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Ask HN: Any well funded tech companies tackling big, meaningful problems?

97 points| digitalmaster | 5 years ago | reply

Are there any well funded tech startups / companies tackling major societal problems? Any of these fair game: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_global_issues

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I don't see or hear of any and want to know if this is just my bias or if there really is a shortage of resources in tech being allocated to solving the worlds most important problems. I'm sure I'm not the only engineer that's looking out for companies like this.

Ran into this previous Ask HN (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24168902) that asked a similar question. However, here I wanna focus on the better funded efforts (not side projects, philanthropy etc).

One example I've heard so far is Tesla. Any others?

98 comments

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[+] doitLP|5 years ago|reply
If you’re interested in having an impact I highly recommend visiting https://80000hours.org/

The biggest impacts can often be made in areas that are most neglected and have high negative or positive outcomes. At the very least it will help you form a mental model of how to spend your time and the types of problems to focus on.

[+] kuzee|5 years ago|reply
Thanks for sharing. Their emphasis on the neglectedness of an issue and focusing on the margins is great.
[+] tosmith|5 years ago|reply
At CIONIC, we're tackling how to overcome disability through precision bionics. Whether a diagnosis at birth (Cerebral Palsy, Spina Bifida) or an acquired disease or impairment (Parkinson's, issues resulting from a stroke), we're engineering sleek, wearable solutions that will provide comprehensive analysis and precise augmentation to enhance human performance, restore physical function and increase independence. Check out more information here: https://cionic.com/
[+] jsin|5 years ago|reply
This looks cool. Why do you think this hasn’t been done before?
[+] bjacobt|5 years ago|reply
Loon from Google/Alphabet [1]. They are attempting to connect remote and rural areas of the world. They are currently providing commercial service in a difficult to reach/low ARPU area in Kenya [2].

Loon uses standard 3GPP (LTE) protocols, so devices are available at low cost and even lower in used markets.

I don't work for Loon or Google, just interested in HAPS (High Altitude Pseudo Satellites) to provide low cost connectivity.

[1] https://loon.com/

[2] https://medium.com/loon-for-all/loon-is-live-in-kenya-259d81...

Edit: fixed references

[+] Mayzie|5 years ago|reply
Wow, Project Loon. It’s been a while since I’ve thought about it. It seems kind of pointless now, doesn’t it? StarLink will displace it in a couple of years.
[+] TYPE_FASTER|5 years ago|reply
Check out the startups working at incubators like Greentown Labs: https://greentownlabs.com/.

Not all these companies will make it. There's a risk associated with working on these problems that is not always countered by the rapid revenue growth associated with a well-funded tech company. Having worked at a company that was briefly situated at Greentown, I will say there is an energy associated with working there. It made my optimistic that people are actually working hard on these problems, and we have a chance at solving some of them within my lifetime.

[+] logoman04|5 years ago|reply
I spent 18 months working as a SWE at a company within Greentown Labs. I can confirm the companies there are all committed to making a meaningful impact around the domains of clean energy / green technology.
[+] qchris|5 years ago|reply
I spent about six months a few years back working at a company at Greentown too. Not only are the people and companies there working on some meaningful (and frankly, really cool) technology, but the incubator itself always seemed really well run and was a great space to work in.

I'm sure things are a bit more difficult with the current pandemic considering their buildings' layouts (like most open workplaces), but I'd wholeheartedly recommend people interested to taking a serious look.

[+] audenaert|5 years ago|reply
What it means for a well-funded company to tackle big, meaningful problems?

Most (not all) of the people (engineers, founders, leaders, etc) I talk to want to work on these problems. Google and Facebook are both driven by missions to do this. They get a lot of things right. They also get a lot of things wrong. So does Microsoft. But take a look at the mission and impact of both the Gates Foundation and the Zuckerberg-Chan foundation and I think you'll see that the founders care deeply about the impact that they are having. Execution on that impact is another matter.

The best companies focus on a specific well defined problem. When looking at companies, ask what problem they are trying to solve. Is this a mission that you can get excited about?

Next, is the company approaching this problem from a direction that resonates with you? Is there approach likely to work? What are the risks and potential side effects?

Facebook has done a lot of amazing and wonderful things. It's also created some problems. You have to balance that tension. All well-intentioned efforts come with risks regardless of whether those efforts originate from government, non-profit or business activities.

I'd encourage you not to slip to far into a cynical view of the world. Yes, there are lots of problems. Fantastic. Focus on what you can change and go find solutions.

[+] dangus|5 years ago|reply
If you want to use your technical skills to make a difference in the world, a lot of less glamorous options are out there: working for a non-profit, working for a university, school system, library system, or other government entity of your choosing.

> One example I've heard so far is Tesla. Any others?

Lol, Tesla is not an example. They are a carmaker. Nothing Tesla does will change the world for the better. In fact investing in automobiles in any form is counter-productive when we should be reverting post-war city design mistakes. The best thing for the world would be to live in walkable communities with inter-city trains taking care of long-distance travel.

Tesla is a great example of the flaw in your question: looking toward a highly-funded company out to change the world is an impossibility. Highly funded companies are expected to produce revenue growth. That’s it. There’s no such thing as a for-profit company out to solve world problems unless solving those problems involves increasing profit.

So, like I said, what you’re looking for is probably a non-profit, a government agency, or research institution.

And don’t expect to get highly competitive salary to do work that helps people.

[+] digitalmaster|5 years ago|reply
> "Highly funded companies are expected to produce revenue growth."

Yup, this is exactly what I was hoping wasn't true: That it's impossible to be both well funded, high revenue growth AND do so while tackling a meaningful problem. ---

Don't want to make this thread about all the ways in which Tesla is a bad example (just first one that came to mind).

[+] eadan|5 years ago|reply
This is such a cynical outlook on the world. Of course there are for-profit companies -- most I would argue -- that have a positive impact on the world, and Tesla is one such example.
[+] zaphod12|5 years ago|reply
How about a tech company using data to accelerate the creation and approval of cancer fighting drugs: flatiron.com (acquired a couple of years ago, but still independently operated)

Interested in improving the state of the art in detecting cancer - paigeai is building automated pathology tools.

A somewhat USA specific one, but goodrx is helping folks afford medications.

Quite a few of those "issues" in your link get you way past traditional Tech company turf, but all will need software engineers! There are a lot of cool biotech companies out there who would need software engineers!

[+] matt_s|5 years ago|reply
Say you worked in a software development organization that was dysfunctional, shipped updates 3-4 times a year and had lots of infighting/political battles between teams. A vendor came by talking about a new development process with a cool tool touting amazing features - do you think buying into this process plus tool is going to solve your organizational problems?

Is tech the right tool to attempt solving societal problems?

If Tesla's goal was to have an impact on climate change they should allow other car companies to purchase their batteries and motors to build from. Or actually build an economical car, sub $25k, no self-driving or fancy features, no performance mode, etc. Just a working, fully electric car that any working-class person could buy, globally. That would have much more impact than building luxury electric vehicles.

[+] GeertB|5 years ago|reply
Their goal is absolutely to drive down cost. Right now they're battery-constrained, so it would not make sense to sell them to third parties. If Tesla can only sell a given number of cars, it makes financial sense to sell them at a higher price. The extra revenue serves to build more factories and grow faster. As production keeps scaling, average selling prices will keep going down. If they'd attempted to start with a $25K car, they'd producing no cars today.
[+] beisner|5 years ago|reply
Tech alone CAN be a solution to large social problems, but typically not directly. Instead, it has to make some socially-“good” effect the inevitable consequence of making something else cheaper/more efficient.

Renewable tech (ie solar, wind) is an excellent example of this phenomenon, where we are finally getting to the point where you don’t need to appeal to people’s morals/values to get their energy companies to use renewables - they’re now simply cheaper in a lot of regions! Because tech improved in the right direction, greed and economic efficiency have become much more aligned with reduced environmental impact.

So the way I like to think about problems is this: what technology, if it existed, would solve this problem even when people/societies act entirely in their own self-interest (given how many world economies typically function)?

Morality is a luxury few feel they can afford, so make the moral choice cheaper.

[+] WhompingWindows|5 years ago|reply
Well, Tesla has done a bit of work with other automakers, but it's probably not in their shareholders' best interest to give away their huge lead in BEV tech.

So, why doesn't Tesla build that cheaper, smaller, lower-range car? It's probably because the profits in it are much smaller, and they need profits to justify their insane valuation. Every quarterly report on TSLA is sliced apart by thousands of analysts, is it in their best interest to make less profit and do slightly more good by electrifying slightly more miles? What if they went bankrupt or lost on a bunch of funding due to this strategy, and then BEVs would be set back a decade?

I'd buy the modest car myself, yes, but I don't think that it's the most financially sound way to proceed...their strategy of starting at the high-end, low-volume side seems to have worked well, so that's what they're sticking with. FWIW, I think the Model 3 is already even on costs with the plurality of new vehicle purchases in America, which with options often range from 30-50k depending on the make.

[+] afarrell|5 years ago|reply
> do you think buying into this process plus tool is going to solve your organizational problems?

No, but broad agreement about what people value and visible signs that people are willing to spend resources on that would.

Electric cars are sexy now and people will spend money on them.

If this conversation is about organisational/behavioral change, then Tesla did create inexpensive electric vehicles. The fact that those vehicles are being designed, manufactured, and sold by totally separate companies is an implementation detail -- An inescapable result of the fact that lower cost requires larger scale and greater expertise with larger scale.

https://www.edmunds.com/electric-car/articles/cheapest-elect...

> To fight and conquer in all our battles is not supreme excellence. Supreme excellence consists in achieving the continuation of our policy with other means -- Sun von Clauzwitz.

[+] tikhonj|5 years ago|reply
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.

[+] whammywon|5 years ago|reply
If I recall correctly, Tesla open sourced their patents in 2014. Couldn't other car companies implement their own version of Tesla's equipment and skip a significant portion of the R&D needed for EV development?

Obviously that would take more work than just buying directly from Tesla, but if they built their manufacturing line to supply their own Tesla-invented tech then they should be able to sell it to other manufacturers, right?

[+] asdfman123|5 years ago|reply
> Is tech the right tool to attempt solving societal problems?

That's not the right question you should be asking. The questions you should be asking are "Where can I contribute the most value?" and "How can I use that to improve society?"

Maybe tech isn't the be all end all, but it's often better to do things that you're good at.

[+] Denzel|5 years ago|reply
> If Tesla's goal was to have an impact on climate change they should allow other car companies to purchase their batteries and motors to build from.

They have and they did. [1] You have it backwards. The other car companies have chosen not to purchase batteries and motors from Tesla anymore.

Tesla wanted to be a spark. They thought, worst-case scenario: other car companies will come and dominate, and we'll be positioned as a supplier with the best technology. Well, that didn't happen.

So now we have a simple dilemma. Tesla needs $$$. $$$ represents choices, research, development, improvement, etc. (Did I mention that Tesla's constant investment in battery technology has been driving down the cost across the industry?) Let's say they want to shutter their car business and just supply batteries and drivetrains.

We'll put the cost of a battery pack at $10k. Like any supplier, when selling to other car companies, they have to add X% markup to cover their future goals, research, development, etc. Now, other car companies pay $15k for the battery pack, which leaves $10k left over for all the other parts of the car to reach break-even on that $25k economical car. Margins are already thin, that ain't gonna work.

Well, Tesla could just sell the battery packs at cost since they care so much, right? Just so happens Tesla raised $5B. $5B / $10k = 500k battery packs. Great! But there were 17 million vehicles sold in the U.S. alone last year... that's a drop in the bucket. Tesla would need $150B / yr just to sell enough batteries to other car companies at cost. That ain't gonna work.

So where do we end up? Well, Tesla can "supply" the battery pack to their self at $10k because, well, it's their battery pack. Thus bestowing a competitive advantage upon their company.

> Or actually build an economical car, sub $25k

That's the plan. Do you not see their steps towards accomplishing that goal? Tesla literally laid out their plan from the beginning: start at the upper end of the market to capture enough money to throw into R&D such that they can work their way down the curve into the more economical price range. Not sure how this isn't obvious from Tesla Roadster ($150k+), Model S ($75k+), Model X ($80k+), Model 3 ($35k+) ...

By the way, you don't get down to a $25k car unless the parts that go into that car cost less than $25k. Tesla has been working to drive those costs down since the inception of their company. Evidence being the many factories they're building and the working partnership they've maintained for R&D on batteries with Panasonic.

> no self-driving

Self-driving is an add-on. It's not included in the base price of a vehicle.

> no performance mode

Once again, another lineup. Not the base model.

> Just a working, fully electric car that any working-class person could buy, globally

Working-class person with a Model 3 checking in. Similarly the Model 3 price point put it firmly within the grasp of my parents who have subsisted on Toyota Camry's and Honda Accord's their whole lives. Their next car will be a Model 3.

> That would have much more impact than building luxury electric vehicles.

Yeah. Tesla agrees. They're getting there. I'm not sure what they've done in the past two decades hasn't proven that.

[1]: https://evannex.com/blogs/news/when-tesla-partnered-with-the...

[+] mkalimani|5 years ago|reply
Brief of Tesla's Master Plan [0]

Part Un: 1) Create a low volume car, which would necessarily be expensive 2) Use that money to develop a medium volume car at a lower price 3) Use that money to create an affordable, high volume car

Part Deux: 1) Create stunning solar roofs with seamlessly integrated battery storage 2) Expand the electric vehicle product line to address all major segments 3) Develop a self-driving capability that is 10X safer than manual via massive fleet learning 4) Enable your car to make money for you when you aren't using it

https://www.tesla.com/blog/master-plan-part-deux

[+] giantg2|5 years ago|reply
I would love a stripped down electric work truck without all the fancy/expensive tech.
[+] anandpdoshi|5 years ago|reply
Plenty (https://plenty.ag) is trying to scale hydroponics using plant science and automation. (I worked here till a few months ago.) Indoor agriculture is going to supplement our nutrition needs in the future. Plenty is focusing on flavor as its selling point, and after eating Plenty produce, everything else seems like eating cardboard.
[+] kickout|5 years ago|reply
Why'd you leave--just curious?
[+] giantg2|5 years ago|reply
I don't know that I would use Telsa as an example. Sure, they are replacing fossil fuels with renewables, but I see this as trading one dirty commodity for another. Lithium mining is environmentally damaging and the impact will likely get worse as demand increases. So maybe a step in the right direction, but definitely not a true solution.
[+] twunde|5 years ago|reply
Tesla is actually a good example assuming that you believe that lithium mining is better than coal mining or at least an equivalent problem.

Tesla's utility-level batteries (MegaPack) make wind and solar projects more economically feasible since any excess wind can be stored instead of being sold at negative rates when its not being used. These batteries will allow the replacement of many coal-powered generator plants since those are typically used for peak times when we need more energy. They're responsible for pushing the electric car revolution forward (making it fashionable), which is forecasted to lead to less peak energy usage and a more balanced usage during non-peak hours (since people will be charging their cars at home after hours). In theory, this reduces the need to make upgrades to the US electricity distribution network and we should lose less energy transporting it. This also reduces the need for oil, and could prevent more wars in the middle east (since their major resource is less valuable)

[+] thehappypm|5 years ago|reply
A gas car dumping CO2 into the atmosphere contributes to climate change all over the world. Is it fair to the rapidly disappearing Maldives that Americans like gas guzzlers? Hell no. They get all the externalities of worldwide CO2 emissions, even though the Maldives is a tiny producer of carbon. That's not fair.

However, if a Lithium mine in South America opens, and it wrecks and pollutes the land, the same place that bears the costs (the pollution) also gains the benefits (the jobs/revenue from the Lithium). At the very least, it's more fair.

[+] johnmorrison|5 years ago|reply
There is no non environmentally damaging solution, really, and there probably never will be.

Steps in the right direction are all we can ever take.

Asteroid mining might be a bit of a solution to this resource extraction problem, but not really.

[+] digitalmaster|5 years ago|reply
Fair. But I do think "better = good". It fits my main query of 1. Well funded 2. Trying to solve meaningful problems
[+] mstatner|5 years ago|reply
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[+] fiftyacorn|5 years ago|reply
Is start with Gates Foundation. It is addressing some of these problems
[+] psmithsfhn|5 years ago|reply
Telsa, Gates Foundation, etc. Ugh. Please stop 'helping' us.

My general guess is that anything actually worthwhile will have little to no private funding behind it.

Global heating. Racism. Soil extinction. Fascism. Disenfranchisement. Inequality. Female disempowerment. etc.

I guess there is government cheese for global heating. Not sure how much useful work would be done outside of government-run and/or -funded laboratories.

And anything that could potentially start out as being at least notionally-well-intentioned will come around to being not that.

My general thinking at this point is I have to find or help to create a small, well-organized group of people who start a not-funded social movement that will oppose almost everything most philanthropists and investors and do-gooders actually care about.

[+] digitalmaster|5 years ago|reply
This is exactly what I was hoping this thread would disprove. But so far I think you're probably right. Private interest just doesn't seem to be seriously willing or able to tackle the big issues.
[+] fsflover|5 years ago|reply
One could argue that Purism, Social Purpose Corporation, is trying to fight with pollution (by providing devices with lifetime updates and choosing their sources) and supports human rights (by using exclusively free software, by creating a new market for surveillance-free user-respecting devices, by trying to shift manufacturing from China to USA).

https://puri.sm/about/manufacturing-and-sourcing/

Not sure if you consider them "well funded" though.

[+] stann|5 years ago|reply
From China to US... surveillance-free?