>entrepreneurs have stopped chasing and solving Big Problems

What is strange to me is that people believe entrepreneurs ever solved "Big Problems". Who in history falls into this class? Thomas Edison? Alexander Graham Bell? Henry Ford? Guglielmo Marconi?

Nonsense, I say. These men didn't solve the "big problems" of their era -- they didn't attack issues that were popular in the public consciousness. They were really much more similar to today's SV entrepreneurs: they created markets, rather than entering them.

We never needed light-bulbs, and we never needed smartphones. We never needed the telephone, or Google. We never needed radio, and we didn't need Netscape either. We never needed cars, nor did we need Paypal, Bitcoin and Square.

The mistake is that thinking the first inventions are somehow more fundamental, just because they're older. That's nonsense.

Big Problems, to the extent that they are ever solved, are almost always solved collaboratively, by coalitions of scientists and engineers, involving both the public and private sector, and the solution rarely appears by flipping a switch. Norman Borlaug wasn't an entrepreneur and he didn't work alone. Ditto Edward Jenner, James Watt, you name 'em, we got 'em. These men were not entrepreneurs (though Watt worked with one).

>And yet, veterans who’ve returned from Afghanistan and Iraq have to wait roughly 270 days (up to 600 in New York and California) to receive the help — medical, moral, financial – which they urgently need, to which they are honorably entitled, after having fought our battles overseas.

>Technology, indeed, is solving the right problems.

Why on Earth would we expect technology to solve political problems?

>Meet the people who have the indignity of being over 50 and finding themselves suddenly jobless. These are the Untouchables of the new American workforce: 3+ decades of employment and experience have disqualified them from ever seeing a regular salary again. Once upon a time, some modicum of employer noblesse oblige would have ensured that loyal older workers be retained or at the very least retrained, MBA advice be damned. But, “A bas les vieux!” the fancy consultants cried, and out went those who were ‘no longer fresh.’ As Taylor Swift would put it, corporate America and the Boomer worker “are never ever getting back together.” Instead bring in the young, the childless, the tech-savvy here in America, and the underpaid and quasi-indentured abroad willing to work for slightly north of nothing in the kinds of conditions we abolished in the 19th century.

Economics: the only field you don't have to study to rant about on mit.edu.

>“What do we have to do with any of this? The unexotic underclass has to pull itself up by its own bootstraps! Let them learn to code and build their own startups! What we need are more ex-convicts turned entrepreneurs, single mothers turned programmers, veterans turned venture capitalists!

You don't have any numbers, you don't have any sources, you don't have any data. You think my only objection is that it's not my responsibility? My objection is that it's insane.

Khan Academy, though, looking at America's education system. Fitbit, targeting the number one cause of preventable death in the developed world. That e-cigarette guy from China, taking on number two. David Nichols and the psychedelic renaissance (not a company but it can't be), bringing MDMA to veterans. Theranos, making blood tests affordable for the 80% of Americans who make five figures or fewer. Prepolarizing MRI. Various on-demand laundry and cooking servies. It's out there. In some cases it doesn't matter: single mothers'[1] problem isn't that they aren't targeted by startups, it's that they don't have any money!

And you know what? It's fucking hard. These companies don't take off like bottle rockets the way Dropbox and Google did. Bringing products to disconnected people in disparate areas who don't like you is a lot harder than selling restaurant recommendations to the other nerds on the train.

[1]: you might be able to make an app so that single parents can find each other and trade-off childcare, but it probably exists already anyway. I'm not exactly Nostradamus, here.