You're absolutely correct that good approaches to social problems (don't want to use the term "solution" which is ill-suited, I think) will not come from VCs: It will come from naive entrepreneurs, naive in the sense that they don't quite appreciate the problem they are tackling, because if they do they would never take it on. A simple fact I learned in volunteering that's applicable here, too, is that in tackling these issues money is not the bottleneck, it's finding people who want to be involved. If you have a good idea in this space it's not hard to secure money from many different foundations and sponsors.

You have focused on a single idea to criticize. It's true that some who venture in this space may be young, privileged, out of touch, etc. I don't think this negates the approach.

Many times what happens with non-profits is that they start great with founders' motivation but have a tough time turning that into a sustained operation.

Great reply! We don't expect to be the source of solutions. We just want to help founders who are brave enough to take these challenges on.

> It will come from naive entrepreneurs, naive in the sense that they don't quite appreciate the problem they are tackling, because if they do they would never take it on

... I'm not even sure where to begin.

As someone who spent my first career in both high-level policy analysis and research into social interventions and also consulted with and helped run multiple non-profits doing direct work with measurable outcomes the idea that it is easy to fund this type of work is ludicrous to me. The lengths I've seen small-medium size non-profits go to stretch a dollar would humble any VC talking about maximizing a runway.

I think you're making a category error by thinking of companies and countries as completely different.

In the global world countries can be seen as sort of quasi-companies that happen to have monopoly control on a particular area (a monopoly that is slowly dissolving with the internet) + force.

There are many ways a company can help solve problems that we tend to think of as government problems. 1. Government also buys services. 2. Startups can fix the services government does badly as an additive product, e.g. Gusto or TurboTax. 3. Startups can solve government problems directly, e.g. Fedex vs USPS.

The only real difference between the two entities is the power of force that government can apply to make you people their services. Which is sometimes useful, but doesn't make voluntary efforts at solving the same problems a bad thing. It is also not in competition. Whenever I see these arguments being made I see people who would rather limit their work on these problems to voting once a year, instead of actually trying to solve the problems themselves.

But they are completely different.

On the most basic level, governments are responsible to their citizens and their only purpose is to serve those citizens.

Companies are responsible only to their shareholders, who may or may not be their customers. Their only goal is to earn money for those shareholders.

Companies get to pick their customers, governments do not.

The examples you give are instructive. Intuit spends a tremendous amount of money lobbying against improvements to the American tax system that would benefit everyone, because that would mean fewer profits for them. Fedex competes in some ways with the USPS, but USPS provides a government mandated service to every remote region of the country, which a private company would not do, because as a country we decided that service was an important function of government. Plus, Fedex actually uses USPS for a significant percentage of their deliveries.

"On the most basic level, governments are responsible to their citizens and their only purpose is to serve those citizens."

In the US, the default is to appear to support citizens while doing a mix of what lobbyists pay for and actually serving citizens. The mix favors the rich folks' lobbyists whenever there is a conflict. The leaked Citigroup memos called this a plutonomy, a capitalist form of plutocracy.

> It's ridiculous to suggest that an app that sends reminders of court dates will make an impact on any of these problems.

I listened to a podcast with the founder. She was impressive.

In terms of the impact of reminders, you'd be surprised. One of the student loan guarantors tried a model where they were paid more if they kept people paying their loans. Their program was very successful with just well-timed reminders and calls. It was pretty amazing.

Source: https://www.asa.org/about-us/

"...By proactively reaching out to borrowers at risk of delinquency and default, ASA helped to avert more than $120 million of loan defaults before the program was eliminated by the Department of Education."

Not surprising that she was impressive. I’d argue that’s the biggest trait being a founder selects for.

I honestly disagree. There are many people in jail now pre-trial because the government is worried that they won't appear for trial. As a result these people often lose their jobs and their housing -- even if it turns out they are not guilty. Better software and technology can help address this problem.

Or we can change bail laws as they exist now:

https://whyy.org/articles/n-j-officials-have-finally-release...

>Yet new data shows only modest increases in two of the main measurements of success since 2017.

In that year, 26.9 percent of defendants released from jail before their trials were charged with a new crime — either an indictable offense or a disorderly persons charge. That number increased from 24.2 percent in 2014.

Some 89.4 percent of defendants appeared for their court dates in 2017, down from 92.7 who showed up in 2014. Analysts cautioned that “small changes in outcome measures should be interpreted with caution and likely do not represent meaningful differences.”

Somehow I get the feeling that building software is easier than changing laws around here

How about, “build software to change laws” ?

To be sure I understand you clearly, are you making the claim that making sure people don't forget or lose track of court dates will help literally nobody avoid going to jail?

People for whom forgetfulness is the reason they'd miss a court date are likely solve their problem with a normal calendar reminder.

Literally nobody is probably close to accurate.

One of the things I've learned is that a non-trivial number of people never acquired what some might consider basic life skills. Like keeping track of upcoming future events or adhering to a schedule.

For all the important systemic problems that parent rights points to as very important, most of them have also proven to be rather intractable. Helping a few people whose major problem is that they never learned how to schedule strikes me as much more tractable.

Sometimes helping people means having to choose between a minor-but-addressable aspect of a large problem and a major-but-intractable one. Just because someone thinks they've found somewhere small where they can make a difference doesn't mean they have earned scorn for not being intimidated by poverty and hopelessness.

Small changes can add up. They certainly do a lot more than giving in to despair.

Of course not. The claim is that even though it might help people, it does nothing to fix the systemic issue, which is that we jail way too many people. The U.S. has less than 5% of the world's people, but almost 25% of the world's prison population [1].

The question is what happens when we try to radically reduce the number of people we send to prison. Is there still space for Promise to make the new justice system more efficient? Do they pivot? Do they scale down? Do they disband entirely?

Or do they end up opposing efforts that would solve the root problem?

I'm sure they have noble intentions. But a lot of these problems are not things that you can make money by fixing. They require laws and policy changes. Not band-aids on top of an inherently broken system from companies that are unaccountable to the citizens they're ostensibly helping.

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2015/04/...

I don't need exposition, though I'm sure some other reader will appreciate the links and numbers.

I've always found that the big problem with insisting on go-big-or-go-home approaches to problems is that the odds are very good that you wind up landing on go home.

It might just be me - and I'm typing this while blearly-eyed tired - but it seems like insisting that systemic change is the only acceptable approach is a good way to make shockingly little progress. You wind up losing those all-or-nothing bets too often.

If the company helps some people and fails as a company, I'm going to call that a victory for humanity. I understand that some might choose to avoid a potential way to improve some lives out of a fear that it could backfire in some possible futures. I don't know what to say except that I disagree with that weighting of probabilities.

Nobody starting a venture-backed company is doing so on the premise that their product will be only useful in a few edge cases.

I'm not denying that it might help people, it just seems like a half-assed bandaid solution given the breadth of the problem.

If you have an idea for an app that will directly tackle poverty and hopelessness, I think there are a lot of people willing to listen.

This isn't an attempt to bandaid over the whole problem. It's an attempt to address a minor contributing factor that is much more tractable than hopelessness.

You think YC/VC's are searching for a solution to income inequality? Check @pg's twitter feed...

The government is already stricken with profit-seekers extracting value from the public. SV wants its piece too. And it will, if it can make VC money out-impact the status quo of entrenched lobby money.

I agree with you, I’m just hoping other people see it.

I'd say most VC's are probably very interested in solutions for income inequality.

In the direction of getting their net worth equal to Bezos that is. In the other direction not so much perhaps.

But really what is people's obsession with "income inequality"?

Ya, the rich shouldn't run governments or be able to evade laws or abuse the poor (which is why we have governments who also perhaps should do more to care for the disadvanted), but other than that, if you have 10 dollars and I have one dollar it's preferable to both of us having 50 cents. I just don't get the obsession with "equality". Seems counterproductive. I truly am just confused by the obsession with it.

There is a wealth of literature on the subject, no pun intended. Thomas Piketty's "Capital in the 21st Century" (or, more practically, summaries of it) offers one interesting perspective. A different take can be seen in books like "Winners Take All" by Anand Giridharadas.

On the most basic level, you should question your own premises. The reality of extreme wealth inequality is that rich people do have a substantially outsized say in running the government and exercising other forms of power, and they are often able to evade laws as well as engage in activity that is harmful to the poor.

But the problem in that case is the way government is set up (folks can "buy" government etc.).

I don't think the best way to solve that problem is saying people can have less money but rather fix the systemic issues (lobbyists, opportunities for corruption, the campaign contribution circus etc). And manifestly not allow abuse of the poor by those with money.

What seems to happen the other way is sort of like what happens in China (or other parts of the world). Becoming a bureaucrat is an income producing commodity. And that has a worse outcome than Bezos buying a newspaper in my opinion.

But I also agree with the problems you point out. They are issues with the way things are running right now in the US for sure that should be addressed and it is hard to do because monied interests stymie attempts.

People don't want to be "the poor".

I think the solution to income inequality will come from the blockchain and AI.

The solution to income inequality probably isn't going to come from governments either sadly.

It has to come from politics. Capitalism unregulated will pretty much always lead to a few accumulating more and more and increasing their power.

Indeed. Want to fix government? Run for office or work in government. Anything else is polishing brass on the Titanic.

Hat tip to the USDS and 18F [1]. Hard working people making an impact. YC: Why not consider hiring lobbyists to enable existing, impactful teams more velocity?

[1] https://thehill.com/opinion/technology/444159-congress-shoul... (Congress should grow the Digital Services budget, which more than pays for itself)

What about a solution that makes it easy for any small group to hire lobbyists? Something like Kickstarter campaigns for cause areas where you want to get something done (eg. prison reform) so you create a campaign and get people to contribute; it hits a minimum threshold and the platform hires a lobbying firm to work towards the goal. Of course, with lobbying there are no guarantees anything happens, but would be interesting (sorry this isn't very thought out, I'm just reading the threads here and this came to mind)

Stripe Atlas for Political Action Committee creation and maintenance essentially? I would throw money at that. I don't entirely agree that money is speech, but I also don't believe in bringing a knife to a gun fight. Or perhaps Upcounsel for lobbyists.

Not exactly but pretty dang close to Stripe Atlas for PACs, but I think a big part of doing that well is having someone that has connections so there probably either has to be some marketplace of lobbyists attached or some mechanism to guide you to the right lobbyist/team to hire based on the cause area

> Capitalism unregulated

There isn't a country on earth that allows for unregulated capitalism.

For good reason.

What you say is true.

Likewise government unrestrained appears to lead to the few accumulating more and more and increasing their power.

That's why we need balance.