'To change the world' is a terrible reason to do a startup
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'To change the world' is a terrible reason to do a startup
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Re: 'To change the world' is a terrible reason to do a startup
#2Everything we do changes the world, even if it's only a little. Our influence is small but it's all we've got. Use it in the best way you can.
And if by chance you're a giant success, all the better.
Re: 'To change the world' is a terrible reason to do a startup
#3Great Article. It is Ye Olde Reductio ad absurdum though. No rational peron goes into business just to change the world. No rational person goes into business just to make money. No rational person goes into business just because they are fed up of their current boss. As ever, it is a combination of all of them. A point in a high-dimensional cube, if you will.
Re: 'To change the world' is a terrible reason to do a startup
#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!
Re: 'To change the world' is a terrible reason to do a startup
#5Become a startup entrepreneur if you "want to change the world" is not the same as "to change the world". I also would not block on the word "change".
To me it means providing a significant contribution to the world evolution. There is some liberty degree in how we would contribute to its evolution and how much.
Another point is that I feel we shouldn't take this at 1rst degree. To me it means the initial author is talking of a life goal, not an objective. A goal is something we try to achieve, tend to, but it's ok to fail. An objective is something we have to achieve and it is bad to fail. In french there is a third level on top of these but I don't know how to translate it. It is a life ideal. (idéal de vie). This is just a general direction we define for our life. Whether we want to do good or bad, make significant contribution to the world evolution or help and support others to live their life and achieve their own goal.
The initial author is himself confusing objective, goal and ideal, but the post author too.
What I retain from the initial author is that beeing a startup entrepreneur is very hard, unsure and we have false assumptions on what it could yield to us : power, money, ...
Re: 'To change the world' is a terrible reason to do a startup
#6The author of this article seems to be confusing "changing the world" with helping people. UNICEF and similar organizations are great at helping people, but they really aren't meant to change the world. They just make the existing one a little less terrible for those who are worst off. I can't imagine a compelling argument saying that digging wells or tree planting has changed the world more that Facebook or Google over the last 15 years. Whether those changes have been for the best is open to discussion, but the fact that many startups have in fact changed the world in significant ways is hard to dispute.
Re: 'To change the world' is a terrible reason to do a startup
#7A very cogent article. Having had my own experiences of startups this is the best takeaway:
"innate driving force that is intrinsically tied to doing the startup."
This applies to all types of startup, not just software/tech.
Re: 'To change the world' is a terrible reason to do a startup
#8You should do a startup because it's what you're meant to do, because you can't think of anything else you'd rather do, because you are driven to solve tough problems, and/or you're passionate about the problem you're trying to solve.
That's the part of the post I agree with.
I say if you want to do it to change the world, go 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.
Maybe you should plant trees or study migratory patterns of marine life or dig wells in Africa.
These are the parts that I don't agree with, and they come up a ton in these conversations. How is working at UNICEF more world changing than doing a start-up that solves tough problems? Same goes for the other examples. What the author describes in the top paragraph I quoted has the potential to be significantly more world changing for the subset of people who are facing that same tough problem.
To me, Libin's general thought was to be driven by the right reasons, and it's in line with what this author says. A large amount of responses to Libin's talk picked on his wording, but in the end the responses are saying the exact same thing, but without the exact phrasing of "change the world", as that is seemingly reserved for projects involved solely with charity, Africa and cancer.
Re: 'To change the world' is a terrible reason to do a startup
#9"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!
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.
Re: 'To change the world' is a terrible reason to do a startup
#10I disagree with the logic behind this piece and I believe it's conflating expected value with utility.
Basically, if given a 0.1% chance of earning 50 billion dollars or a 50% chance of earning 3 million dollars, one could convincingly argue that the most rational choice is the latter because the marginal utility of money diminishes rapidly.
However, if given the choice between a 0.1% chance of saving 50 million lives vs a 50% chance of saving 30,000 lives, one could argue that the former is better since the marginal utility of saving lives is much more linear.