I've been thinking a bunch about why it's the trivial projects (Altair, the WWW, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, AirBnB) that change the world, and the change-the-world projects (Xanadu, WebTV, Chandler, WebVan) end up becoming trivial.
I think it's because of a quirk of human psychology. The value of a product to us, as a user, is about how well it fits into our daily lives. "Fits into" is the operative phrase: to get adopted, a product needs to be nearly invisible, and fit into what we're already doing so well that it's just a seamless augmentation of our own capabilities. Such products naturally seem trivial.
By contrast, we judge the importance of a project by a combination of a.) how difficult it was to do and b.) how many people it affects. Both of these are anticorrelated with how likely it is to fit into our lives. Difficult projects are usually complex; that complexity tends to spill over into the user interface and make it harder for us to make sense of how we would use the product. (Indeed, when moonshots like Google or Tesla succeed, it's usually because they manage to put a complex problem behind a really simple & familiar interface.) And aiming to please a large audience means handling a lot of corner cases, which again bloats the user interface and makes it harder for any one person to adopt it.
Once you've got lots of happy people adopting the product, they can serve as teachers and evangelists to bring a little more complexity to the wider world. But if you build something designed to change the world from the start, it tends to "bounce off" of the world, as it doesn't actually fit into the daily needs of any one person.
> I've been thinking a bunch about why it's the trivial projects (Altair, the WWW, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, AirBnB) that change the world, and the change-the-world projects (Xanadu, WebTV, Chandler, WebVan) end up becoming trivial.
Selection bias, mostly. I mean, "change the world" projects also includes the likes of Apple Computer, Amazon, Edison's laboratory at Menlo Park and the World Health Organization. All of these have changed the world more than Reddit ever will. And whilst what Tim Berners Lee and Zuckerberg started off might have looked trivial, I'm pretty sure they were motivated by a belief that they could change the way people communicated, and not simply develop X for Y. scale. profit.
There's nothing wrong with doing the latter of course, and a business that revolutionises the world... of analysis of social media sentiments for digital marketers might well deliver far more radical improvements to the lives of its employees and early investors than companies with loftier and less well-defined aims. But the argument that this talent might have actually improved the world more by doing something as mundane and often-criticized as helping a fund pick stocks remains.
Apple Computer was also trivial when it started - it was a circuit board without a case, that hobbyists had to assemble itself, and needed an external TV to display any output.
Amazon had big ambitions, but they started selling books via Perl script. I remember when it first started attracting media attention in 1996, I wondered why the hell people could get so excited about selling books. If a similar startup launched today - say, call it book.ly - would you consider it a "change the world" company?
Edison's laboratory isn't a fair comparison: at the time it was established, Edison had already been inventing things for a decade. It would be like looking at Google in 2005 instead of 1995. (Google, along with Elon Musk's companies and Pixar, actually are the exception that the article talks about, where they seem crazily ambitious from the beginning.) Edison's first patent was for an electric vote recorder, which a.) sounds a lot less impressive and b.) didn't exactly change the world.
The WHO is an entirely different beast: it's an arm of an international organization, established under the umbrella of the United Nations. I would say it qualifies, though - it's under the "do something crazily ambitious" clause in Sam Altman's article. Indeed, even then it took 25 years to go from founding to the eradication of smallpox.
To find examples that actually contradict the point, you need to find companies that a.) appeared to outsiders, not just their founders, as crazily ambitious b.) at the time of their founding and c.) actually did change the world. There are relatively few of these; there are some, but it's a definite minority. Most of the time, if you think of an invention as having changed the world from the beginning, it's because your "beginning" was actually several years into its development, and your perception of its importance is colored by events & adoption that have already happened.
Frankly "world's biggest bookstore" shortly after launch sounds more like a potential world changing company today than much of what's coming out of Silicon Valley. And Bezos was bold enough to build it before many people had considered buying things online.
Sure, everything looks trivial to some people (bah! not another government-backed space launch vehicle manufacturer). But there's a big difference between companies that seem trivial to outsiders because those outsiders are sceptical about the founder's claims there's a mass market for the service, and companies that seem trivial because they're throwing VC money at incrementally improving existing platforms to capture a slice of a maturing market. Founders taking the Jobs/Bezos-type bet that things like consumer genetics and 3D printing are on the cusp of being ready for the masses evidently have world-changing aspirations even if many outsiders think the products will remain a toy (and even if hindsight proves them right). On the other hand it's already very well established there's a real and huge market for products which improve click through rates on ads, but you'll struggle to convince anyone that doesn't work in marketing that it's actually a world-changing mission, no matter how gushing the press release is and how close they are to success. I think the criticism directed at SV for focusing efforts on "trivial" problems tend to be directed mostly at companies with the latter type of ambition than the former.
I feel like products that boast to be revolutionary also drive away users because it increases what they expect of a product. Products that are designed to be 'game changers' from the start often try to solve problems or offer people alternatives in areas where people don't like to make the compromises one typically has to make with things that are still in beta or just starting out. The trivial products come with lower expectations, which I think also lowers the threshold to give them a try.
Facebook, Twitter, reddit, the Internet itself, the iPhone, and on and on and on—most people dismissed these things as incremental or trivial when they first came out.
I would say Twitter and Facebook in particular are still are incremental and trivial as billion dollar companies and always will be. The web is a dumbed down version of older hypertext systems and hasn't shaken that legacy in 25 years.
The real problem with the pace of innovation is these things weren't trivial to build, that's why the best we can do is incrementalism. And that comes from the foundation systems we use. When something near the bottom of a technology stack/pyramid offloads complexity to the top, it becomes a nightmare to get anything done.
For example, we don't have a natural language command line for regular/stupid users. Instead we have point and grunt GUIs. That means apps have to be monolithic. Apps can't work seamlessly with one another even if the underlying tech allows it.
And from that small bit of complexity we get billion dollar walled gardens.
You can fool yourself about worse is better while making a few bucks. You can wall yourself off from the naysayers. But the real impact on the economy and humanity from eBay, AirBB and FaceTwitter is low.
To single one out, the Full Belly Project is a great example. Their Universal Nut Sheller has had a real, measurable impact on economies.
In general terms, several industries have had a real, measurable impact on economies. The scooter, the diesel truck, the steel hulled boat, the washing machine, the cell phone... There are many successful companies in these industries that have a real impact on humanity and make a profit too.
I find it astonishing that you couldn't think of examples of businesses that have had a bigger impact on humanity than Twitter and Facebook.
> I find it astonishing that you couldn't think of examples of businesses that have had a bigger impact on humanity than Twitter and Facebook.
I never said I couldn't think of businesses with more (current) impact than Twitter and Facebook! I think my work history amply illustrates that (Google[x], Google Life Sciences, etc).
I was simply saying: A lot of really great, impactful businesses started off with more-modest beginnings; chiding existing upstarts for not being sufficiently ambitious borders on hubris.
Real impact is "low" and the market will reflect that after the hype settles. There wasn't much to pour money into at the start of this tech bubble/cycle so FaceTwitter got a lot more.
Every other business that doesn't aim to be some small boutique has growth and impact in the back of their minds, or got the idea after a taste of success.
And by far the biggest impact in computing has been from NLS-Mother of All Demos and Xerox PARC Smalltalk, who were aiming for exactly that. Measured in the trillions. Each individual startup's hyped up billion dollar share of this pie is small. As it should be, since they handle narrow subsets of functionality and can't even work seamlessly with each other. And most users can't deal with all the different UIs.
Engelbart's "Mother of All Demos" had a huge impact on the world, but was an epic failure for his business. Xerox never capitalized on his innovation... so by that measure (since I asked you to name companies), it was a failure. ;)
Yes financial reward and power wasn't properly distributed in these cases. But economic impact is not just about their individual success. It's economic.
>But the real impact on the economy and humanity from eBay, AirBB and FaceTwitter is low.
Yay! This post. A mathy-engineering type condescendingly putting down services with a billion users while the world communicates and shares things with each other on FaceTwitter (I see what you did there, the services are the same functionally, so why differentiate them? very clever). While they're sitting around being too good for these services for the masses, the masses are being entertained, meeting new people, and staying in touch with old acquaintances, and enjoying themselves. Also not thinking a lick of the engineer who is too good to use their services.
>The web is a dumbed down version of older hypertext systems and hasn't shaken that legacy in 25 years.... You can fool yourself about worse is better while making a few bucks.
Yep. Worse is better because all of these things are just iterations on the thing you originally saw, which is obviously the pinnacle of the web. It's like people who move to New York City and expect the city to stay exactly the way it was when they first became emotionally attached to it. Or people who join reddit and complain about it going to shit because it's different from when they joined it. The web wasn't in some ideal state that you happened to come across and get in with while it was good. The one constant of the internet and the web is how it evolves and changes.
I was never good at mathy things, decent at abstract art.
The masses were already entertained by AOL chatrooms and ICQ. A lot of older people I see stay in touch with email, and they got each other's addresses by talking on the phone. And they use it exactly like facebook newsfeed, forwarding silly news stories to each other and not being able to format out the endless forwarding chain. They don't think a lick of the innovative engineering and billions of dollars behind facebook, because their batch of friends just forwards emails. I've heard some complaints about the terrible formatting, people asking to be taken off the lists, people not knowing how to do it, but it mostly works. Facebook confuses them too. Some only use Skype.
What is facebook when you boil it down to its real functionality?
Address book with photos
Event system for the address book
Mail forwarding between people in the address book
Filters for forwarded messages
Filters for people in the address book
Media storage and filters on who can view it
But mostly a UI that enables a larger percentage of casual computer users to use more of these features than they could in email. Takes the friction out of the forwarding messages use case. Sharing photos and the address book are in one place and searchable.
And there are your entertained masses and billions of dollars. But what was it worth when half of those features were stuck in email?
The GUI and the way we organize programs is why we shoveled a bunch of these features from one place to another and made a big fuss about it when an unknown proportion of users started using more features than they did in email.
The first piece of advice "don’t claim you’re changing the world until you’ve changed it" makes sense.
A tiny minority of founders really work on products that change the world. Many just hope that their company is acquired and that is how most "successful" startups "exit". The so-called "exit" is a badge of honor (even if the company had been through a fire-sale or acqui-hire)
There are other good points in the column, but I think Sam is a bit too defensive when he says "ignore the haters and work on whatever you find interesting. The internet commenters and journalists that say you’re working on something that doesn’t matter are probably not building anything at all themselves."
If someone is a "hater", does it really matter if they are building anything else ?
Tesla has its critics, social-networking-for-cats will also have its critics. Both companies may assert that they are changing the world. However, I don't think it makes sense for the latter to use the former as an example of why its critics are all "haters". Of course, I don't mean to suggest that the latter deserves its critics. I'm just saying that there is no need to circle the wagons against these so-called "haters".
If you think your startup is worth it, just work on it. Most startups don't change the world in a big way, but that shouldn't stop you from trying.
If you're accused of working on stupid, trivial things, and Facebook and Twitter are your best counterexamples, it's a little pathetic. It's very easy to conflate making a lot of money with doing something that matters. At the end of the day, they're ad-serving time-sucks that delivers CandyCrush and advertisements and an endless stream of selfies from our most annoying, narcissistic acquaintances.
Almost every founder, engineer, Stanford grad, and VC has been chanting "We're changing the world!" for the last eight years. Stop it. It's trite and annoying and it pisses people off. It doesn't piss people off because your current batch of products are half-baked and stupid. It pisses people off because your very best products of the last decade are, at the end of the day, stupid and trivial and really haven't changed the world in a very positive way. It pisses people off because it doesn't hold water outside the myopic Silicon Valley bubble, where everyone tells each other "We're changing the world" often enough that they actually buy into it.
That's a rather blithe and shallow criticism of Facebook and Twitter. I could easily complain about email because of spam, but it would totally disregard its usefulness and impact. (As for Candy Crush invites and annoying selfies, Facebook actually provides tools to deal with those problems. RTFM?)
Facebook in particular has allowed me to keep in touch with a much larger social circle. It has made it easier to meet people, establish friendships, maintain distance relationships, and keep in touch with more of my extended family. It allows me to plan events quickly and on short notice, and get quick feed back on who will be attending. It helps me learn about new events or activities that I otherwise might have missed.
> Facebook in particular has allowed me to keep in touch with a much larger social circle
For me, Facebook offered a false sense of being social. The more I used it, the more I craved social interaction, leading me to use it even more. It's possible, maybe even likely, that I was "using it wrong." But after I used Facebook's tool for dealing with this problem (the Delete Account tool), I've become a more genuinely social person.
I do miss out on photos posted by my extended family. That is a genuine loss. I've probably also missed out on some events organized through Facebook. But then again, I'm making more of an effort to actively maintain relationships offline, and it's probably been a net positive.
Of course, that's just my experience. There are 1.5B active users who might disagree.
I'd also like to point out that FB has served a great purpose for me and pretty much all my social circle.
It lets me keep up with people I would _otherwise not bother to talk with_ by seeing what's happening in their lives. It lets me organize events and coordinate with ease. It lets me share things like photos and video (both privately and publicly) super easily
Sure, technically, it's "incremental improvements" on blogs + RSS + email, but only in the same sense that C is an incremental improvement on Brainfuck. It's made a lot of these concepts easy to use for non-nerds on a large scale.
Dismissing Facebook ignores the social impact it's had on a huge amount of people.
Warning, the following only relates to small remark from the article...
I really like the remark "noone understands hyperexponential growth". I've always wondered if it's possible to learn understanding this better. I'd like to think that most things can be learned and improved on at least to some degree so it might be worthwhile to investigate this.
I used to play online poker for a living and I feel it improved my intuitive understanding of limited chance events quite a bit (and taught me to think a lot more in expected value than in actual results which is very valuable imo). My hypothesis would be that a pool of (good) poker players understand something like every day variance better than a comparable sample with no poker background. There's some counter evidence that may be related (econ students routinely know very little about basic econ concepts) but these examples tend to be about theoretical and not practical knowledge.
Not sure what other groups one could include, statisticians or people who use statistics regularly (data scientists, data centric QM, investment bankers maybe)
Constructing an instrument (questionnaire?) to measure intuitive understanding of statistics is probably non-trivial.
+I'm already having nightmares of endless Frequentist vs. Bayesian debates.
Afterwards, the interesting thing would be to construct creative (I'm thinking games due to my background but it could be anything) learning environments where an improved understanding of (hyper)exponential growth is developed.
I tweeted about this yesterday and I firmly believe the conversation around this would be a lot more fruitful if startups & founders would evaluate and focus their companies on _helping the world_ & stop with this "changing the world" bullshit. The latter is arrogant, presumptuous, and often not true; the former is a genuine desire and wish.
Few people and companies, in the history of our existence, arguably, truly change the world (i.e., make history and alter our lives for better). And none of them claim to be changing the world while they're doing so. Everyone else and every other company is a footnote but that doesn't mean it cannot help people and our world at large in some way while alive.
The main underlying difference between the two is:
Helping the world = focus on customers.
Change the world = focus on the company.
Part of the problem is the innate need of companies in SV to pitch themselves to VCs and in order to do that - they need to hyperbolize their mission - hence why you get a lot more "WE'RE GOING TO CHANGE THE WORLD" blathering.
"the uber of x" "trainers hate him" "you wont believe what happened next"
Those are all consequences of the current internet culture where everyhing is a product.
Some are really pitching to VCs, some are maybe good idea, most are just following the trends that works to generate interest.
The catch is curiosity doesn't mean conversions and while views generated by clickbaiting may seem good in a pitch value is mostly in the actual returning customers.
This had been know from ages, but today it is only the last bullet point of 'growth hackers', known today under minimise churn rate.
As the weight moved to virality and marketing views to revenue plummeted and at the current advertising cost per click to fuel the gtowth of apps with a 0.1% conversion or less you really need millions.
And here we get back to the main point: those millions to drive views to lure VCs for more millions to build more views are not actually making the product any better. Are making for big headlines at most.
And the fun part is, they call whose whom suceed unicorn because in this system of advertisement fueled growth means they're mostly pumping millions in ads on whatever, without any confirmation on the actual product sustenaibility beyond the growth spiral, and having to have a million user before discovering if the product is actually useful is a plan so retarded that it doesn't faze me chances of one of this suceeding are as good as winning the lottery.
These apps "change the world" only if your "world" is the silicon valley echo chamber. The real world is only moderately impacted, and only for a limited time, even by an anomaly like Facebook.
Seriously, to all the silicon valley startups and investors: get over yourself. You are not changing the world.
*EDIT: There are a lot of interesting and cool things going on in silicon valley, perhaps more than in any other place in the world. To that, I agree. The whole "changing the world" thing is a bit much, though, and I believe anyone who claims this is either overestimating their startup or underestimating the world (or both).
A third of divorce filings in the United States contain the word Facebook. People are writing whole books (or incite revolutions) on iPhones while they're on the bus. I'm not saying that Facebook is as important as genetically modified rice on a worldwide scale, but it's up there.
Genetically modified rice (golden rice) is a propaganda tool that can't change anything (you can't cure malnutrition due to poverty with genetically modified anything), so bad example.
What offends me about the claims is the difference between what could be done and what is done. In 1999 we learned via Napster of a fundamentally new type of entity, the digital good. This was an item with zero marginal cost - it literally costs nothing to reproduce on margin.
This fact should be fundamentally changing the world. A new type of economy is possible now, one that goes beyond capitalism, one where wealth can be shared instantly across the planet and multiplied infinitely the moment it is created.
This revolution was shot in the face by the DMCA and various other efforts, and that brilliant energy channeled instead into making a panopticon to allow better ad targeting.
Facebook did not change anything; Facebook is squatting on the corpse of real change.
> Genetically modified rice (golden rice) is a propaganda tool that can't change anything...
Vitamin A deficiency is responsible for 1–2 million deaths and hundreds of thosands of cases of blindness per year. Even just basic Vitamin A fortified rice could literally change millions of peoples lives per year.
And if I'm wrong and this has been refuted, please share your research.
> A new type of economy is possible now, one that goes beyond capitalism... Facebook did not change anything; Facebook is squatting on the corpse of real change.
Facebook made the internet usable by normal people for things normal people wanted to do. It is changing their lives right now. DMCA is shitty, but most people find a way to watch shows just fine.
Yes, Vitamin A deficiency is a problem, and Golden Rice can treat it. You know what else can? Pretty much any other food with Vitamin A. Why do we need to create an entirely new kind of fortified rice? Why not just, say, give these people carrots?
These people are vitamin deficient in their diets because they are poor. Making golden rice is solving the wrong problem. What we need to do is end poverty.
Should we work towards ending world wide poverty? Yes.
In the meantime, just like Canada added iodine to salt to prevent a whole host of diseases at the turn of the 20th century, so to can we add things like vitamins to very basic foodstuffs for the third world.
> Why not just give these people carrots?
Because that is extremely costly, difficult, and destroys local agriculture and has a host of other negative externalities. Furthermore many people are too proud to take a handout, but selling their farmers better grains is achievable.
It isn't costly at all. We can feed everyone on earth for a few paltry billion; food is not expensive. We choose not to. Golden rice has its own technical hurdles and is only solving a single nutritional problem.
We already have enough food to feed the world[1]: the problem is distribution. Poor people can't afford to get a balanced diet that's already there, would the GM rice be miraculously free?
I agree that distribution is a large part of the problem, but there are other problems as well, like perverse incentives (destroying local farm economies by flooding in free food).
Rice is an extremely durable foodstuff and even if it wouldn't be free, it would be much cheaper than the alternatives and it would easily integrate into already existing markets and logistics chains.
Writing books on iphones? Seriously, that's neither beneficial nor effective -- smartphones might be changing the world but certainly not because it's helping people write books.
> A third of divorce filings in the United States contain the word Facebook.
Do you have a link for this statistic? Do 90% of divorce filings also contain the word `cheated`? And would they have contained `journal` or `letter` 70 years ago in as much as they cite email or cellphones? The medium of expression is changing but that's not the same as `world-changing` not to say they aren't linked, but surely divorce is a terrible example.
> Yes. Over 75% of the writing on Wattpad happens on a mobile device. I know. I find it crazy too.
Ok let's be clear, I don't know what wattpad is -- but how many books worth a damn are written on smartphones, I wager << 1%.
> How is divorce a terrible example? What is more impactful to someone's life than ending their closest lifelong relationship?
Because facebook has nothing to do with that based on the information you've cited. Yes people get divorced, there are usually deep-seated reasons for that,if the cat, the dog, the kids, their friends, their letters, or their facebook are mentioned amongst thousands of words of the filings does not in anyway say something about the particular significance of those factors. I think you'd be completely stupid to insist facebook is a cause rather than a medium amongst these.
Marriages, cars, houses, computer programs and businesses all take work, are subject to rot, and can be rebuilt. If every bump in marriage doomed it, nearly no marriage would survive. The viability is a combination of all the negative and positive pressures.
I'm not sure you can call a billion people connected in a single massive network a "moderate" impact or "only for a limited time." Almost every aspect of many people's social lives now goes through Facebook, from keeping up with old friends, to sharing opinions, to organizing events.
Let's set aside for a moment that the exact means by which people keep up with friends is not necessarily "world changing", and also that this has been mostly enabled by the internet itself, not any particular app-du-jour that rides on top of the internet. Besides that, it's not obvious to me that people in the world are actually more materially "connected" by Facebook than they were before Facebook.
> not any particular app-du-jour that rides on top of the internet.
I remember the internet pre-Facebook and it definitely didn't have the same social implications. People were split across different networks, and there definitely wasn't the concept of group events.
> it's not obvious to me that people in the world are actually more materially "connected" by Facebook than they were before Facebook.
It is too me. Facebook is literally the only way I keep in touch with friends from back home and the USA.
I'm currently studying in the Middle East. It's very interesting but also could be very isolating. Without tools like Facebook and Skype, I never would have done this.
Exactly. I feel like Facebook is somehow being credited as inventing human communication itself. Why else would people fawn over "a billion users?" To me, a billion users means there are a billion rows in a database table somewhere; that doesn't inherently mean there is significant value.
Ask yourself this: If Facebook were to disappear tomorrow, would the world continue relatively unchanged? I argue that it would.
'Most of the “intermediate” companies, although it would take a separate long post to explain why, end up not having a big impact'
This is something I can't quite accept at face value, though I'm open to convincing. It kind of depends on the terms you're think in, anyway. Sounds worthy of a long post.
I mean, how do we class twitter or whatsapp? World Changers. On one hand, they have that hyperexponential growth in users usefulness. They have had "political scale" implications. On the other hand, we can speculate that had these specific services not been started, other would have. Do they count as toys or hyperambitious endeavours at the start? Being network effect apps, they have that need/implication for lots of users. They are also "toys" in the sense that they are relatively simple apps.
I'd like to hear about the terms he's thinking in, basically.
Regarding the SV hate, I think this is more about (1) not understanding low probability, high risk than exponential growth and (2) the arrogance of saying you are going to change the world while being cashed up. IE, when investors pay $100k for a 1% of a company that may be worth $10bn at some point, that's assuming an awful lot of companies that failed to become worth $10bn. People see hundreds of companies reported on (or in person). Even if they're good at picking out potential, they see that effectively all of these companies are ridiculously unlikely to ever reach anything like that. Yet, they are talking in these grandiose terms. Sounds delusional and arrogant.
The most important sentence in that article is the very last one:
> The internet commenters and journalists that say you’re working on something that doesn’t matter are probably not building anything at all themselves.
I live by this approach. If you build something, you will encounter lots of critics. Most of them do not do anything meaningful and produce no value. Do not listen to those. Only take to heart what you hear from people that actually built something.
Actually, the most extreme example are todays "journalists & bloggers" — very few provide value. So if you get criticized by Ars Technica, you should think about what they said carefully. But pay no attention to what yet another news-regurgitating site wrote.
I don't think that's the best example of dismissing criticism (basically an ad hominem). Just like a car critic doesn't need to build cars, the Times doesn't need to build an Uber clone to comment on the fact that in the long term, Uber will likely lower taxi driver income.
So what is a „car critic”? Why would I value his/her opinion?
In order for me to value someone's opinion, that someone needs to earn my respect. People who have built something (anything!) get that respect automatically. And if you want to write about cars, you don't necessarily have to build cars — you just have to have built something.
There is too much criticism from people who built nothing, and provide little or no value. All they can do is criticize.
The language people use is just a function of the funding environment. With VC cash in the billions for the taking, the loudest, most arrogant and most self-deluded have a leg up on those that are quietly building something solid. So no wonder that environment tends to produce louder, more obnoxious people.
Great point. The most important VCs want to fund the most important companies, so everybody has to ego-inflate themselves into being the best in the world at everything or else nobody will even look at you.
I have yet to see a working definition for "change the world." And if there is one, who creates this definition? VC? Journalists?
Once I see a workable definition, my next question is why "change the world" is a metric, a goal, or whatever it is. Given your answer, what does that imply? Maybe the phrase should be more truthful... something like "make a meaningful contribution".
Maybe this is just an American buzz phrase and I am not getting it? To be honest, I am getting a little tired of it.
There's that Woodstock generation song from the 60's with the chorus: "I'd love to change the world, but I don't know what to do..."
I guess software VC and tech journalists have now solved that issue?
Funny, but "changing the world" (in the idelistic sense of the song) today seems a much more daunting task than it did back then, even with the addition of cable TV and now another communication medium being offered by the telcos and cable companies. The world is better entertained and possibly better informed. The "change" it led to is some ridiculously strong monopolies that like to maintain status quo.
In Czech/Slovak Republic, it would sound quite preposterous and pathetic if someone claimed "and this will change the world" or "this will make the world a better place", so thankfully we do not usually get this nonsense, although generally the pathetic PR-speak continues to creep in into public communications. I recall there is a nice Czech song by the old group Nedvědi+Brontosauři with a verse going "...I wished to rebuild the world, yeah that happens, so many of us did and still nothing...".
And that's why you never will (change the world). Or the people who can will move elsewhere.
If someone in CZ would invent a new battery and claim it will change the world, they'd be ridiculed even if they can prove it works. But not in major tech hubs, most of which are still in the US. They'd get money.
In a world where exaggeration is the norm, it's hard to break through with understatements and even normal statements (like stating pure facts and refraining from saying preposterous things like "world changing").
"Aim for the stars and you'll land on the Moon" holds true for most businesses imo...
One way to look at it as world-changing is a reduction in STD spread and a reduction in unwanted conception. Condoms are world-changers and this brings them closer to people who could make bad decisions because a condom is out-of-reach.
It's like Uber: taxi in an app. Think about all the lives saved because of the convenience of Uber when drinking. I was taxying about before Uber and it wasn't a pleasant experience: you always had to have cash on hand and 2AM calls were expensive. Now it's super convenient, no cash, no problems, no excuses and it saves lives - it just wasn't obvious at the outset that this is where it would lead to.
There is definitely some shit that won't make a difference, though. Condoms on demand is not one of those things that won't make a difference; whether that startup fails or succeeds comes down to delivery (specifically: how fast).
My generous assumption is that the ridiculous home-delivery business model is designed to get people talking ahead of a fully intended pivot to selling the condoms in stores.
Or something. Otherwise it's a ridiculously terrible idea. The number of people needing condoms, yet wanting to wait an hour instead of popping down to the convenience store, is not something you can build a business around.
So, in 2007 I invented the first social alarm clock(sleep.fm) and wow people hated it. I always took a lot of flack for it ... even would come to read Hacker News back in the day and stumble upon others here ripping it apart randomly.
It hasn't gone mainstream just yet, but since it's invention 100s of developers, huge pop stars and Fortune 50/500 companies have created social alarm clocks.
The author speaks of ideas that look stupid and are ridiculed when they are first published on the web, as mine was.
Nowadays there isn't any ridicule seen in the headlines, press and comments from users/prospective users after so many have been created.
It still hasn't hit the big time, but maybe it will. It just needs to be done properly so it truly makes the sound of your alarm clock ALWAYS wake you up with a smile or giggle or something informative/more useful then just your regular lame loud alarm tone.
I would take Sam's final words of advice one step farther - don't claim you are changing the world just because you are changing one business industry. There is more to the world than that.
I like the advice to not claim to change the world but it also seems that by and large to get VC you kind of have to claim exactly this (at least implicitly). Hypergrowth potential or go home. While this isn't the official mantra of VC it's probably a lot harder to get funding for a humble idea that you also pitch humbly.
Maybe a sub-YC with the explicit idea of "pitch your startup with no hypergrowth potential" would be an interesting experiment. Ironically I think YC is probably the best about not looking too much at hypergrowth potential and focusing more on execution potential but they are also the most likely to try a sub batch like this (based on the recent "superearlystage pitches only" and including non-profits etc.)
It seems that there is a much higher threshold of "changing the world" applied to the private sector than to government or non-profits. I routinely hear people in relatively less influential organizations of the latter make such claims without coming off as arrogant.
This makes me think that people in Silicon Valley aren't arrogant as much as they tend to break an unstated social rule: One can't claim to be doing good while making a profit (even if what you're doing is in fact net-good).
Part of the problem is that markets don't distinguish between "screw the little guy (or the clueless VC) and make a quick buck" returns, and "have customers flocking to you because your product is awesome and it makes them awesome too" returns.
As far as markets are concerned, there's only money. Accountants and auditors know nothing about social value, and care less.
How can you measure social value when there are no accepted metrics?
Honestly, I can barely stand HN and the startup world anymore, why not be up front about it already and say it's all about being rich and escaping the common folk disgusting lifes? How is Facebook an example of "changing the world" in any relevant way? How is Apple any different of other big corporation of yesterday like IBM, GE, Ford? To me this is startup gospel with zero substance("ohhhhh network effects! It's like special effects!"). This is mainstream culture, but I guess the "idealist hacker maker underdog" myth is just too good to let go.
I think the key here is that as long as your building something and are enjoying doing it in the process, who cares if its useful. Tinker long enough and you might fall onto something revolutionary.
What's hyper-exponential growth supposed to mean? "User base doubles every month" (so 2^x) but then "the value is the square of the number nodes" which yields 2^2x, which still has the same properties as 2^x.
Mix a dash of math, a pinch halo effect from fame, and suddenly something meaningless sounds meaningful.
Not a single app that sprouts from intelectual curiosity is "stupid". It's the use stereotypical marketing wording like "change the world" or "join the revolution" what makes a product (and its founders) look stupid.
"The internet commenters and journalists that say you’re working on something that doesn’t matter are probably not building anything at all themselves." Mic dropped... exit stage left.
I think it's because of a quirk of human psychology. The value of a product to us, as a user, is about how well it fits into our daily lives. "Fits into" is the operative phrase: to get adopted, a product needs to be nearly invisible, and fit into what we're already doing so well that it's just a seamless augmentation of our own capabilities. Such products naturally seem trivial.
By contrast, we judge the importance of a project by a combination of a.) how difficult it was to do and b.) how many people it affects. Both of these are anticorrelated with how likely it is to fit into our lives. Difficult projects are usually complex; that complexity tends to spill over into the user interface and make it harder for us to make sense of how we would use the product. (Indeed, when moonshots like Google or Tesla succeed, it's usually because they manage to put a complex problem behind a really simple & familiar interface.) And aiming to please a large audience means handling a lot of corner cases, which again bloats the user interface and makes it harder for any one person to adopt it.
Once you've got lots of happy people adopting the product, they can serve as teachers and evangelists to bring a little more complexity to the wider world. But if you build something designed to change the world from the start, it tends to "bounce off" of the world, as it doesn't actually fit into the daily needs of any one person.