Sure maybe you’ll bootstrap an amazing product with some secret sauce that’s magically hard to copy, but more likely you’ll need a bunch of people (we’ll call them “investors”) to give you their approval (we’ll call it “money” or “capital”). If your great idea with no investors is competing against someone else’s pretty-similar-but-not-quite-as-good-idea-except-they-have-a-hundred-million-dollars, you’re probably going to lose.
If the group of people who can access that capital is very homogeneous (and it is in real life), we’re probably missing out on designs and ideas and innovations that would otherwise make everything better.
Also worth noting that this isn’t just about gender and race/ethnicity, disability is a great practical example: disabled folks are more likely to create things that are accessible for disabled folks, but non-disabled folks very often benefit from that accessibility (i.e. stuff is easier to use). We’d be shooting ourselves in the collective foot to have only non-disabled folks making stuff.
I have also lived in poor countries, and can say from personal experience that it's a 1st world myth to believe that in poor countries everybody is exhausted from overworking. In many poor countries, people actually don't work all that much, and are poor as a result of a lack of opportunity. In these places, there is actually plenty of time, but no opportunity.
And the more technology develops, and jobs become available remotely, the more smart, ambitious people in these countries are able to rise above their circumstances. Of course they need to at least have enough money to have a computer and an internet connection, but these are becoming more accessible every year.
Don't get me wrong - it's highly unlikely some little kid from Kenya will build the next Facebook. It's much more than time and bandwidth. But it's a process, and I'd say we're headed in the right direction. Just go on UpWork and see how many people from developing countries are now making very decent wages.
And the problem looks different from country to country—the way we get people from developing countries into high-paying jobs is different from how we get underrepresented people from developed countries into high-paying jobs. It’s a complicated and hard problem. I just get annoyed when people are super reductive about it and pretend that there is one magic bullet to solve it (especially when, surprise! that purported bullet requires doing no extra work).
- use employment rather than contractors for things like janitorial and service work. This give people more stable employment and better benefits that can be leveraged to climb the social ladder
- develop strong recruiting efforts at HBCUs and other sources of under-represented talent
- add some non-university/credential based sources in your recruitment pool (ex: leet code)
- sponsor your employee’s time to volunteer during the workday for things like robotics competitions and other STEM clubs at area high schools that have under-represented youth
- at a cultural level, begin to at least collectively acknowledge that almost nothing is a pure meritocracy; that attitude serves as air cover to avoid confronting internal biases. You may doubt that implicit bias exists or that it impacts you. If so, I kindly request that you take [this test](https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/takeatouchtest.html) before responding to this particular point.
This underestimates the difficulty of going against the grain of technology. Some things are easy to do with current tech, some are much harder. As it happens, the things that are easy are the things that align with the dominant paradigms of tech culture.