Even just 30 years ago, if you were idealistic and wanted to change the world, you went into politics. Today, I believe the best way to change the world is through information technology. It has the ability to empower people to do the "right thing" far more than any centralized authority ever did. I see it as decentralized data-driven vs centralized ideology-driven decision making.

Take banking for example. The general public is up in arms with the industry as their actions are the supposed causes of the global financial crisis. Most of the rhetoric has been around two sides arguing for more or less government regulation around banking as a fix. Well I've spent the past several years deeply researching how the banking industry works, and let me tell you, it doesn't matter which side is right. Regardless of the regulatory climate, most banks are flying blind. They don't have the technology to see basic ratios about their balance sheet in a reasonable timeframe, let alone the specific risks of complex structured products. They have to manually calculate trivial stuff like deposit decay models in unwieldy spreadsheets or use some very kludgy narrow use-case tool built by a consultant while shuffling data out from one system to another via spreadsheets. By the time any useful information about the bank makes its way to the top for review/action by management, the data is already several months stale and been summarized in a powerpoint. No ability to iterate on hypothesis, no ability to do further analysis.

Many banks still think in this old brick-and-mortar mentality. The number of branches and ATMs aren't a competitive advantage anymore. Products they offer have become commoditized, and regulations like Dodd-Frank have begun to squeeze their main source of revenue, interest margin.

But there is hope. Banks today are fundamentally data companies. Most just haven't realized it yet, or the ones that do, don't know how to effectively build technology. The consulting, vendor, and in-house IT team models are broken mostly due to ineffective tech management (compare to a top priority project at Google or Facebook for example). Instead of building a company that is yet another enterprise vendor trying to replace some 3 letter acronym system, I think there's an opportunity to work with forward thinking banks who are ambitious but are limited by their infrastructure. Pairing expertise from within the industry with top technology talent typical in consumer tech, to rebuild their entire technology stack from bottom to top. Better technology can enable faster decision making, more precise measurement of risk and risk hedging, ability to underwrite and manage very custom loans and other products for customers, and allow smaller banks to compete with the big few.

I believe this is the case with every single industry, not just banking. Construction, manufacturing, logistics, hospitals, pharmaceuticals, agriculture, etc. I believe once these major industries that form the backbone of our society are running 100x more efficiently, with proper competition from the small guys, we will have a lot of improvement in society and it will begin to "unfuck" itself via market forces. Or at least, we'll free up a lot of resources to be able to focus on it.