Hard Problems.

About

Many of the world’s smartest and most dedicated teams tackling hard problems struggle to get help from (or hire) experienced technologists who are integral to designing and implementing important solutions. The technical part of problem solving, which we refer to simply as tech, is seen as an “add-on” to be hired out at the end of research and planning when it’s much more effective to integrate tech into problem-solving from the start.

At the same time, most tech people don't think it's a viable career move to work full-time on hard problems and decide to focus on “prestigious” Silicon Valley career paths instead. Even if they do want to transition to working on something meaningful, they can't see where they might have an impact.

We aim to solve this divide by bridging the gap and championing the importance of practical tech for good.

We plan to

• Help teams to set themselves up for success. Once teams are formed, there are many challenges to successfully getting off the ground. We will show, from our experience, how to form functional teams, move quickly to validate ideas, and how to deploy software in new/challenging environments.
• Encourage long-term solutions. The tech world is notorious for focusing on short-term thinking around shiny new technologies. Hard problems are, pretty much by definition, multi-decade problems without 'silver bullet' tech solutions. This is a cultural value in tech that needs to be shifted.
• Develop sustainable funding models. This itself is a hard problem. Capitalism is obviously the crux of many of these challenges – tech people can make big money working on other challenges, and most teams working on hard problems are chronically underfunded. Ultimately, we will need to address this. We believe the solution is unlikely to be impact investing, which intends to generate a measurable, beneficial social or environmental impact alongside a financial return.

What success looks like

Thinking of this in terms of KPIs, we’d first think of measuring: the number of people we help make the leap from the traditional tech world to organizations that work on the world's hard problems. In the broader sense, our goals are to change the culture of tech to value people who work on hard problems.

Office

4th Floor, 1 Rivington Place, London EC2A 3BA