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Ask HN: Companies or startups that are *actually* changing the world?

11 points by PostOnce ↗ HN
I just read about another startup that wants me to "come change the world" by making some app that does nothing, so I started thinking:

Let's discuss companies that are actually changing the world, rather than Not Hotdog or Facebook for Cats.

We've got stuff like Boston Dynamics and SpaceX (and friends) which could very plausibly change the world in any number of ways (Giant satellite internet constellation? Robocop? Lunar Resort?).

We've got the big AI companies (for better or worse, surveillance, self driving cars, it's definitely changing the world).

There are I assume medical and sociological companies or nonprofits doing wild new things that I am not aware of. Paul Allen's research institutes (brain and cell) maybe.

What are some places (startups, corps, nonprofits) that are actually changing the world, for better or worse?

12 comments

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sharemywin
You could argue that Uber, Facebook, Google changed the world, but didn't start out very ambitious.
cm2012
Facebook and Google have profoundly changed the way people connect and find information, respectively. It's quite a developer mindset to have incremental space travel improvements above those.
ajeet_dhaliwal
Seems like you think something is changing the world only if it has some link to the physical / hardware world - go work or found a hardware related company then I suppose. Personally I think many software only companies change the world in ways that are just as important. Connecting ideas and improving processes gives human more time and part of their life back. I’m the founder of tesults.com and I think it’s changing the world in its own small way but I may well sound delusional to anyone comparing this effort to a massively funded hardware tech company such as Tesla or Space X.
PostOnce
This is absolutely the kind of totally pointless, already-solved, software-only non-product that causes no measurable change in the world that I was talking about.

I'm not saying software can't have an impact, it absolutely can, and a BIG one. Think Tor, Bitcoin, Signal, or maybe some AI or open OS or something that allows people to do something they couldn't do before at any price. Those things can cause some major structural or other disruption to society at large. Automated test results will not. People don't even test stuff most of the time (sadly).

ajeet_dhaliwal
The small things and the details matter though when it comes to implementing the big ideas Tesla and Space X has. I'd guess they're relying on hundreds, if not thousands of products that you might call totally pointless (on their own) to achieve their end goal. It's definitely the right thing to think big imo but the work needs to get done.
BjoernKW
Perhaps, you haven't worked in an environment where that kind of information is regularly and pointlessly compiled into Excel sheets.

Tesults certainly isn’t changing the world as in “SpaceX is changing the world.” but I suppose they have a few customers who think that their product is worth the price.

As for already solved problems: Remember Dropbox?

senatorobama
Rigetti Computing
PostOnce
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rigetti_Computing

If quantum computing happens, I wonder how long it will take the workforce and tools to develop -- it took some time for classical computers to get good tooling and a decent size workforce.

Definitely the potential to change the world, if it's actually possible to build working quantum computers.