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'Silicon Valley Is Missing Unicorns Because It Doesn't Understand Poor People' (cnbc.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Silicon Valley might be hunting unicorns in the wrong places. According to one top federal health official, entrepreneurs and investors are overlooking one massive population: Low-income Americans who qualify for Medicaid. That's a big mistake, given that new funds are available for those that are bringing IT innovation to the space, said Medicaid chief medical officer Andrey Ostrovsky. "My gut is that it's a big opportunity with $500 billion in federal spend every year in a system that hasn't evolved technologically much since 1965," Ostrovsky said. "There are unicorns sitting in there," he added.
Arizona laws are based on the presumption that if you make the poor miserable enough, they will move somewhere else.
The whole idea that Silicon Valley VCs are somehow *looking* for unicorn companies or unicorn ideas is totally ass-backward.
Silicon Valley VCs believe they can *create* unicorns by throwing money at them. They aren't looking for them per-se. They are looking for the "right team", the "right investment", etc... The actual idea? Maybe a company can pivot to an idea before the iron grows cold and they are off to the next team. Or not.
A billion dollar valuation (aka unicorn) simply means VCs have managed to get some 3rd or 4th round chumps to dump a bunch of money into a company for a microscopic share of equity. The smart investors either came in early, or have financing structures with warrants that are dilutive (meaning they didn't actually invest at unicorn levels) unlike the employees that usually promised fully diluted shares some day. The whole fiction of unicorns is simply a media creation and has nothing to do with the market potential of a company. Like Enron or Adelphia accounting, it's a fiction that only has to do with the esoteric machinations of valuation and financing a startup.
I suspect the main reason nobody is pivoting towards medicaid recipients is that silicon valley companies probably don't think they can compete with the fraud levels that are out there. If some SV company thought they figured out a way to skim medicaid dollars, they probably can't hold a candle to what people are already doing to the system. It's hard to beat scammers at their own game (esp if you are trying to play fair). On the other hand, maybe a Uber-like company might want to tackle this, but I don't know if that would be a good thing.