….Let me illustrate this with an anecdote: there were a few companies @ Disrupt that, to me, seemed like they might not just be doing some real good*, but have a chance at making an impact. One of them wasCakeHealth. Great tech, awesome idea, a way to make people’s lives simpler in dealing with their health care and their insurance companies. When they pitched in the startup finals, Marissa Meyer was on the judging panel. She started talking a bit about Google Health, and “why it failed,” and you could see her line of thinking: disrupting health care is insanely difficult. She listed a giant litany of obstacles. Indeed, in many ways, you could see she was almost ceding the battle. At the very least, you could see her blatant skepticism that health care is disrupt-able with such a small team. More depressingly, she seemed to be saying that even the mighty GOOGLE couldn’t crack it. Indeed, part of me secretly thinks CakeHealth didn’t win not because it wasn’t disruptive enough, but because it was tackling something un-disrupt-able. Health Care in the US is not the hotel industry or car sharing. It is legion. It is everywhere. It is, perhaps, indestructible. Or close to it.
So, in thinking about going back into tech, this is sort of my conundrum: the desire to do some real good, mixed with a love of the small startup world, combined with a lurking belief that the solutions needed to solve the real problems are going to be large. Real large. Like Tesla or Space X large. No one’s come close to really marshaling those levels of resources in the tech scene to tackle education, health care of environment yet. And if I did go back into this, that’s maybe what I’d be looking for.**
Whole thing is worth a read. Kind of similar sentiment I developed while researching and delving into the startup world as I tried to find a job. It’s hard to generalize, but there was an overwhelming sense of annoyance with the way a word like “disrupt” was overused - sometimes these companies weren’t even sure what they were disrupting or why it needed disruption.
