I had an idea recently, to procure large living spaces and sublet them in San Francisco. This is certainly something I would have loved as a tenant the first time I arrived.
Here’s what I expected would happen next:
After a few days of research, I would have a vague path for version 0. Path in hand, I would then talk to potential customers, refine an MVP, and start iterating.
A few hours in, I saw how complicated the housing laws were for San Francisco. Each path had it’s own “shady” side. It seemed like any action I could take could be wrong, and exposed me to unnecessary risk.
With this, I felt how viscerally negative this kind of bureaucracy is to our productivity as a community. After a certain level of red tape, it’s just not worth investing time and money into something.
I had thought that a small business would have been a reasonable path for doing good and building an income stream, but counterintuitively, building something in tech could still be better. There’s many things going for tech, but one of the most immense differences lie in regulation.