Uriah Z Maynard
Aug 24, 2017 · 2 min read

I’m sitting here in my own small town New England summer home, and I see very much what you mean, though I suppose I have the advantage of not living in the bay or even working in tech right now. America is getting squeezed hard right now, and it’s very difficult to see that when you’re focused on who’s generating hundreds of millions of dollars in shareholder value in a matter of months and how you can convince the next hyper-privileged ivy league grad to join your startup so that you might be able to get your piece of the action. We’re facing huge, seemingly intractable problems as a nation, and no, an app is not going to fix that. But that doesn’t mean a tech company couldn’t make a huge impact. Apart from the oligopoly powers of previous booms, the fastest growing and most exciting consumer tech companies in recent years have been taking on huge existing markets. Tesla, Uber. Those aren’t the only industries ripe for disruption out there. Silicon Valley has an unprecedented ability to raise capital, almost to the level of New Deal era government spending. Andreessen was right — software can indeed eat the world, but if it’s going to accomplish that, it’s got to focus on solving the very real problems that regular folk are facing, and provide clearly superior options to the offerings of the world’s sclerotic legacy industries. And as Uber’s many problems have taught us, part of accomplishing that must involve building companies that most people would actually want to win, not just new and clever ways to extract more value from workers.

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    Uriah Z Maynard

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    Business guy, problem solver, accountant, marketer. Real Estate. Crypto currencies. Tech startups. Design. Progressive as fuck.