Poverty-Fighting Startups

There's no sacred cows in this case, just groupthink.

Incidentally, Silicon Valley isn't at even typically anti-government. That bit isn't even in the groupthink even if there's a particular anti-government dogma that isn't absent from the milieu.

(note: I'm not in SV or it's groupthink, I'm speaking as an observer of it)

>“One of my ambitions is to help our users put more food on the table,” says Jimmy Chen, the founder of Propel.

This app has some short-term benefits, but it’s hard to see long-term benefits. What if every government aid program was super easy to sign-up for and instantly check whatever you need. What would change? Less taxes from all the gov workers we’d no longer need?

At first blush it would seem that coordinating or collaborating with cooperative government agencies might be of benefit as many of these apps seem to streamline and make processes more effective for the ultimate beneficiary of the programs. Obviously this is a benefit for both the recipient and the government organization which wants to serve its pop as well as possible.

As someone mentioned in the thread, efficiency could lead to either better benefits to the recipients of the government benefits or they could result in contraction of the government workforce.

To that latter concern we must figure out whether people are employed by the government (or companies in general) to do a job or they're there also equally as a part of a social contract to keep the most people possible in gainful employment --which if the latter is true, SV startups are an anathema by design. People for the most part aren't building startups in order to require more people to keep things running --they tend to be in business to save their customers money.

Non-profits can be startups too, if they're attempting to build new business models.

I'm not from Silicon Valley, so the only sampling I have of SV culture comes from this site[0]. From what I see, the article has a refrain that being anti-libertarian goes against the SV gain, but I see political opinions from across the political spectrum here, and my leftist opinions are often upvoted. So, while I can see investors being skeptical, would the tech community as a whole be anti-welfare? I don't necessarily think so.

Regardless, that's just a nitpick about the article. I'm happy that these businesses are doing what they are doing.

[0] FWIW, the article cited a comment from here, so this place must be important enough to cite as an example of SV attitudes