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Awesome article, but, > 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.
Let's be honest- that ship sailed years ago.
And this is the heart of everything:
>>>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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why would you want to enter the Oil/Gas industry when you can disrupt them thru Green industries ala Elon Musk ?
When is Elon Musk going to make an electric car that costs < $30,000 new though?
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?
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).
See http://www.libertarianism.org/blog/liberal-is-not-dirty-word
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Somewhat controversial idea: a startup that focuses on cognitive enhancement (IQ, mood, impulse control, mindfulness, stuff like that). Supplements, meditation, and brain training can probably have a non-negligible impact, but I don't see the "underclass" partaking in those currently. IQ and income: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_quotient#Income Victorians smarter than us: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/scien…
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).
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 n…
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.
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.
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…