Efficiency is the achievement of desired results with the least amount of waste. There is also a type of efficiency where the waste comes from choosing the wrong targets, called effectiveness. Government is the most obviously inefficient system in the world. To have anything done, you have to go through steps and processes that have nothing to do with the thing you're doing but arethere for different reasons like transparency and accountability. Academia is even more inefficient than government. To the extent that it has negative efficiency. Meaning, it does the opposite of what it needs to do. Instead of teaching people to think, it teaches them to borrow understanding second hand from others. And because the world is a product of academia, it makes sense that it is also extremely inefficient. Anyone who has ever worked anywhere knows that private organizations are also extremely inefficient. It is easier to be objectjve about others than yourself and notice their inefficiencies in an organization. Startups are proof that these 95% inefficiencies exist. These inefficiencies are what make it possible for startups to make ridiculous amounts of money. A startup is basically the building of a product to improve something by a lot for a lot of people. Uber improved taxis by 20x for hundreds of millions. It could not have done so if taxis were not running at 5% If every system runs at 5% efficiency, there should be more startups that solve them. The primary reason there aren't more startups is that there are moats. In Academia, if you build something that makes it 20x easier for people to learn, people will not use it because learning is not their primary objective. Their primary objective is to get good grades. And a good grade does not necessarily overlap with learning. It has more to do with writing the exact stuff that the teacher wants you to write. So noticing inefficiencies is not that difficult when they are so common. That's why startup ideas are dime a dozen. What is difficult is finding startup ideas where the moats are crossable