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The Unexotic Underclass

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Re: The Unexotic Underclass

#91

Post by michaelochurch »

theoppositeof wrote: post #88
michaelochurch wrote: post #86

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…

Michaelo Church or Michael O. Church, I don't know who you are, but this is a great comment on the article. Thank you for this perspective. As someone once in VC, I laughed when you said what is true: most VCs are not actually putting their own money behind the investments. Indeed, it's only the 9-figure celebrity ones. My only quibble was your line about not making money. Your first year associates/analysts are pull…

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.

Rent burns it all, and VC-istan and Wall Street both have ageism problems.

It's the same thing as for athletes. A typical major-league professional athlete (which means we're already in the top When you consider how tight our window of employability is (as soon as we're not "shiny" anymore, we're thrown back into the regular economy, and the locals out there have good reasons not to like us) and how much nonsense we have to put up with, we're not that privileged. Most of the VC-istan hotshots making $175,000 per year will see a 30-50% salary drop (in addition to a -100% ROI on their startup equity) when the bubble goes out.

Re: The Unexotic Underclass

#92

Post by ippisl »

michaelochurch wrote: post #86

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…

I liked this comment , but instead of funding local talent ,wouldn't it make more sense to fund the best solutions for important problems ? Yes the direct financial gain might be a bit less(specially with today's thin startups), but better products and services might offer a lot more value.

Re: The Unexotic Underclass

#93

Post by michaelochurch »

ippisl wrote: post #92
michaelochurch wrote: post #86

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…

I liked this comment , but instead of funding local talent ,wouldn't it make more sense to fund the best solutions for important problems ? Yes the direct financial gain might be a bit less(specially with today's thin startups), but better products and services might offer a lot more value.

I agree with you. I also think it's somewhat pointless that a bunch of people have to move to a high-COL area when they really don't want to be there.

There are plenty of people who'd love to have the same jobs as they can get in the Valley in smaller towns. They move where the jobs are. That'd be fine, except they get taxed to death by the landlords.

Location should, in truth, be completely irrelevant. It's not so much that I see a virtue in funding "local talent" as I'm averse to the conditions that require such talent to be elsewhere, in a place where they have to compete with housing against Russian oligarchs and parentally-funded dipshits (i.e. "funemployed" hipsters) with effectively infinite resources.

Re: The Unexotic Underclass

#94

Post by IsaacL »

raylu wrote: post #25
kstenerud wrote: post #5

All of this moralizing and "solve big problems" talk is really getting old. On average, chances are pretty low that a particular individual will ever solve a big problem, so stop worrying about it! It's not for others to say how you "should" spend your energy anyway. The moralistic fluff is unnecessary. Those who aren't motivated will ignore it, those who are motivated don't need to be reminded, and the moralizers wi…

On average, chances are pretty low that a particular startup will ever make even a hundred thousand dollars, so stop starting new companies! It's not for either your investors or your customers to tell you what to build anyway. And just never talk about morals, which I deem "fluff".

I read it the opposite way - your chances of having a big impact are low, so stop worrying and start a company anyway. This might sound paradoxical, but for a lot of people (myself included) being told "don't waste your time on something trivial" can be paralysing. You end up questioning every idea and never being able to settle on one.

You can (and should) get a sense of which ideas are worthwhile, but you'll never know for sure. Maybe your potential cure for cancer won't work. Maybe your todo list app will help 100 medical non-profits each be 5% more efficient, in effect having 5 non-profit's worth of impact. With that in mind, the best you can do is pick something that you can probably make work, that people probably want, and that will probably have a positive impact on society. Whether or not you change the world is up to the gods.

Re: The Unexotic Underclass

#95

Post by yardie »

kyllo wrote: post #3

I noticed that devs on HN often sneer at CRUD apps because they're boring to build, but meanwhile a simple CRUD app could do something like make all these veterans' medical benefit claims paperless so that they can get filled out and approved in minutes rather than months , and they could get the care they need sooner. One could do a lot of good by just making CRUD apps for people who need them and can't afford to pa…

In a past life I built one of these CRUD apps. The CRUD part was simple. The volumes of rules and exceptions is where the time and money went. At one point I tried to replace a DOS terminal-based system with something that would resemble a GUI. Based off the old GUI it was easy to replicate, then the rulebooks came out and I realised I was way over my head.

Re: The Unexotic Underclass

#97

Post by sophacles »

205guy wrote: post #31

I don't disagree with the article, but I had 2 thoughts form in my mind while reading it: 1) I don't think entrepreneurs (and tech ones at that) have solved any problems, even for the upper classes they cater to. Instead, they have become popular and profitable the old-fashioned way, by creating and filling a need. Even a solution as fundamental as search on the internet is not really helping me lead a better life--t…

>> where are the non-tech entrepreneurs? Are there solutions that don't require computers anymore?

You know, there are a lot of really broken processes in the world. Ones that don't benefit from computers directly, however indirectly a computer scientist willing to ditch the standard toolset (computer, compiler, etc), could probably make a big splash. We are all trained to think hard about the steps to automate a process - what order is necessary, what order is irrelevant, where can we substitute a functionally equivalent but more efficient mechanism, what constraints and bottlenecks need to be worked around and so on. This thinking usually is just about code, but really, it isn't that different for a lot of other areas. I think you end up seeing computers applied as a solution where they don't fit very well, because that is the tool that does process in our minds.

Perhaps there is money/usefulness/something, in getting away from the computer and finding other ways to apply our skillset.

Re: The Unexotic Underclass

#98

Post by bdavisx »

kyllo wrote: post #63
pvdm wrote: post #61

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?

Less than $30k? You're going to need less than $15 for the underclass that this article is talking about; and even then those people are going to have to buy used.

Re: The Unexotic Underclass

#99

Post by jasey »

ebiester wrote: post #44

It's pretty simple. The Unexotic Underclass Doesn't Have Cash. In 2007, the bottom 60% of the country had 4.2% of the country's wealth. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:U.S._Distribution_of_Weal... Frankly, it doesn't make sense to target anyone but the top 40% of the country. Roll a 20 sided die. If you roll a 1, put in the pile that goes to the bottom 60%. If you roll a 2-20, put it in the money that goes to the…

100% this.

As per the laws of free market capitalism if a niche in the market is underserved the market will step up and supply to the markets demand.

On Wall st where the author has worked, any market inefficiency is arbitraged away. Where there is profits to be made the market will find them.

I just don't think there's any big viable markets there, it would be nice if the author could identify at least 1 product idea... As she identifies that the allergy problem stretches across all demographics so this is not really a 'unexotic underclass' problem.

The other issue I see here is allot of the b2c opportunities in the tech industry are based on having customers with "disposable income". In theory a struggling single mum probably doesn't/shouldn't have a iPhone.

Finally I'm not sure that the "unexotic underclass being uninteresting is the problem" argument holds water. Again wall street is arguably not that interesting either but they are not crying about a skills shortage.

These issues are government issues. If the government put money into solving these problems im sure the startup community would happily come and help out.

Re: The Unexotic Underclass

#100

Post by ebiester »

kyllo wrote: post #63
pvdm wrote: post #61

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?

One too many zeroes. The unexotic underclass would not even be able to afford the $3,000 dollar hybrid battery (Prius) replacement, much less a full EV battery.
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