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Connecting Smart People to Problems

First posted on June 21, 2021

I've been thinking about this for a while:

  1. There are smart people in tech.
  2. There are hard problems that need smart people to solve them.

The thing is that a lot of people that I know aren't really looking to solve hard problems right now. I guess we're all too worried about finding a job for when we graduate.

I think that's a shame because when we finally get that email address with the fancy domain name, we spend a lot of our time just putting numbers in databases or optimizing button clicks. I mean, it's essential work. If nobody did this, then Zoom wouldn't be able to support all of our online meetings and enable us to work from home.

But what I want is to work on something cool. I want a program that:

  1. Finds important problems that need to be solved.
  2. Recommends problems that would interest me.

But the program can't just output something abstract like "solve world hunger." It needs to be specific. Ideally, it should find someone I can contact that understands a subset of the problem—for example, a researcher who understands the inefficiencies of transportation networks that leads to hunger in Malawi.

Here's how we might find the problems:

  1. Search through academic papers and contact the experts who wrote the papers.
  2. Scan through one's work on their Linkedin profile.
  3. Look for documentaries/solutions crowdfunded on Kickstarter.

Here's how we might pair the problems with people:

  1. Search through Github to see what skills and interests people have and send a personalized email.
  2. Ask a couple of the popular programming YouTube channels to promote the problems.

One last thing. A few months ago, I contacted someone working on a problem I wanted to help solve and asked him how he got started. Here was his response: "What matters most is not how you start, but just that you do get started." I think that a program like this will get more people started, even if it's a small contribution.

I'm not sure what this program might look like, but I think that working on it will be very fulfilling because there's an awful lot of smarts that could create immense good when placed on the correct problems. And I look forward to signing up.

I wish you a great week.

- Curtis

#58: A Newsfeed for Your Life  |  #60: I Think I Know Why I Like You