'To change the world' is a terrible reason to do a startup • Hacker News Board

Re: 'To change the world' is a terrible reason to do a startup

#21

Post by Tichy » Sat, Apr 28, 2012, 1:50 PM UTC

lolcraft wrote: post #13

SpeakMouthWords wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Working for a charity will NOT change the world, since charity places are already oversubscribed. There's an interesting Oxford-based thinktank that works on the most effective forms of making a difference called 80,000 Hours. They're quite a good read, I'll leave the link here. http://80000hours.org/

OT: I find very funny that 80K Hours singles out "banker" as a positively socially impacting career. I guess all those people that were evicted after the housing bubble collapsed don't count :)

Still, being able to borrow money to build a business used to be considered essential for a working economy...

Re: 'To change the world' is a terrible reason to do a startup

#22

Post by seekingnunormal » Sat, Apr 28, 2012, 1:53 PM UTC

I disagree. Fred Wilson puts it much more succinctly than I could:

http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2012/04/can-the-crowd-be-more-patien...

Re: 'To change the world' is a terrible reason to do a startup

#23

Post by danthewireman » Sat, Apr 28, 2012, 1:58 PM UTC

Why not start a startup simply because you're curious what would happen? You don't have to change the world. I think it's fine to just have an adventure (with the understanding that it may be a huge number of hours, fraught with frustration, etc).

Re: 'To change the world' is a terrible reason to do a startup

#24

Post by dlf » Sat, Apr 28, 2012, 2:08 PM UTC

seekingnunormal wrote: post #22

I disagree. Fred Wilson puts it much more succinctly than I could: http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2012/04/can-the-crowd-be-more-patien...

And yet he seems to argue that the sort of world changing things we need aren't in the wheelhouse of startups, in the internet/mobile sense, which are the sort of startups that Phil Libin argued should only be done if you mean to change the world.

Fred Wilson's post seems to advocate crowdsourcing the funding of big, world changing ideas like curing cancer. Tackling these sort of problems is hardly prevalent among startups, but as far as it goes it's fine. But then changing the world is still an extrinsic motivation. You're not intrinsically driven to the idea of a startup or an obsession with the problem your trying to solve. I tend to think this is more problematic with the really big, world changing sort of problems with a long time horizon. It's also unclear to me how crowdfunding these sort of things would work. Would you need to renew funding annually? Would people continue funding you if they didn't see marked progress? ...maybe that's the point of his post, but in any case it's tangential at best to the present discussion.

Re: 'To change the world' is a terrible reason to do a startup

#25

Post by iamdev » Sat, Apr 28, 2012, 2:45 PM UTC

dlf wrote: post #16

iamdev wrote: post #12

TLDR: (Using Phil Libin's own logic against him) Startups are likely to fail, so it's just as absurd to say you're doing it to change the world as it is to believe you're doing it for the money. You're still better off joining an organization that has momentum and resources. This invites inevitable argument though, since: 1. It's endlessly debatable which companies are actually changing the world. 2. The ones most pe…

1. Yes. 2. I don't think of the ones based on charity. The ones that come to mind are Google, Facebook, Twitter, Apple, and AOL (in its day). My point was just that there are other ways to change the world. I used a poor and overdone example by work seemingly related to charity (how come no one is picking on the marine biology example), but you could very well have a world changing impact and be an author or a profes…

I should have been more clear that I personally thought your article was spot on. I was only trying to summarize the debate brewing on HN.

Great blog post and really thought provoking.

Re: 'To change the world' is a terrible reason to do a startup

#26

Post by dlf » Sat, Apr 28, 2012, 3:00 PM UTC

iamdev wrote: post #25

dlf wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. Yes. 2. I don't think of the ones based on charity. The ones that come to mind are Google, Facebook, Twitter, Apple, and AOL (in its day). My point was just that there are other ways to change the world. I used a poor and overdone example by work seemingly related to charity (how come no one is picking on the marine biology example), but you could very well have a world changing impact and be an author or a profes…

I should have been more clear that I personally thought your article was spot on. I was only trying to summarize the debate brewing on HN. Great blog post and really thought provoking.

Thanks! As were your comments!

I admittedly glossed over these issues in the post, but I didn't want to dwell on them because I thought it might detract from the overall message. I kind of did that anyways though.

I like HN because the quality of responses is so much higher than elsewhere, and because you have a forum for fleshing out the glaring issues left in the article. I might delve into the topics you mentioned a bit in future posts. One thing that I think drives people crazy is the whole "change the world" rhetoric in general. It might be useful to explore what that actually means.

Re: 'To change the world' is a terrible reason to do a startup

#27

Post by batista » Sat, Apr 28, 2012, 6:58 PM UTC

michaelochurch wrote: post #18

The "change the world" rhetoric that most of these startups use is marketing copy to get naive engineers to work for them for half market salary. At most of the hot VC startups, the rank-and-file tend to believe in "the mission" but the higher-ups don't. It's like many religions. The peasants believe it and work dutifully, but the high priests know it's bullshit but keep it going because it works. For the record, I t…

>The "change the world" rhetoric that most of these startups use is marketing copy to get naive engineers to work for them for half market salary. At most of the hot VC startups, the rank-and-file tend to believe in "the mission" but the higher-ups don't.

So, mostly like any political party!

Re: 'To change the world' is a terrible reason to do a startup

#28

Post by batista » Sat, Apr 28, 2012, 7:01 PM UTC

Tichy wrote: post #4

"work for an international non-governmental organization or UNICEF. What you do will actually have a greater chance of changing the world through those organizations." Citation needed!

Well, helping at least 1-2 human beings is far more "changing the world" than making a "Facebook for pets", an "Instagram for police mugshots" or a "Dropbox for people literally dropping boxes".