> Saving time is to me the most important point of doing a startup.
I mis-read this in an interesting way: some startup ventures may seem like "not a big deal", but if they save 1% of the US population 1 minute of time every month, that's almost 70 person-years per year.
I can't imagine how much time GMail has saved for me that I would have spent setting up mail clients. Ditto for reddit, or news.YC - there is no way I could have found out and kept track of so much information out there in the blog/entrepreneur community while being a full-time student, doing research, and working two part-time jobs.
This is not to say we shouldn't donate more of our time and money to giving to those in real need, of course, just that sometimes we give to society indirectly, or even without realizing it.
Yeah, I'm not a big fan of the 1 minute * 300 million argument because we fritter enough time away already (TV, internet, waiting in line, chewing too slowly, hitting snooze, etc.). A minute here or there will invariably be sucked up somewhere else.
I used to work at a large, very large, software company. I learned not to buy the argument of ("Hey, design this right and you'll save 1 minute on 450 million machines") as a motivating factor. You just don't notice small things enough, and there are a million small things every day. (Did you notice the new wide-mouth soda cans? They do save you time gulping. But would you be satisfied being their inventor?).
Personally, I'd prefer to have a large impact on a few people and grow from there. But that's just me.
I mis-read this in an interesting way: some startup ventures may seem like "not a big deal", but if they save 1% of the US population 1 minute of time every month, that's almost 70 person-years per year.
I can't imagine how much time GMail has saved for me that I would have spent setting up mail clients. Ditto for reddit, or news.YC - there is no way I could have found out and kept track of so much information out there in the blog/entrepreneur community while being a full-time student, doing research, and working two part-time jobs.
This is not to say we shouldn't donate more of our time and money to giving to those in real need, of course, just that sometimes we give to society indirectly, or even without realizing it.