and appreciate its merit. By the same token, if YC was unduly worried about that, they would never be able to fund (tech) companies that operate principally outside the west because the problem you allude to has never really been solved satisfactorily.

But here's my point: as YC becomes larger and looks for growth outside its traditional areas, its model must evolve.

Right now it does seem a bit scattershot. Is it a VC or an Angel? What is the place and relationship of charity and the entrepreneurs it sponsors? It claims to invest in founders predominantly over their ideas, but everyone I know who applies, does so with the thought at the back of their minds, that the de-facto situation is one in which an idea which cannot be a billion dollar company is best left at home. Whats wrong with funding a company that has the potential to reach 100M?

I guess what I mean to say is: for the larger mission YC espouses, the funding model is broken; indeed the mission itself is unclear. For those like me who aspire to be funded this creates much frustration