The Unexotic Underclass

> The regulations barriers are immense and the security and compliance problems are legion.

Paging Uber ... I am kidding, kind of. I do wonder what would happen if a well-capitalized startup did something in this space. Provide services directly based on the hope/promise/belief of future repayment?

It's a lot easier to get money out of people who have some to spare.

And people say Big Problem when they are embaressed to admit that it's Big Money that they are really after, when you get down to it.

That said, I know quite a few people trying to solve big problems in SF. http://www.handup.us for example.

I like parts of this article more than others.

For example, while I share a certain sense of frustration that SV seems to spend a disproportionate amount of resources on mobifotosocialgames, smartphones and their downmarket progeny are an enormous quality-of-life improvement for broader America. There's virtually nothing a cash-poor-responsibility-rich person needs to do that having a smartphone does not make them better at.

Commute to work? Apply for benefits? Schedule appointments with doctors? Successfully keep those appointments? Keep tabs on kids while working/errands? A smart phone makes you better.

As an entrepreneur who makes stuff for people who are not the usual suspects, the challenges to doing this are numerous and largely not conducive to the VC-funded trajectory. You have to convince people to pay you money for your services, you have to be able to service those customers profitably, and the customers are disproportionately pathological. Most of the software they consume is getting written by AppAmaGooFaceSoft because they can underwrite it with their massive monopoly rents, subsidize the cost straight down to zero, and deal with the CS headaches attendant in serving poor people by sending them to a call tree / web app backended by a Markov chain backended by /dev/null.

There's also a bit of "every problem has a software solution" enthusiasm which is, well, a bit overstated. (Sometimes this isn't stated outright, but when you expect to do something meaningful on e.g. $500k in an angel round, you implicitly expect to do something meaningful 100% in software, because $500k isn't even enough to launch a single McDonalds in the real world.)

Many problems have an 80% software solution attached to a 20% "interface with the real world" mandatory bit. The marginal cost of that last bit, though, is hundreds, thousands, or tens of thousands of dollars per client served. Or it has highly non-trivial political/regulatory barriers to entry, like "Convince an incompetent, intransigent, and politically invulnerable agency to disemploy half their workforce, who are by the way mostly veterans, whose main professional competence is doing an important thing slowly, poorly, and expensively."

Let's take a look at the real problems facing America and the rest of the developed world:

1. Mismanaged IT in critical infrastructure.

2. Misallocated funds in programs helping the destitute.

3. Cyclical loops of depression-lack of opportunity-lack of skill building.

4. Health disorders on a massive scale, like metabolic disorder, that can be solved with very simple things like diet and exercise.

These places are not where a bootstrapped startup can make a difference. They are mired in red tape and ignorance.

Show me the path to get people off of sugar diets. Show me the path to get the VA to modernize their forms and applications. I'll do it right now for free. It isn't just me, so many of us are ready and willing to help.

The truth is that we build Instagrams because people will use them. We build them because the biggest hurdle is Apple's insane app verification process; but the bigger problems are so much harder to solve because the blockades are human and political. Barriers that most of us can't hope to cross.

Yeah, as someone who qualifies as privileged having grown up firmly middle-class and blessed with computers and the interest to learn them since the 80s, I am not incredibly inclined to channel my entrepreneurial spirit into something unfundable to satisfy the moral call of an ex-Goldman MIT graduate on a guilt trip. Put simply, I can not move the needle through self-sacrifice. That doesn't mean I don't have ethics and integrity about what I choose to do, but just that I'm not fool enough to believe I can solve (eg) poor single mothers' problems in this country with an app.

The problems are not going to be solved until culturally we come to a common understanding about what the concentration of wealth is actually doing to the country, so the zeitgeist can move past this sort of ra-ra Fox News pro-corporate anti-socialist propaganda that millions of people believe on principle because it appeals emotionally to their rugged individualist values, but actually only serves as an idealogical wedge to distract the proletariat while the oligarchs continue with business as usual lining their pockets behind the scenes.