A founder who left law, then consulting, then a venture-backed parking startup, has written in Fortune about the moment that changed his direction for good. On a Christmas Day trip to San Francisco, he wandered into the Tenderloin and saw an open-air church service surrounded by extreme poverty, in a city where roughly one in every 14,000 residents is a billionaire. That contrast pushed him to leave convenience tech behind and start building software for social services instead.
What I'd tell a client about this
Here's the lesson I'd sit a client down with: the biggest opportunities are often the ones everyone else has decided are too boring or too messy to touch. The Fortune piece lays out a pattern I see constantly in business. Talent and money pour toward problems that are already comfortable to solve, quick food delivery, faster ad targeting, while the hardest, most unglamorous problems sit untouched because they're buried in paperwork and bureaucracy.
The numbers in the article make the case plainly. In fiscal year 2025, SNAP served an average of 42.1 million people a month, about 12.3% of the US population. The USDA reported a national payment error rate of 10.62%, worth $10.1 billion in improper payments, and the agency was explicit that these are errors, not fraud. Roughly 87% of that was overpayment and about 13% was underpayment, meaning families who qualify for help aren't getting it. A 2025 federal study from the Administration for Children and Families found child welfare caseworkers spend an average of 4.3 hours a day on paperwork, more than half a standard shift. Turnover among caseworkers runs around 30%.
None of that is a talent problem. It's a systems problem, and systems problems are exactly what software is built to fix. The author's company now works with agencies in a dozen US states, and says it has helped cut administrative burden in half for some partners, starting with Fairfax County, Virginia. That's not a story about AI replacing people. It's a story about pointing skill at the right target so the people already doing hard work can actually do it.
As a coach, this is the kind of story I want every client to sit with for a minute. It's easy to build a career or a business around solving problems that are simple to define and pleasant to work on. It takes more courage to ask whether the problem you're solving actually matters to the people who need help the most. That question doesn't just apply to founders in Silicon Valley. It applies to anyone deciding where to spend their skills, their hours, or their budget this quarter.
One thing to do this week
Take fifteen minutes and write down the three problems your work currently solves for other people. Then ask yourself honestly: are these problems for people who are already comfortable, or for people who are genuinely stuck? You don't have to overhaul your business by Friday. But naming the gap is the first step toward closing it, and it's the same step this founder took a decade ago before he ever built anything new.
If you want a second set of eyes on that list, that's exactly the kind of conversation I have with clients every week, turning a story like this into one useful decision for your own work.
The piece ends on a line worth sitting with. Silicon Valley has never made more money, but it won't rediscover purpose by fixing the inconveniences of people who are already fine. The hardest problems are unglamorous and full of forms, but they're not hidden. They're right there, a short walk from the money, waiting for someone willing to look.
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