> Dude, it's Instagram. It lets you add faux vintage to your pictures. Building pyramids we are not.

This is a false dichotomy. It's like comparing Carly Rae Jepsen's "Call Me Maybe" to Jimi Henrix's "Purple Haze". Egyptians may have built the pyramids, but they also built thousands of small homes and fields that don't have any value to us today. Jimi's work was likewise born amid a bunch of forgettable pop songs by others that served only to entertain for a short time. Great things are born in a sea of the mediocre. You can't optimize this away. In fact, to do so will do far more harm than good because it stifles and crushes the mind's ability to explore.

The goal of geometry wasn't to build the pyramids any more than computer science was to build the Internet. At the time, each solved a business purpose (farms for the former, ballistic calculations for the latter). They were the byproduct of several big minds that wanted to build something else beyond the practical. Ask yourself how pyramids allow me to build a better farm? How does the Internet make ballistic calculations easier?

Everything of cultural significance throughout history had little or no practical value at the time. The pyramids were huge mountains of stone, had large and priceless paintings put inside, and filled with golden items. For what? Some dead guy. Leonardo shunned practical architecture, math, and anatomy so he could paint some girl. Bach was genius in patterns and sound, but all he wanted to do was bang on ivory keys. Even science takes a long time to serve a practical purpose. If kings and nobles asked for the practical from Galileo et al., we wouldn't have the telescope or even bothered studying astronomy. [1] Every significant song, play, artwork, architecture, and book serve almost no practical purpose. Do we do away with them because of their apparent lack of practical purpose?

Instagram still had to solve problems that aren't directly related to hipster pictures. They had to solve image processing in real time with a small device. They had to solve the problem of updating and messaging tens of thousands of nodes with millions of users. They had to solve network outages, slow connections, and availability at scale. It taught the Instagram team those concepts can be used to solve other problems. Now they have both the technical knowledge and the capital to build something else. Maybe they solve a "big" problem or they go off to build some other widget.

I hate the obsessive view that everything needs a practical purpose. Why does Instagram et al. teams need to solve any "big" problem? When you back up far enough, most services don't solve any big problem at all. Poverty isn't solved by Google's search algorithm. War isn't solved because Paypal made it easier to buy stuff online. Hunger isn't fixed by Amazon's internet shopping. If we measure everything by the metric of solving really hard problems, then almost everything we do every day fails to live up to that metric. Is that really the metric we want to use to measure the usefulness of a business or product?

People are working on the hard problems we are facing. They are very passionate about solving them, even just a little bit. Looking at Silicon Valley and saying they aren't solving any real problem is being incredibly insulting to those people who are working on the big problems. It's like saying that "If only those SV people would look into such and such problem, it would be solved." No it won't. We aren't Superman. We would only be adding our great minds to the sea of great minds already working on those problems.

Family Guy [2] sums up my feelings of whether or not a service/product solves a "big" problem. Go out and do something you find interesting. Who knows what it will become or if it will serve a useful purpose.

[1]: I understand that Astronomy was used to plan for farming, harvest, and other time keeping purposes, but that was known thousands of years prior to the Middle Age thinkers. What 17th century problem did finding out that points of light in the sky went around other points of light in the sky? Probably a whole lot of nothing. Now that knowledge is very useful, but it took 300+ years to become practical.

[2]: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oI3DlIrvoHg