Who Wants To Start An Important Startup? | Hacker News Reader

Who Wants To Start An Important Startup?

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32 pointsolalonde8 comments

I'd also suggest http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/07/13/khosla-the-silicon-... as an affirming counterpoint.

I've talked about something very similar to this with colleagues and friends of mine. Seems there aren't enough businesses out there focusing on improving the world. Of course the point of a business is to make money, but when is enough, enough? Money can be a means to an end, but it should not be the end.

By the way, I'd probably change the title of that article to something along the lines of, "We Need More Self Sustaining Businesses that Improve the World."

"Of course the point of a business is to make money, but when is enough, enough?"

Tech startups have made billions in wealth to people over the past 10 years. That's definitely enough.. but wait.. to whom exactly? To the people who made the wealth. But I never got a part of it. Nor you...

Make money first, quit the day job.. then worry about working on something that's fulfilling and providing an useful service to others.

I can name several people who has made $10B EACH.

I can't speak for your situation, but the internet has provided a huge amount of wealth to people who use it. For example, take just search engines. If think about how much I'd be willing to pay for a search engine over not having a search engine, it'd be quite a lot. It's scary to think of how much- easily way over $1k/year. So Google provides me with at least $1k in wealth every year.

Now take the sum of all the software advances in the past 20 years multiplied by the number of people they've impacted. That's a lot of wealth that's been created for a lot of people.

Technology has helped made our lives better, of course. It's provided "wealth".

Yet at the end of the day, the structure of our lives has not changed in the past 50 years. We spent 10 hours working for an employer for 40-50 years.

'Seems there aren't enough businesses out there focusing on improving the world.'

It is just fucking hard to do a business that improves the world, let alone a business itself.

Plus, sometimes you need your own money to properly execute your vision, so that you don't have to sacrifice certain core beliefs in the name of investors and generating revenue.

you must have rent control...

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