Work on these things
Stripe의 CEO인 Patrick Collison의 블로그에는 Advice 섹션이 있다. 사람들이 종종 자신에게 이메일을 보내 어떻게 하면 세상을 바꿀 수 있는 일을 할 수 있는지 조언을 구하여 자신이 해주고 싶은 말을 블로그에 정리하였다고 한다.
그 블로그 글을 통해서 “What should you do with your life?”, “Work on these things” 등 비슷한 주제의 글 몇개를 알게되었다. 인생을 통해 무슨 일을 할지, 어떤 일을 해야 의미가 있을지 고민하는 사람들을 위해 사회에 큰 영향을 미칠 수 있는 분야와 문제를 정리해 놓은 글이다. 그 중에서 내가 관심있게 보고 있고 앞으로 일하고 싶은 분야도 있어 정리를 해본다.
출처
What should you do with your life? Directions and advice by Alexey Guzey
Work on these things by Tyler Cowen
Markets to build in (2019)
Requests for startups by Y Combinator
Enterprise Software
Software used by large companies is still awful and still very lucrative.
Category-defining enterprise software companies will emerge to solve problems for every vertical, every business size, and every job function. Here are 3 specific areas we think are particularly interesting:
Making The Expensive Cheap: Because of the cost of traditional enterprise software, many categories of solutions were previously cost prohibitive for small or even medium sized businesses to benefit from.
The Next Billion Workers: Traditionally office-based knowledge workers have been the users of enterprise software. Mobile phones and tablets turn every type of employee – from the retail store associate to the field services team – into a knowledge worker.
Digitizing Every Industry: Every industry is going through some form of information-based disruption; this is causing businesses to modernize their practices, leveraging new data, accelerating key processes, and delivering digitally-enabled experiences in the process.
Financial Services
The world’s financial systems are increasingly unable to meet the demands of consumers and businesses.
That makes some sense because regulations designed to protect customers can’t change fast enough to keep up with the pace at which technology is changing the needs of those customers. This mismatch creates inefficiencies at almost every level of the financial system. It impacts how people invest their savings, how businesses gain access to capital to grow, how risk is priced and insured, and how financial firms do business with each other.
Software will accelerate the pace at which financial services change and will eventually shift the nature of regulations.
AI
AI stands to have a large impact on society. Applying research to any narrow domain (drug discovery, programming assistant, legal advice, fraud detection, etc) and intersection of AI and robotics (manufacturing, self-driving cars, etc).
Technology Infrastructure
Is there a way to structure, pipe and manage data better?
Are there ways to improve productivity given the information overload and noise we have in our work communication?
Can we make access to information affordable?
Can we make it easy to apply machine learning to all the complex problems we face?
How can we bring data science to help solve increasingly complex everyday problems?
Can we enable people who don’t know programming to build applications?
Can we build smart and intelligent systems that will respond to human needs?
Integrated Software Empires
Atrium is re-inventing the law firm with technology. Pilot is doing the same for accounting and Triplebyte is doing this for recruiting. These startups trade a simpler sales cycle for the shackles of a margin-light service layer. Instead of selling components to incumbents like Wilson Sonsini, they just sell the end-product to users.
Skeptics will say these are just service businesses hiding behind a facade of SaaS multiples. Reality is more nuanced. Assuredly law firms and accounting firms could be using more software! Even if not, leveraged buyouts have taught us that incumbents can naturally lose operational efficiency. This playbook may appear across other industries: Re-build Accenture with an army of “Lego Apps.” A new KPMG that audits using software instead of clipboards. Etc.
These companies are also an important component in workforce retraining. A ruck driver may not become an accountant at PWC, but they might be a great fit for a software-enabled accounting firm that relied on a lower level of human expertise.
Container-izing the World
Opendoor enables home-owners to achieve near-instant liquidity for their home by using software and machine learning. Convoy is serving as a software dispatcher for freight and trucking, bringing Uber-style efficiency to a a $700B industry. Cloud Kitchens (started by Uber founder Travis Kalanick) allows chefs to spin up “dark kitchens” with a click of a button, creating a new generation of restaurants optimized from the ground up for delivery.
Using software to more efficiently containerize and move objects around the world. You could imagine this extending: better use of un-occupied parking lots, instant mobility between homes or offices, etc.
A comparative study of foundations and their efficacy
Philanthropic foundations are behind a lot of important work. But how does a foundation decide what it wants and how the resulting grants should be structured? How effective are the programs of that foundation? In practice, how have its institutional mechanisms evolved? Imagine some kind of resource that answered these questions for the major American foundations.
Institutional critiques
More broadly, there is no discipline of institutional criticism. There is a very rich literature of policy criticism in economics, journalism, and non-fiction books. There is also a rich literature of “corporate criticism”: there are thousands of articles about how Facebook (budget: $20 billion) works and how it might be good or bad. But there is relatively little analysis of the most important institutions in our society: government departments. How is the Department of Agriculture (budget: $150 billion) organized and how effective or not is it? How about the Department of Energy (budget: $32 billion)? And why are not those questions paramount in the minds of policymakers?