O MANNY's

It’s always great to want to be founder or person that changes the world however the question many founders fail to ask is…is the business for the better of the world or as a founder are you just creating new problems?


The truth is, there’s no founder on this planet that doesn’t aspire to change something, create something, or tweak things except maybe you were a small cannabis dealer. However since the time of innovations, entrepreneurs have been altering the world with their creations with a huge blind optimism. Some founders have made life some-how better but one sometimes wonder why do we still face the same social & economic problems that were present in the stone age, bronze age, dark age, religious age, industrial age, etc. The purpose of this exploratory content is to see if founders do really change the world for the better or just change it.


We still live in a world of have mores and have nots. We live in a world whose foundation is based on the co-existence of opposites but what if founders could fulfill people’s desires with little downside to a person’s life? Love, ecstasy, fantasy, all delivered in a matrix like world. Clearly would be a better world.


Simply using STEM to eradicate factors that cause human suffering around the world. “Instead, as of this century we have manage to create kings and queens out of founders who still haven’t figure how to change the world or solve problems without a lot of side-effects.” says, Manny of Founders Under 40™ Group

We have email and text messaging as communication tools which have lead to less and less voice calls and personal touch. We have social media and Tinder yet still people don't completely feel connected.



In most parts of the world, we have water,electrical, food distribution networks that help sustain life pretty well. We have transportation systems that inform users of exact arrival and departure times due to GPS. Our weather forecasting systems are almost God like. Our access to unlimited information is just endless. Families and communities are growing fragmented. Driver-less cars and more automation are about to disrupt civilization hopefully for the greater good of all.Weed is ok at work??? : ) We have growing personal privacy and security anxiety level in urban people never seen in densely populated people maybe during times of wars, famine, diseases, pandemic, etc. 




Clearly a lot of founders and entrepreneurs like Uber, Airbnb founders are changing the world but is humanity better because of their offerings?

Let’s Take A Look At Google’s Founder

The google machine haven't taken their foot off the gas since they reinvented the search engine. They haven't  let incumbents deter them from creating great products such as Google maps, Google Docs, email for the masses, email services for businesses, affordable targeted advertisement, etc The amount of tools, services, and apps has being tremendously embarrassed around the world. But has all that is Google made the world better? 



It is stated that Larry Page, one of Google founders, is constantly pushing its people to innovate and take risks. It has changed how we find information. In the past the library was the primary source of organized information so clearly they have change the world but what they have also brought along is a business model that turns gathering people’s behaviors online and offline into money. Today, People are becoming very concerned and frightened by the abuse and the mistrust of tech companies. So Larry Page and the entire Google/ Alphabet organization have just made a digital age terrifying intentionally and unintentionally. Now imagine the power entities like Google will have in automated cars. AI, VR, AR, blockchain, etc.to change the world.


Larry Page however understands that free innovation for the masses must be funded by a sustainable business model. So no matter how much good intentions Google, Alphabets, Larry Page has …the reality the more powerful you or your business becomes the likely abuse of dominance.


Has Larry Page made the world better?

Let’s Take A Look At Facebook’s Founder

[Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, has pledged US$3 billion to cure all disease by the end of the century, while Microsoft has vowed to ‘solve the problem of cancer’. ] 

I personally commend Mr. Zuckerberg for having the compassion to assist others in eradicating the ills of the world. But a man that grows more powerful than most nation's leaders is bound to attract more attacks from it’s citizens/users and governess and competitors.


Before there was Facebook we manage to engage each other and stay in touch with basic tools with no entity storing our personal details and exploiting it and no hacker to worry about maybe the rare possibility of interception by the ISP or others.


"Facebook’s power and dominance, its knowledge of every aspect of its users’ intimate lives, its ability to manipulate their – our – world view, its limitless ability to generate cash, is already beyond the reach of any government."


Facebook has tuned something as basic as safely and privately staying connected to a powerful surveillance platform which in most cases the user is providing the intelligence.


And a founder running a publicly traded company his number one objective is to make money and any attempt to change the world or make it better can never get in the way of making money.

["Commercial entities in the marketplace do not have an incentive structure that systematically rewards high-risk, long time horizon experimentation; they need to show quarterly results. Similarly, public officials in a democracy do not have an incentive structure that rewards high-risk, long time horizon experimentation; they need to show results quickly from the expenditure of public dollars in order to get re-elected. In contrast, foundations are not subject to earnings reports, impatient investors or stockholders, or short-term election cycles."]

From my observation, founders trying to make the world better usually do it outside a for profit business structure. However a new generation wants corporation doing good 24/7 like paying workers for overtime work, hiring a diverse workforce, encourage growth of all, or research the impact your hiring could have on the local housing, transportation, food, etc


Has Mark Zuckerberg made the world better?

Let’s Take A Look At Amazon’s Founder

The thing about the Jeff Bezos of the world is that their wealth is created by creating value while unfortunately exploiting others who lacked the courage to take the right risks for their dreams. Jeff Bezos was once an employee who got paid in salary and many of you know wealth doesn’t happen with a salary. So clearly what I’m saying is whatever wealth Jeff Bezos of Amazon has accumulated it is because he worked his ass off to earn every penny and advantage. He has changed the way we buy a lot of goods so give him is kudos.


[This was the question anchoring the approach that Jeff Bezos, the world’s richest man, laid out last week in announcing his and his wife’s entrance into mega-philanthropy: a $2 billion gift to address homelessness and education. The Bezoses want to fund capable organizations serving the homeless on the ground and to build a network of private, full-scholarship Montessori-like schools for poor children, who will supposedly be treated like customers are at Amazon, where the Bezoses amassed their $100 billion-plus fortune.]


But unfortunately the world isn’t better or going to be better because of Mr. Bezos and his concerns for the homeless or other philanthropic endeavors. The world of business and its founders needs to stop biases, wrong values, and greed at any cost.  Harms are being inflicted on the weak and the vulnerable for the sake of bottom line objective, policies are sometimes shady.





Everyday people are mad about the extreme inequalities, the disruption to our democracy, values, and social & economic benefits that are like carrots at the end of a stick. Jeff Bezos of the world need to get down to the root cause of these social & economic issues. We just have a vicious cycle of the fucked up in societies fucking other people. Some people who have been wronged as children grow up to wrong others.



[Observing this, if there is one skill that separates Bezos from other effective CEOs — and really most people in general — it’s the ability to make optimal decisions in the face of a future he doesn’t fully understand.]





Has Jeff Bezos made the world better?

Let’s Take A Look At SalesForce’s Founder

If there were ever a desire to be mantee to a founder/ceo,,,I would hope every founder would pick Marc. Marc Benioff of SalesForce is a rare founder who is truly dedicated to social and economic causes. He’s not afraid to publicly speak up about the injustices in America and around the world.
Him and his wife recently bought the iconic Time magazine so they can encourage and influence positive change.

Mr. Benioff has manage to touch many millions of business users around the world while generating billions in revenue. He’s a founder with a civic mind and true believer that the role of business is to make the world a better place.




[ The business of business is improving the state of the world," Benioff said, speaking from Salesforce's Dreamforce conference in San Francisco.]




[His philanthropy is similarly active. To tackle Silicon Valley's housing crisis, he and his wife have pledged millions of dollars for low-income housing, and, in a typical Benioff move, rather than leave it at that he's now raising more money from friends ("We're high-tech beggars"). He wants every CEO to join him in personally adopting a middle school. And he and his wife have given $250 million to two University of California, San Francisco children's hospitals, both of which now bear their names.]



I guess this would be a founder who gets the new reality.Sales & profit is not everything.


Has Marc Benioff made the world better?

Let’s Take A Look At Micosoft’s Founder

[“I’m certainly well taken care of in terms of food and clothes,” he says, redundantly. “Money has no utility to me beyond a certain point. Its utility is entirely in building an organization and getting the resources out to the poorest in the world.” ]- Bill Gates


As many know Bill Gates helped build the most riches and powerful tech company. And since he retired from full time operation at Microsoft he has been busy trying to help the world’s poorest.Gates has imitated David Rockefeller of Standard Oil sense of philanthropy with a purpose.


I personally agree and many others would agree Mr. Gates has change the world but could you say because of his charity & foundation the world is better? Sustainable progress is likely what we all want. A world where poverty is completely eradicated and diseases like Cancer are not a recurring threat to lives. Wars are the thing of the past. A better human population makes for a better world. Maybe the investment to better personal development  and self discipline should also be a primary focus. Send John Maxwell along with the money, Bill.


All and all Mr. Gates is not obligated to give back. Maybe it’s still too early to say whether the world will be better because of this very generous founder.

[“There’s been a lot of discussion about what happens if large numbers of young people in the poorest countries are denied opportunities to build better lives,” they write. “People worry about insecurity, instability, and mass migration. We wish they would also recognize young people’s enormous potential to drive growth. They are the activists, innovators, leaders, and workers of the future.”]

[The Gates Foundation is also credited with some amazing, life-saving accomplishments, and shown a willingness to acknowledge mistakes and take corrective actions. The field of philanthropy, however, has invited greater scrutiny as charity work has become more political in nature ]



Has Bill Gates made the world better?

Let’s Take A Look At Space X’s Founder

Just like everyone loves Raymond, everyone seems to love Elon Musk. He has inspired a generation of founders, entrepreneurs, musicians, leaders to not be afraid to dream big. Probably the most importantly is to execute and never give up.




He’s gradually making it possible for the masses to use renewable energy, space travel as popular as a train ride. He aspires to colonize Mars by 2040. My off topic question is. . . will he be sending genetically modified humans? or will he be sending cloned version of himself?



Musk has accomplished a lot. Way more than most people with three life times.
But if you step back to see what Elon Musk has done would people say he has made the world better?


You might say he change and disrupted a lot of shit but is gun violence gone? Is corruption still around in government?




What Elon Musk has done to make the world better is by making weed smoking so much cooler.

Has Elon Musk made the world better?

Let's Take a Look at the Opera Winfrey Show / Harpo

If every founder could build an impactful business like Oprah’s Harpo, now called OWN, the world definitely should be better. It would take a founder that can empathize, reserve judgement, be disciplined, self aware, business savvy, great communicator, great unite, great listener, connect with anyone.


Oprah made book reading an important pleasure, she’s made living your best life obtainable by anyone who wanted a better life. She showed us the power of visualization. She showed us how to lead and showed us how to love. 

Basically some  gay shit! : (



She helped create spin-off like Dr. Phil, Dr. Oz, Rachel Ray...


She took her black ass from hell to heaven and made billions and helped a lot of people. I can’t imagine another Founder that has touched the lives of so many around the world.

[If Oprah stands for anything, it is expecting nothing but excellence out of yourself. As she recently told her BFF Gayle King, "You are not the product of your circumstances. You are a composite of all the things you believe, and all the places you believe you can go. Your past does not define you. You can step out of your history and create a new day for yourself. Even if the entire culture is saying, 'You can't.' Even if every single possible bad thing that can happen to you does, you can keep going forward."]

In 2007, she opened the Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy for Girls in South Africa. So Oprah is the rare exception founder who made the world better while operating a business and not waiting till she had her philanthropy hat on to do good. 






[Oprah Winfrey has influenced the way women think, talk, eat, study, shop, exercise and lead. She has changed our every day culture and vernacular to include respect for the emotional and spiritual. She has supported the arts, produced and starred in ground-breaking films that challenge stereo-typing of any sort, and single-handedly revolutionized the book industry and the way we read literature through her focus on-- and love of—books and reading.]


Has Oprah Winfrey made the world better?

Let’s Take A Look At Carnegie Steel’s Founder

[   In 1901 Carnegie made a dramatic change in his life. He sold his firm to company US Steel Corporation started by the legendary financier J.P. Morgan. The sale of his firm earned him more than 200 million dollars and 65 years old Carnegie decided to spend a rest of his life by altruism. He invested much of his resources to educational initiatives, he was building up the libraries and supported different independent projects, whereupon he even radically grossed up these investments in the beginning of 20th century. He gave approximately 5 million dollars to a library in New York, thanks to that it was able to open several other smaller libraries and it is rumoured, that thanks to his financial gifts together 2 800 libraries were opened. ]

Carnegie might have made the world better via his philanthropy efforts which some say was out of guilt.Andrew Carnegie and the Carnegie Steel company weren’t necessarily angels in business. They changed many aspect of the world especially in construction but showed how dark capitalism can become.

A founder who change the world but guilt made him pursue giving back. So he made the world better by creating liberaries because he wanted to redeem himself.


Has Andrew Carnegie made the world better?

Let’s Take A Look At Edison Electric Company Founder

Compared to Steve Jobs & Apple, Thomas Edison had created for the greater good of all men not necessarily just for people who can afford expensive things.

How Edison made the world better is by showing us that persistence sometimes does pay.

[Edison once described his invention methods as involving a lot of hard work and repeated trial and error until a method was successful. “During all those years of experimentation and research, I never once made a discovery. All my work was deductive, and the results I achieved were those of invention, pure and simple. I would construct a theory and work on its lines until I found it was untenable. … I speak without exaggeration when I say that I have constructed 3,000 different theories in connection with the electric light, each one of them reasonable and apparently likely to be true. Yet only in two cases did my experiments prove the truth of my theory.”]

I think every founder should try to create as many solutions, and offering that help solve people’s problems so that one’s contribution to others is not just money. Simply, the value of your contribution to man kind outweighs the cost of obtaining goods & services from your business.






Has Thomas Edison made the world better?

Let’s Take A Look At Apple’s Founder

Steve jobs might be the most popular and most globally admired fonder ever. However Steve & Apple haven’t really made the world better. They have manage to create a very very profitable cult like business but research into what their contribution to social and human growth is pretty much minimal.

Their tech products might have an extraordinary appeal but have they stood for something outside their organization that says they are not about selling you shit with some marketing BS. Nothing against Apple & late Steve Jobs.

 It’s just obvious that their contribution to a better world is none.The few thing that founders can take from Apple is get your priorities right, embrace buddism, none-mainstream culture  and don’t do anything just for the money.

“I was worth over $1,000,000 when I was 23, and over $10,000,000 when I was 24, and over $100,000,000 when I was 25, and it wasn’t that important because I never did it for the money.”– Steve Jobs

Also what is also obvious is that ["Apple iOS App developers get paid more. Software developers who made iOS apps have made more than $4 billion since the iPhone first supported apps. Android app developers have made less than half a billion. Some 210,000 software development jobs in the United States exist, theoretically, because of the iOS platform and app store system Apple created. Many more programmer jobs have been created internationally. Apple’s ecosystem represents a world in which software developers can make a real living selling mobile apps."]

Maybe Apple has indirectly made the world better by inspiring others to think different or that's just Jedi mind tricks.




Has Steve Jobs made the world better?

Let’s Take A Look At Other Founders

 

David Karp
[David Karp created Tumblr, a site famous among many millennials who use the blogging platform daily. The site is normally used for sharing art and images, but it also acts well for short form blogging and sharing ideas.]

Has David the founder of Tumblr made the world better?


Ben Silbermann and Evan Sharp
[Continuing the theme of ultra-famous social media and content sharing sites, Ben Silbermann and Evan Sharp created Pinterest. Pinterest has grown into a massive business with these two guys at the helm.]

Has Ben & Evan the founder of Pinterest made the world better?


Adam D'Angelo
[Adam D'Angelo left Facebook in 2008 to start his own site, Quora. Quora has since become a massive site on its own and continues to grow in size and scope.]

Has Adam the founder of Quora made the world better?


Brian Chesky
[Founder of Airbnb, Brian Chesky has managed to disrupt and revolutionize the way we approach travel, room and board.]

Has Brian the founder of Airbnb made the world better?


John Zimmer
[Another entrepreneur focused on disrupting markets, John Zimmer is famous for his creation of Lyft, a major competitor with Uber. Ride-share apps are changing the way people think about travel, delivery and more.]

Has John the founder of Lyft made the world better?


Daniel Ek
[Daniel Ek is one of the founders of Spotify, the music streaming service. The service has grown to a massive size, and it will likely continue to absorb a large share of the music market.]

Has Daniel the founder of Spotify made the world better?

Let’s Take A Look At The Companies

Because sometimes the founder is never 100% the reason why a company fails or succeeds in it’s pursuits sometimes it’s just the underlings that take nothing and turn it into something.




Mitchell Energy
The following definitely change the world by introducing oil fracking process which at this very moment is still widely used due to endless demand for fossil fuel. The company is called Mitchell Energy which was founder by George Mitchell (Greek family name was Paraskevopolous). The founder might have seen oil no different from water. . .in that survival of any economy needed a supply of oil.

Has Mitchell Energy/ Oil Companies/ Petroleum Goods made the world better?


McDonald
McDonald’s is the most recognized brand in the world and the most popular ambassador of American culture. It took something as basic as meat, bread, cheese, and pop and turned it’s supply chain and delivery and operation into a  thing of beauty.

However I bet Ray Kroc would not have envision his restaurants as a threat to human health, or the manipulator of children just to hook families. But maybe I’m not a good judge whether the world is better because McDonald serves fast food?

Has McDonald made the world better?



Diner’s Club
In the time of late 40’s there weren’t many alternative to paying for goods. Then the gradual introduction of credit cards. It was called a charge card which founder, I believe was Frank Sullivan, was simply offering convenience to buy from any company. So it was the predecessor to VISA, MASTERCARD, AMERICAN EXPRESS,…which in the early years were a God sent to peoples lives.

Today they have become a thing to not handle irresponsibly. To the finance sectors it was a another cash cow. People buy something at $1 today only to pay $5+ tomorrow.
It has made the world better in the right hands such as entrepreneurs but a nightmare if depreciating assets are bought. So is the world better with credit cards?

Has Diner’s Club / VISA / Mastercard made the world better?



AT&T and the Telecommunications Industry
There was a time communicating over the telephone was such a pleasure and you’d look forward to it because of its innocents. Now it’s become something that requires end-end encryption, recording, caller id’s,death of the voice mail, and the rise of text messages. You have to thank AT&T & Bell Labs for creating and bringing to market the telephone. It’s revolutionized the way we connect on a global stage. Its founder definitely change the world but having it is the world a better place?

Has Verizon/WhatsApp/Skype/Rogers/Messenger made the world better?

FINAL WORDS

In my opinion the mentioned founders may have changed and disrupted industries however their companies and its offerings hasn’t significantly eradicated major human problems. Which unfortunately bring me to the point that founders aspire to change the world but never pursue highly difficult problems that will help make a better world.



Take A.I (artificial intelligence technology for example …I will bet almost 90% of the developers, founders and organization are using it for something mundane like finding better leads,analyzing who is likely to buy, hiring better, sell more,cut cost, make more money and not how do we create better zoning in cities, getting people to integrate better, or reducing the poverty levels, managing cost, predicting who is likely to be displaced by the automation age, enable access to opportunities, etc



Of course, listening to all these founders around the world who eagerly want to change the world is sometimes humorous but to me “to achieve greatness why not dare greatness”. You however better have a good motivation, good advice, a good problem, a good drive, great tangible and non tangible support. And a true understanding of the pros and cons of technology and your offering. It just takes a lot more effort to make things better in a changing world  - - -Manny of Founders Under 40 Group