YC's request for startups: Government 2.0

This 10000%. I founded a YC company that's focused on Public Sector, and we see the greenfield opportunity in this space every day.

Only 5% of a given public sector IT's budget is cloud software (most of their software is legacy/on-prem) vs. 50%+ for similar large commercial enterprise.

As governments digitize more and more, they will prefer native "gov first" products. So while it's still early days in these parts of the market, the early winners will be a great position as we move along the tech adoption curve.

It's worth noting too that the tech adoption curve still exists in government, even if it's backwards skewed. And when the early majority hits, given the scale and size, it's going to create some very large and successful companies.

> It will come from naive entrepreneurs, naive in the sense that they don't quite appreciate the problem they are tackling, because if they do they would never take it on

... I'm not even sure where to begin.

I agree with the spirit of these but (venture) capitalism generally feels unsuited to tackle the deepest underlying structural issue in the United States and the world: poverty.

Growing up in poverty has strong correlation with traditional measures of success (high school/college graduation) as well as being shown to affect a child's IQ[1], working memory[2], language development[3], etc. At that point, we can increase access to college and healthcare and whatever else, but the damage has been done.

Education can do some good, but if the problems are environmental, if the challenges are that children can no longer go to school because they need to care for siblings/children of their own[4] or work to supplement their family's income or grow up with PTSD from gun violence[5] or end up in jail because they're taking advantage of the limited means available to them, then…I mean I don't know. It feels like capitalist enterprises focused on adults might not be the real solution here.

And please don't take this as criticism of YC. Their Basic Income project is the most forward-thinking approach to solving this exact problem, but precisely because it doesn't try to solve poverty through capitalist means. The risks associated with doing business with people with low income means the interest rates for lending (payday loans) are unconscionably high. Businesses just aren't incentivized to help the poor.

I think it's going to require political action. Not only helping people vote—YC's funded a number of initiatives here—but specifically supporting candidates who will tackle poverty[6], who focus on the root of so much suffering in our country and our world that is not directly solvable by capitalism.

And in fact, Silicon Valley's greatest success stories are directly fueling wealth inequality. Not only destroying jobs but centralizing wealth into a small corner of the world. Airbnb, Uber, Lyft, etc. take wealth from all over the world and centralize it into the Bay Area. When these companies IPO, the vast, vast majority of that wealth created comes back to Silicon Valley.

Capitalism is not the answer to every problem, nor was it meant to be.

Adam Smith wrote The Wealth of Nations about markets, but he also wrote The Theory of Mental Sentiments about reducing suffering. Markets to him were a tool in the pursuit of happiness, and sometimes that tool did not fit.

So I agree with the sentiment here, but believe there is more to be done, perhaps more important or impactful work to be done, beyond the bounds of capitalist enterprises.

[1]: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3052975/ [2]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2662958/ [3]: https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~mfarah/Development-povertyassocia... [4]:

Biggie Smalls:

> Yeah, this album is dedicated > To all the teachers that told me I'd never amount to nothin' > To all the people that lived above the buildings that I was hustlin' in front of > Called the police on me when I was just tryin' to make some money to feed my daughter (it's all good)

[5] Chance the Rapper:

> It just got warm out, this the shit I've been warned 'bout > I hope that it storm in the mornin', I hope that it's pourin' out > I hate crowded beaches, I hate the sound of fireworks > And I ponder what's worse between knowing it's over and dyin' first > > 'Cause everybody dies in the summer > Wanna say your goodbyes, tell them while it's spring > I heard everybody's dying in the summer > So pray to God for a little more spring

[6]: For this reason I believe that one of the greatest political tragedies of modern American politics was the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy.

This is way too generic and inflammatory to count as anything but off-topic flamebait. If you post like this, we're guaranteed a flamewar. However good your intentions and however sure you are that you're right, that's a destructive thing to do, which is why the site guidelines ask you not to, so please don't.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

Please especially don't post nationalistic slurs to HN. Your comment unfortunately dips at least a toe into that toxic waste.

I'm in my 40s and old enough to remember when the government ran just fine (before the national debt grew to $3 trillion in the 80s). We grew up wanting to go to Space Camp, and build human-powered airplanes, and hack into our school to change our grades. There was none of this dour doom and gloom about government overeach we have today. Fast Times at Ridgemont High and The Breakfast Club demonstrated that our biggest problems were finding dates and getting into college, not worrying which constitutional freedom the government was going to take away next.

IMHO the problem happened when the propaganda machine began telling us that the government is the enemy and can't do anything right:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xhYJS80MgYA

I know that many people still believe that today, but they are wrong. My personal evidence for this is the fact that our education, infrastructure, and social safety net were all much stronger in the 80s than today. The catch is, that they weren't strong for everyone. Women and minorities were largely left out. The 80s were mostly about the growing pains of transitioning from a 1950's style nuclear family economy to a 21st century one where every human being has equal dignity. That scared a lot of people, and resulted in AIDS and the war on drugs, among a great many other social ills that never.should.have.happened.

The scientific evidence for the lack of justice and progress in 40 years is the vast wealth inequality today. We're what, 2, 4, 10 times more productive per capita than in 1980? But make less money adjusted for inflation? Someone stole that money. And they did it politically. The catch there is that politicans are the symptom of dysfunction, not the cause.

With all that out of the way, I think we can still have a vision forward. I think that to get the USA back towards the top, we need to address every ranking where we currently suffer: education, healthcare, infant mortality, college/personal/national debt, environmental sustainability, being overworked/underpaid, lack of transparency in government, on and on. We know the problems, but our two major political parties have us deadlocked and distracted so they can skim from us to line their own pockets and those of their donors in order to maintain artificial scarcity and rent seeking to bolster hierarchy.

Politics aside, there is a huge, untapped, public sector market that has been starving for capital since 1967. There was a long term agenda to convert that to a private sector market by means such as HMOs, the privatization of education, and buildup of the military industrial complex without an industrial superpower threatening us.

Personally I'd like to see money be shifted from those things back to the public sector (We the People), but that's unlikely to happen because our economy is made up of the middlemen it feeds now. Luckily with our increased productivity, we can find a way to feed everyone.

Government is traditionally good at long term investment. So it's going to be a shift for any private sector startup to go from short term thinking to long term planning. But for example, there is nearly infinite opportunity in things like the Green New Deal, distrupting the ISP duopolies, bringing the arts and humanities back into education, big data/machine learning in medicine, new forms of transportation, organizing labor/guilds, peace corps and legal financial instruments to provide people the means to work off and/or settle their debts, and so on. These are comparable to the federal budget, perhaps $1-4 trillion annually in untapped opportunities.