[tikhonj]

I think the answer is that technology absolutely can address social issues, it's just less direct than people might think.

One simple example: new technology can drastically lower the barrier to do things which inevitably democratizes them. Then teams don't have to rely on specialists to accomplish that task and the overhead of internal politics/poor communication/etc goes down. I bet spreadsheets saved a number of otherwise dysfunctional companies when they were introduced by letting small teams do their own analysis and operate independently. Sure, in some sense you're just letting individual teams work around the broader dysfunction of an organization, but sometimes that's exactly what you need to get out of a company-wide stalemate.

For all that people don't like fancy cloud tools and microservices, they play the same role at tech organizations. Having a lot of trouble with teams not integrating their code well and not playing well with your deployment/ops/etc team? Give each team the tools to deploy and manage their own services and they'll figure something out.

Not an expert on this phenomenon, but I think mobile payments and banking in developing countries is playing a similar role. I'm sure there are other examples along the same lines being developed and tested as we speak—not necessarily by startups though.