[throwthisawayt]

I think people forget that vc backed startups are profit and greed driven (like all free enterprises). We all like to drink the cool aid and think that a startup's purpose is societal impact but really they are engineered to make $$$.

As such, it makes sense that people pour millions of dollars to target the 1%. They've got a shitload of more money than the rest of the country. Seriously, if you've got an product that every rich person wants but that no other person cares about, you will have vcs knocking on your door. We need to think of vcs as building cash machines, not as the money behind "changing the world". Yes occasionally vcs fund companies like Google that have broader impact but that's not their primary aim.

If we want more people building ventures that impact society we need to either * change the funding model * build bootstrap ventures * build non profit ventures * ask the government to step in (a socialist approach)

A good example are institutions like the Gates foundation and WHO eradicating polio in the last few years. Yeah it's not sexy but organizations like that are making real societal impact.

[productboy]

Facebook, Instagram [and any similar VC backed company] are not targeting the 1%. Quite the opposite. Mass human scale adoption is their goal. And once this is achieved then their biz models get very interesting. I do hope there is a significant shift towards social impact ventures. This is where some of the hardest challenges are.

[danellis]

> We all like to drink the cool aid and think that a startup's purpose is societal impact

No, we don't. Who do you think you're speaking for?

[adjkant]

A lot of startups say explicitly that out of one side of their mouth while eating money with the other.

[soVeryTired]

That sentiment is commonplace enough that Silicon Valley parodied it: "We're making the world a better place. Through constructing elegant hierarchies for maximum code reuse and extensibility"

[d4nt]

Something that's been on my mind recently, given the increasing amounts of inequality, is "why aren't the lower and middle classes more effective at taking rich people's money?".

In other words, rather that thinking about protectionist measures or redistribution (not that I'm particularly opposed to such things), why aren't rich people spending more cash on things and thereby allowing the money to flow down?

One possibility is that we really are topping out our hierarchy of needs. Billionaires are driving round in Priuses and wearing $80 jeans. Capitalism relies on demand being practically infinite. Could this growing inequality be a sign that this assumption is faulty?

Or do we just need to invent more drone mounted, blockchain integrated juicers to sell to them?

[lawnchair_larry]

The reason that lower and middle class people are not more effective at taking rich people's money is because if they were effective at taking money, they would not be lower and middle class. They are lower and middle class because they are effective at other things that have nothing to do with taking money.

[d4nt]

Perhaps I should have phrased the question as "why have the lower and middle classes become relatively less effective at taking rich people's money in recent years".

[OnlineCourage]

This is a tautological explination which adds absolutely nothing to the discussion. Yes we all understand that A = A.

[brianwawok]

I found it much more helpful than this reply.