If you want to change the world in a more serious way, SnapChat's valuation should have as much of an impact on your determination as Coca-Cola's.
We owe the 20th century and virtually every convenience in our lives to the existence of petro-chemicals. There is absolutely no justification that oil companies "don't solve real problems".
I would go so far as to claim petro-chemicals are the single most important discovery in human history. (There are certainly downsides in the form of global warming, pollution and environmental damage, but you've completely ignored the massive upside).
It wasn't phrased perfectly, but I'll leave it now since several people have responded.
Watching a bunch of critical thinkers, developers and startups pull at straws trying to defend ridiculous payouts, evaluations and utopian end-games sounds more like 2009-era stock broker talk than it does anything positive or revolutionary.
I don't know what to say if you don't think oil solves real problems.
huh? Providing value in a market has nothing to do having some direct and profound impact on society. They make drinks people like and are willing to pay for.
It's fun to look at celebrity tech culture (just like it is to read the covers of the trashy mags at the checkout counters at your grocery store). Just because we see news like this doesn't mean that important, interesting, valuable work that helps people isn't being done somewhere else.
Folding@Home[1] is one of the oldest examples of this. It is a distributed computing network that uses brute force to crack protein folding, which is imperative in our understanding and curing of many conditions. It also makes it easy for the everyman to contribute their computing power to the task.
We literally can help cure diseases by writing code.
My point is that it's not like a bunch of us are trying to decide between building the next SnapChat or curing cancer, and only choosing the former because it's a faster way to get rich.
For example, let's say piracy was legal, who would need to get a new job?
Software developers, filmmakers and musicians, mostly.
If you think about it, the only reason why musicians/software developers make any money at all is because threat that we will be thrown in jail if we pirate the product (and the culture that "piracy is bad"). Given, there are trivial ways of getting around this barrier, but the fact of the matter is that nobody can officially sponsor a centralized service that you pay for that pirates content and make it extremely convenient.
If piracy was legal, the free software movement would have the most ground, because most people wouldn't be making any money off of the software anyway. Microsoft would go bankrupt. Apple probably would suffer a huge hit, but they would probably survive due to the fact that they manufacture their own hardware. So both would likely release the source code to the public if they want to hold any market share at all.
People would be able to legally sell jailbroken iPhones and Android phones with cyanogenmod installed by default for a fraction of the cost. And provide support.
Nobody would be making these shitty iPhone game apps like Candy Crush because there would be no money in it. Instead they would be making software for individual companies that are solving actual problems, like those self-checkout machines at the grocery stores for example. Most software development would instead be a hobby instead of being completely overvalued the way it currently is.