11 ms·

After the Gold Rush

236 points by miolini 11y ago

vorador 11y ago
Interesting article but I think it has a critical flaw — not all startups are in the consumer space. Of course, there’s not going to be another Facebook for the next couple years at least, but another Stripe — maybe?
stephenhuey 11y ago
He said: "Today’s tech behemoths aren’t the lumbering giants of yesteryear. They are leaner and meaner and more competitive precisely because they have co-opted the same technologies startups used to attack them." But this is far from true with the huge entrenched healthcare tech companies. Many of them haven't even begun to employ the newer software technologies. I'm down the street from the largest medical center in the world and numerous doctors and nurses encourage me all the time with their complaints about the major tech players in the industry. SV has barely scratched the surface of what could be improved and I look forward to seeing many more entrepreneurs join us in this $3 trillion industry.
- onli 11y ago
  But he is covering that, isn't he? > Move into new fields that have not (yet) gone through this transition. Tech giants may have adapted (somewhat) to the startup threat, but there are other fields — healthcare, for instance — still trying to adjust to last decade’s technology. These will remain fertile ground for some time yet. However, we know that this is not an easy field for many reasons (regulations, importance, no mistakes allowed, …). There is a reason why this field seems that stale.
  - stephenhuey 11y ago
    Yes, I think that's exactly right. Perhaps a combination of regulations while a lot of other industries have also enjoyed the spotlight more in the past decade or two. Hence healthcare hasn't attracted as much software talent. A few days ago I got into a Twitter exchange with my insurance company explaining to them why they should secure their login form, not just their registration form. Hopefully the social media rep will actually pass along the recommendation to IT as promised but even with stringent HIPAA regulations it's clear the industry hasn't been able to hire as many competent people as you'd expect for such a vital industry.
- amelius 11y ago
  The problem with the medical and biological fields is: you generally need expensive equipment. Also, you will need expensive certification. This is something that wasn't the case for software, so I guess this is also why this goldrush was so much different than anything else we've seen before.
  - stephenhuey 11y ago
    Good point, but my medical friends' complaints tend to be about the software they have to use more than anything else. And on top of that there's a lack of software tools for a lot of things they do.
    - amelius 11y ago
      There is lots of good bioinformatics software. The problem is often that institutions don't want to pay for it, because open-source software is available with similar functionality (albeit with lacking user interfaces). In my experience, it is very difficult to make money with scientific software in general, so I'm certainly not expecting a "goldrush" here.
      - stephenhuey 11y ago
        I agree to some degree (!) but I believe a lot of the software used by medical personnel in their daily routines could use an overhaul, plus numerous other modern tools could be given to them for daily use.
        stan_rogers 11y ago
        HIPAA (among other things) makes it Not Fun™ to be in that space. It's not that it isn't ripe—almost overripe—for an overhaul, but that the bureaucratic requirements tend to attract, well, bureaucratic types and reject people of a more "disruptive" nature. There's no particular reason why software and systems that can pass audits can't be as pleasant to use as any; it's just a matter of assembling a team of people that is creative, has both an aesthetic and ergonomic sensibility, and doesn't mind the kind of working environment that the process (and the auditors' interpretation of regulations; it doesn't matter what's actually required if nobody will certify that you've met the requirements) demands.
- username223 11y ago
  > But this is far from true with the huge entrenched healthcare tech companies. The current SV business model is "hoover up personal information people don't completely realize they're providing you, then use it to sell them marginally-more-effective ads." That works for "social" websites and taxi companies that aren't taxi companies, but I doubt it will fly for health care.
rco8786 11y ago
It's somewhat clear that were headed for a bit of a downturn, but this article reeks of the "everything that could be invented has been invented" fallacy.
- onli 11y ago
  I think it is also kind of missing that you can't easily draw parallels with the past here, as the field we are mostly talking about – software making, I think – is the first(?) modern big industry field where the means of production are in the hand of the workers. You can't easily compete with car companies, cause most of us won't have the means to even produce a prototype. But nothing is stopping someone capable enough from building his own OS, for example. And yeah, then we come to the forces of design and market share, but still – this is fairly new and distinct.
  - venomsnake 11y ago
    There is lack of freely available hardware on which said os to run - a lot of companies try to be your gatekeepers. The golden days like in the 90-s everything is PC, you can run whatever you want on PC are still somewhere ahead of us with mobile and IoT.
    - cft 11y ago
      Mobile app stores are owned by two tech giants. Expect more and more stories like https://medium.com/@joshliptzin/this-is-how-google-kills-your-app-c1abad30eb25 https://medium.com/@joshliptzin/this-is-how-google-kills-you...
      - venomsnake 11y ago
        I have a feeling that these tech giants are up for Standard Oil/ Bell surprise in the medium future.
roymurdock 11y ago
I like to scan these articles for numbers before reading. If I don't see any, I exit out. If you're going to talk about financial/economic phenomena please at least conduct a modicum of quantitative research and give us some concrete data to discuss, not just opinions in a void.
- diminish 11y ago
  There's maybe one small number observation, I m not sure if it's correct as there maybe high growth YC companies which will soon pass those 3/4. "In 2011, Y Combinator’s poster-child alumni were — already — AirBNB, Dropbox, and Stripe. Can you think of any Y Combinator companies from the last five years as well-positioned today as those Big Three were then? Maybe Instacart, if their unit economics work. That’s it."
  - nostrademons 11y ago
    That observation has a huge amount of hindsight bias. AirBnB was founded in 2006, DropBox was founded in 2007, and Stripe was founded in 2010. What did the ideal startup look like in 2007? It was one of: "A social network for X, like Facebook" "A social news site for X, like Digg" "A way to massively improve your e-mail experience, like GMail" In other words, people always chase the massive startup that got popular about 3 years previously. This article is pretty much on-time if it's holding up AirBNB, DropBox, and Stripe - those are the massive startups that got popular about 3-4 years ago. But in 2007, these were most decidedly not the hot industries to go into. Hotels were a done deal: Hilton, Marriott, Holiday Inn, and others chains owned it, and who would think a tiny team could take them on? Filesharing was an incredibly crowded market with 20-30 players, and in any case, if it got popular Google was going to crush them with Google Drive. PayPal owned payments; everybody knew it was a regulated industry with strong network effects, so why bother to compete?
- monkmartinez 11y ago
  You don't need hard numbers to philosophize about the tech industry, nor economic phenomena in general. Read blogs like ibankcoin/flyblog or zerohedge and you will find financial/economic articles written with data that is ancillary. That is, the hard data is not immediately required to make the point.
GreaterFool 11y ago
Now that TC announced it, it's official people! Time to close shop, pack your bags and leave. Startup gold-rush is anything but over. Tell me this: if not into startups, where will the money go to find possible returns? Negative interest rates, oil price can't find the bottom and stocks aren't really going anywhere either. So where will this money go?
- venomsnake 11y ago
  Vancouver, Mayfair, Manhattan, San Francisco
- marcosdumay 11y ago
  The usual way that this unfolds is that first the money disappears (into thin air, exactly where it came from earlier), and then investments dry up. Has the US experimented monetary deflation since the half of last year?
- jMyles 11y ago
  > Now that TC announced it, it's official people! Time to close shop, pack your bags and leave. I had the same thought - TC is pretty much an eye-roll-and-move-on for me at this point. However... > Tell me this: if not into startups, where will the money go to find possible returns? Negative interest rates, oil price can't find the bottom and stocks aren't really going anywhere either. So where will this money go? I think that the point here isn't that entrepreneurship is suddenly dead, but rather that > [the big players] have co-opted the same technologies startups used to attack them” and so “until there is another fundamental technology disruption, the window of opportunity for startups is limited to more traditional markets with less competitive players.” The various *AAS models may be coming to the end of their usefulness as a disruptive media, but there's plenty of "fundamental technology disruption" ahead: mesh networking, crypto-blockchains, embedded, VR, and on and on.
- eggie 11y ago
  It will go into the giants, for whom the zero interest rate regime provided exactly the right conditions to monopolize by buying up their competitors. Things will only get more extreme in this regard until we accept that change is beneficial and let the giants. The article provides no clear metric for success, just impressions based on brand success. Things are not so rosy for its darlings as it implies. A price to earnings ratio of 70+ is quite a risk, no matter how sure it seems that such a company becomes a permanent monopoly. I feel that the low (now negative!) interest rates offered by central banks are fueling a huge bubble in the valuation of these companies.
johnrob 11y ago
All of these claims are true in any market, but we ignore them during booms because fundraising is easier (and de-risks our startup involvement). The only novelty in this article is a return to honesty.
bsder 11y ago
No the social gold rush is gone. Everybody who wishes to get online is online already with something and you have displace that. And "gold rush" is a good term--"land grab" might be better. The fact that the "disruptive" companies are all now skirting or outright flouting the law shows that the easy land is taken. If it's highly profitable, it's either illegal or difficult. Easy and profitable means that, even if you're first, the horde is inbound. Those of us with real products that can't simply be done with 4 20-year-olds and a dog in Ukraine? We're chugging along, thanks. Yeah, raising money is getting really annoying, but, if we can't, we'll bootstrap. Funny that, bootstrapping is an option when people pay you money. And, do remember, the people who made all the money in the gold rush weren't the miners, it was the people who sold shovels and alcohol.
- matheweis 11y ago
  > And, do remember, the people who made all the money in the gold rush weren't the miners, it was the people who sold shovels and alcohol. Ssssh, don't give away the secret. ;) Actually, startups designed to sell to other startups will fail too when the whole thing collapses like a stack of cards... Enter Mandrill, which recently found its conversion funnel so ineffective that they suddenly shut the entire system down.
  - tdaltonc 11y ago
    Is that what happened to Mandrill? I've read a coherent explanation of what's going on there and why, but I'd love to.
    - matheweis 11y ago
      Well the official answer was "this change isn’t driven by profit–it’s about aligning our culture and core competencies with our core customers’ needs. There are many people who use Mandrill as a (free) utilitarian infrastructure service, who are not our core customers, and who deserve to use a company that’s better set up for that in the long run." https://blog.mailchimp.com/important-changes-to-mandrill/#comment-3356313 https://blog.mailchimp.com/important-changes-to-mandrill/#co...
joslin01 11y ago
It's funny because the means through which big business tech companies have "co-opted the same technologies startups used to attack them" is through buying said startups. So no, I don't think it's all over. You can't type on a keyboard and make an automobile factory that can compete with the big car companies, but in software, you pretty much can. It's a pretty chaotic market for this reason even if there are big dogs.
- mapmap 11y ago
  It's not over. Big business [anything] companies become slower with each new process and bozo explosion.
jbeales 11y ago
"If you are building something which is genuinely extraordinary, that’s always the right answer." The gold rush is never over for extraordinary companies.
tarr11 11y ago
Then[1] and Now[2] [1] http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/09/technology/09silicon.html http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/09/technology/09silicon.html [2] http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/22/technology/caution-rebuffed-unicorns-and-other-start-ups-fixate-on-rainbows.html?_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/22/technology/caution-rebuffe...
- dataker 11y ago
  I am not sure of what to infer from these. In the end, the entire macroeconomic background is different.
  - tarr11 11y ago
    Even in 2008, there was a lot of denial about the impact of the downturn on Silicon Valley. "And they assert that they are not feeling anything like the pain that followed the collapse of the dot-com bubble, which led to big job losses, an exodus of talent, a plunging commercial real estate market and a significant drop in investment in start-up companies."
    - tim333 11y ago
      Denial? Isn't their statement true that the impact of 2008 on Silicon Valley was not as bad as the dot com crash?
debreuil 11y ago
The gold rush is over because everyone who wants a PC has a PC. -2005ish
- calebgilbert 11y ago
  Well, actually that wasn't completely inaccurate. The PC has been a place of declining margins, interest, and activity...
- douche 11y ago
  The hardware hasn't really gotten significantly better in the last 10 years to get people on the upgrade treadmill again. Phones are on that curve now, but eventually they are going to top out too, and your iPhone 10 won't be that significant an upgrade from your iPhone 9.
  - mkhpalm 11y ago
    I guess it depends how you measure getting better. If you're just looking at Mhz then maybe I can understand. For me, 10 years ago I had to use a desktop to achieve much of anything. These days I have the power of my desktop except it weighs 2.65 pounds, wireless transfer speeds up to 1300 Mbit/s, has a 13.3in 3200x1800 touch screen, 256GB drive I can read and write much faster than my 3ware RAID0 setup I had back then. Its the size of an actual notebook and runs all day long without getting plugged into anything. Not to mention it only cost me $750 bucks compared to at least twice that for my old desktops. For me, it feels like things have improved fairly significantly.
    - douche 11y ago
      We're sort of out on one end of the bell-curve, really. For Joe Blow, average computer user, email and Word and YouTube works on their decade old hardware. Unless you're a gamer, there's not a lot of call to have the latest and greatest - and you can still run a lot of stuff on lower settings on old hardware. Long-lived console generations and the paucity of PC-first development have kept the minimum specs on even AAA titles pretty low. For instance, my parents are happy as clams using a G4 Macbook and a second-hand HP Pavilion laptop
strommen 11y ago
Maybe the "gold rush" is over. But there's still a heck of a lot of gold to mine. We're not even close to the point where there is no more valuable software to be written (and sold).
cft 11y ago
I agree with this article overall, especially re: Google, but I do not agree about Facebook. Most American users 13-25 do not use Facebook anymore. Facebook will either have to work out a business model that makes it profitable to frequently buy WhatsApps/Instagrams and then Snapchats/Telegrams/etc or they will end too.
- monkmartinez 11y ago
  I agree. I ask myself this question; "If <x> was to disappear tomorrow, what would happen?" The answer for Facebook and me, is nothing. If Google disappeared tomorrow, I would be hurting for many services I probably take for granted. I suspect if Facebook disappeared tomorrow, most people's lives would not materially change for the worse. Perhaps they would even change for the better.
  - ZanyProgrammer 11y ago
    I think a lot of people would be better off without Twitter.
    - cft 11y ago
      I think twtr stock symbol may not exist by 2018 actually
      - askafriend 11y ago
        If you really believe that then put money into it.
        cft 11y ago
        It's hard to short for such a long time, nearly impossible. Common shorts and puts are short term instruments.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
Periodic 11y ago
As someone who has worked at Google for a few years, I can't agree with the author's characterization of tech behemoths. While they have embraced the start-up mode of doing things for some new projects and are very free with their investing, their core business is everything you'd expect from a big business. I'm not sure it's possible to grow as large as Google, Apple or Facebook and remain agile. The product and organization gains too much inertia on its own. Even if you have a brilliant idea for improving the product there are hundreds of people you need to convince, months worth of meetings and reams of design docs required. The big companies may be innovating on the edges, but their established products are all ripe for disruption. Of course, if you look too disruptive they'll probably just buy you with their mountain of cash.
- Eupolemos 11y ago
  "Of course, if you look too disruptive they'll probably just buy you with their mountain of cash." Woe! :P
  - marssaxman 11y ago
    Woe to the people working for you, at least.
  - lubujackson 11y ago
    Unless they decline the offer, like Facebook did and Google did and almost every current big company did at some point. If you are wildly successful there WILL be that option in front of you at some point.
    - tdaltonc 11y ago
      Who offered to acquire google?
      - sogen 11y ago
        Google offered themselves to Excite, also Yahoo.
ogezi 11y ago
This is mostly true but it sounds a bit too gloomy.
- kdkooo 11y ago
  Agreed.
calebgilbert 11y ago
I've gotta say as someone who is not actively developing full time, most of the comments in here read like people in denial. It doesn't really matter what anyone's opinion is, or what any of us say though - the future will bring what it brings. That said I hedged my bets a couple years ago against the tech world's macro economic future and culture.
willholloway 11y ago
There is truth here, but remember that the age of the intelligent networked machine is just beginning. Look at the YC classes. They are very different from 2005. You can't get rich making a site like reddit today. YC is going international, with X for Y country businesses. I was talking to a friend with a startup in Indonesia. In Asia its like 1998. I think we are just at the end of the easy social/mobile revolution in the West and on the cusp of the next robotics/AI/IoT revolution. And the same process that created cheap and easy tools for software, the same process that dropped the cost of starting a SaaS business 10x will happen for robotics/ai/IoT. Its already relatively cheap and easy to prototype and fabricate things like low power bluetooth wearables. Computers have just gotten tiny, low power, wireless and cheap enough to be disposable. These devices are about to be everywhere. This is not the end of the tech startup gold rush. It's time to learn AI and hardware prototyping.
- davemel37 11y ago
  > In Asia its like 1998 I can't speak such a broad generalization, but I noticed a learning curve/ trajectory of how people perceive opportunity online and the ideas they get excited about. It seems to depend when someone truly dove into internet and used it for everyday needs. I only have anecdotal evidence to this, but I really think that most follow are following the same trajectory/learning curve about opportunity online and people are currently in place across that curve. We still have fewer than half the world online, and billions who are using the internet today the way we used it in 1994. This is my theory for why old school domainers stopped buying domain names for a premium in 2007, and yet there are still people today paying a ridiculous amount of money for domain names, and thousands more investing in them like it's still a gold rush. That gravy train seemed to dry up in the last decade, yet somehow new people enter the market and fall in love. I bet there are still penny auctions making money and daily deal sites emerging, despite those trends passing years and years ago. Those on the cutting edge need to remember that they don't reflect the bulk of the world, there is lagging opportunity for at least a decade in every space that seems to be owned.
  - vonklaus 11y ago
    I registered a domain last week directly from the registrar for $200 a year, which Is a lot for me. I know it is probably at least worth $1000 right now so I could get what I paid out of it at least. The point I am trying to make is that things adopt their real value, domains for an analogy are like real estate. SF/SV/NYC/LON are very desirable areas and it takes a long time to build out that infrastructure. It is a supply/demand mismatch. Domains were these nebulous things no one understood but if you bought one, it was worth way more than you paid for it. However, JET.com and Genius.com were quite expensive because they are pretty desirable domains, nerdy.com just went for 25K. Supply has gone up so the localpetstores.co.com domains aren'rt really worth anything. On balance, technology companies-- companies that are leveraging technology well and constantly improve as part of their business, will continue to do well. However, if you define technology as, with a computer then that sector is as descriptive as American or European. Companies in leveraging technology well: Alphabet Apple FB (oculus) Amazon Intel Companies often referred to as "technology companies" IBM Twitter LinkedIn GE If you look at the highlevel descriptors, both baskets are fairly comparable, and that is the trap!. Amazon has a globally unified distribution for digital media, technology applications, physical things, and a marketplace. Alphabet. Facebook has 1Billion users and owns much of the messaging. It is how people organize social search. They also are able to marry the phone messaging and image/moments, with the online community of the computer and soon bridge the devide to gaming and a truly addictive world of VR. Intel is the world leader in building the thing every one of those companies runs on. etc. The mismatch between value and perceived value is becoming more evident. So it is, to quote our guy Charlie D, both the best of times and rthe worst of times, some have much infront of them and some have nothing, and the pundits will insist that it is a superlative of this or that, when in reality it is sameness: think hard, be more correct and capitalize on your view of the future. edit: just to clarify, I plan on using the domain lest anyone think I am a squatter. Although, I do have a tendency to get sidetracked/change gears so I was using that as an analogy above.
andy_ppp 11y ago
I bet you he's wrong and I intend to prove it.
cornellwright 11y ago
Oh no you have to do something new to get rich. There's still plenty of money, talent, and success out there for new, good ideas. It being hard to fund the same old thing again and again is more of a feature than a bug. And the argument about the last few YC classes - it takes years to see who the stars are. I remember seeing one of the founders of Stripe speak when they were in YC. It wasn't clear they were going anywhere. What they were doing was cool, but there wasn't exactly lots of hype about it. Their success only looks obvious in hindsight.
chinathrow 11y ago
Ctrl-f, thiel, not found. Why the slug?
olivermarks 11y ago
TechCrunch, the over confident tabloid reporters of hype who only a few weeks ago were all breathless about 'unicorns', are now swinging the pendulum to the other extreme. I'm in the bay area and there is a new realism for sure, but the idea that low buck entrepreneurialism is 'over' is absurd. Most of the current wave of tech's origins are in the Web 2.0 'read/write' web that came after the dot com pump and dump funding fiasco...twitter et al grew out of the ashes of the last vc and wall street debacle. we are a similar inflection point IMO, where honest innovation will be more important than megabuck funding fests...
- jestrada 11y ago
  I think you're right. Most of what we read in media is the latest hype. Unicorns were hype and covered to no end. This weeks hype is the end times of tech. There's no middle ground in most of the news I read. Imo, the markets are tightening up forcing companies at all stages to cut their budgets and/or generate revenue. Tighter markets and harder conditions does not equate to the stagnation of tech. They are not the same. In fact, constraints lead to greater innovation.
  - tim333 11y ago
    Yeah, I think it leads to the winner being the company with the best product rather than the company that pulled in the most VC funding.
rm_-rf_slash 11y ago
It's not startups that are losing their luster, it's tech-for-tech's-sake companies. Now that we pretty much have everything we need to be connected, we have to look beyond technology and to the strongest fulcrum of society: culture. Culture companies are the future. When you can get anything anywhere, the brand matters far more than the product. Anyone can make a burger or a pizza, so why are McDonalds and Pizza Hut crushing it across the globe, especially in China? We're already seeing this with news. Traditional media companies are struggling to adapt while media outlets with personality like Vice (and Slate, and Quartz) are doing better than ever. When all the gold is mined, when all the tech is made, the only thing that's left is to sell yourself.
- manmal 11y ago
  I agree with you that brands will grow even more important. Though, all tech has not been made yet - I suspect tech is taking a short time-out right now before the next big disruptions are enabled by: * VR (cinema, anyone? could even make some 3d printing obsolete) * order-of-magnitude faster mobile internet * cheap(er) robotics * abundant energy supply thanks to fusion or <insert yet unknown source>; also, perhaps break-through battery tech? * self-driving cars (obvious, but I think that in itself will enable a lot of disruptions, like cheap grocery delivery) * cheap(er) drones (= flying cars eventually?)
  - rm_-rf_slash 11y ago
    Clarification: tech as in tech for this computational generation (i.e. Smartphones). Pretty much everything there has been done, and it won't be until new platforms that exist (like drones and VR like you mentioned) that interesting things will be made. That being said, such shifts do not often treat incumbents well. Microsoft dominated the PC market in the 90s and early 00s, but their smartphone/tablet is barely a footnote in the market.
edoceo 11y ago
I'm glad I built a profitable business before taking any investment. Seems like I'll have a little better leverage going forward.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
rdlecler1 11y ago
Consumer may be entering a trough but the industrial internet is rising. Social and enterprise SaaS are highly saturated, but these become tools for the next generation of companies. The next wave of technology is characterized by technology that senses and interacts with its environment and this will drive tremendous innovation in the industrial internet (agtech, manufacturing, construction, etc). As these technologies mature, become less expensive and more ubiquitous, we'll see startups start diffusing back into the consumer space and the cycle will repeat again.
steven2012 11y ago
I disagree with the authors premise that there can only be 2-3 behemoths. Has he not been paying attention to how kids use mobile apps these days? No one is locked in to a single ecosystem like they used to be. People use gchat, Facebook, Instagram, snapchat, whatsapp, and iMessage simultaneously, for distinct purposes. And all of their friends do too. As long as the app present value, kids these days have no problems switching back and forth between apps, meaning they can get hundreds of millions or billions of users too.
- ilaksh 11y ago
  Facebook owns Instagram and WhatsApp. The only app on your list that isn't controlled by a giant company is Snapchat.
tedmiston 11y ago
> Over in The Information, the Lessins argue that “the period where tech startups can readily disrupt larger tech companies is ending for a simple reason: Today’s tech behemoths aren’t the lumbering giants of yesteryear. They are leaner and meaner and more competitive precisely because they have co-opted the same technologies startups used to attack them” and so “until there is another fundamental technology disruption, the window of opportunity for startups is limited to more traditional markets with less competitive players.” Oh, come on. Where there are BigCos, there is inherent bureaucracy slowing them down. Creating a startup gives founder engineers the opportunity to massively create wealth in a way that BigCo simply does not incentivize.
ilaksh 11y ago
After the technopolies will come the decentralized technologies like the block chain etc. Then we will eventually get a common platform built on things like an AST format (e.g. web assembly) with a semantic module registry allowing for creating interfaces across programming languages to integrate and evolve the decentralized tech. Then we will get into competing smart contracts and localized systems that limit company size and regulate social interaction via the technology. Then we will have superintelligent hybrid systems with features we can't anticipate now.
Bjorkbat 11y ago
So, tl;dr version: The dark ages of the tech industry are finally over. Everyone, rejoice, it's a brand new day. Stop working on your social network. Stop trying to simultaneously pick the lowest hanging fruit while going after the biggest pile of cash. Go after problems that matter, rather than gizmos that might get a lot of users, or "eyeballs".
personjerry 11y ago
> Over in The Information, the Lessins argue that “the period where tech startups can readily disrupt larger tech companies is ending for a simple reason: Today’s tech behemoths aren’t the lumbering giants of yesteryear. They are leaner and meaner and more competitive precisely because they have co-opted the same technologies startups used to attack them” I disagree. I am reminded of the comparison of the prisoner and the warden, where the warden [behemoth] has his whole life to think about whereas the prisoner [startup] is only thinking of escape [way to get a leg up on the behemoth]. The difference is that many people see the behemoth with no obvious weaknesses and give up; but if they had the same weaknesses they exploited, that would be too easy wouldn't it?

236 points by miolini 11y ago

Interesting article but I think it has a critical flaw — not all startups are in the consumer space. Of course, there’s not going to be another Facebook for the next couple years at least, but another Stripe — maybe?

stephenhuey 11y ago

He said: "Today’s tech behemoths aren’t the lumbering giants of yesteryear. They are leaner and meaner and more competitive precisely because they have co-opted the same technologies startups used to attack them." But this is far from true with the huge entrenched healthcare tech companies. Many of them haven't even begun to employ the newer software technologies. I'm down the street from the largest medical center in the world and numerous doctors and nurses encourage me all the time with their complaints about the major tech players in the industry. SV has barely scratched the surface of what could be improved and I look forward to seeing many more entrepreneurs join us in this $3 trillion industry.

onli 11y ago
But he is covering that, isn't he? > Move into new fields that have not (yet) gone through this transition. Tech giants may have adapted (somewhat) to the startup threat, but there are other fields — healthcare, for instance — still trying to adjust to last decade’s technology. These will remain fertile ground for some time yet. However, we know that this is not an easy field for many reasons (regulations, importance, no mistakes allowed, …). There is a reason why this field seems that stale.
- stephenhuey 11y ago
  Yes, I think that's exactly right. Perhaps a combination of regulations while a lot of other industries have also enjoyed the spotlight more in the past decade or two. Hence healthcare hasn't attracted as much software talent. A few days ago I got into a Twitter exchange with my insurance company explaining to them why they should secure their login form, not just their registration form. Hopefully the social media rep will actually pass along the recommendation to IT as promised but even with stringent HIPAA regulations it's clear the industry hasn't been able to hire as many competent people as you'd expect for such a vital industry.
amelius 11y ago
The problem with the medical and biological fields is: you generally need expensive equipment. Also, you will need expensive certification. This is something that wasn't the case for software, so I guess this is also why this goldrush was so much different than anything else we've seen before.
- stephenhuey 11y ago
  Good point, but my medical friends' complaints tend to be about the software they have to use more than anything else. And on top of that there's a lack of software tools for a lot of things they do.
  - amelius 11y ago
    There is lots of good bioinformatics software. The problem is often that institutions don't want to pay for it, because open-source software is available with similar functionality (albeit with lacking user interfaces). In my experience, it is very difficult to make money with scientific software in general, so I'm certainly not expecting a "goldrush" here.
    - stephenhuey 11y ago
      I agree to some degree (!) but I believe a lot of the software used by medical personnel in their daily routines could use an overhaul, plus numerous other modern tools could be given to them for daily use.
      - stan_rogers 11y ago
        HIPAA (among other things) makes it Not Fun™ to be in that space. It's not that it isn't ripe—almost overripe—for an overhaul, but that the bureaucratic requirements tend to attract, well, bureaucratic types and reject people of a more "disruptive" nature. There's no particular reason why software and systems that can pass audits can't be as pleasant to use as any; it's just a matter of assembling a team of people that is creative, has both an aesthetic and ergonomic sensibility, and doesn't mind the kind of working environment that the process (and the auditors' interpretation of regulations; it doesn't matter what's actually required if nobody will certify that you've met the requirements) demands.
username223 11y ago
> But this is far from true with the huge entrenched healthcare tech companies. The current SV business model is "hoover up personal information people don't completely realize they're providing you, then use it to sell them marginally-more-effective ads." That works for "social" websites and taxi companies that aren't taxi companies, but I doubt it will fly for health care.

rco8786 11y ago

It's somewhat clear that were headed for a bit of a downturn, but this article reeks of the "everything that could be invented has been invented" fallacy.

onli 11y ago
I think it is also kind of missing that you can't easily draw parallels with the past here, as the field we are mostly talking about – software making, I think – is the first(?) modern big industry field where the means of production are in the hand of the workers. You can't easily compete with car companies, cause most of us won't have the means to even produce a prototype. But nothing is stopping someone capable enough from building his own OS, for example. And yeah, then we come to the forces of design and market share, but still – this is fairly new and distinct.
- venomsnake 11y ago
  There is lack of freely available hardware on which said os to run - a lot of companies try to be your gatekeepers. The golden days like in the 90-s everything is PC, you can run whatever you want on PC are still somewhere ahead of us with mobile and IoT.
  - cft 11y ago
    Mobile app stores are owned by two tech giants. Expect more and more stories like https://medium.com/@joshliptzin/this-is-how-google-kills-your-app-c1abad30eb25 https://medium.com/@joshliptzin/this-is-how-google-kills-you...
    - venomsnake 11y ago
      I have a feeling that these tech giants are up for Standard Oil/ Bell surprise in the medium future.

roymurdock 11y ago

I like to scan these articles for numbers before reading. If I don't see any, I exit out. If you're going to talk about financial/economic phenomena please at least conduct a modicum of quantitative research and give us some concrete data to discuss, not just opinions in a void.

diminish 11y ago
There's maybe one small number observation, I m not sure if it's correct as there maybe high growth YC companies which will soon pass those 3/4. "In 2011, Y Combinator’s poster-child alumni were — already — AirBNB, Dropbox, and Stripe. Can you think of any Y Combinator companies from the last five years as well-positioned today as those Big Three were then? Maybe Instacart, if their unit economics work. That’s it."
- nostrademons 11y ago
  That observation has a huge amount of hindsight bias. AirBnB was founded in 2006, DropBox was founded in 2007, and Stripe was founded in 2010. What did the ideal startup look like in 2007? It was one of: "A social network for X, like Facebook" "A social news site for X, like Digg" "A way to massively improve your e-mail experience, like GMail" In other words, people always chase the massive startup that got popular about 3 years previously. This article is pretty much on-time if it's holding up AirBNB, DropBox, and Stripe - those are the massive startups that got popular about 3-4 years ago. But in 2007, these were most decidedly not the hot industries to go into. Hotels were a done deal: Hilton, Marriott, Holiday Inn, and others chains owned it, and who would think a tiny team could take them on? Filesharing was an incredibly crowded market with 20-30 players, and in any case, if it got popular Google was going to crush them with Google Drive. PayPal owned payments; everybody knew it was a regulated industry with strong network effects, so why bother to compete?
monkmartinez 11y ago
You don't need hard numbers to philosophize about the tech industry, nor economic phenomena in general. Read blogs like ibankcoin/flyblog or zerohedge and you will find financial/economic articles written with data that is ancillary. That is, the hard data is not immediately required to make the point.

GreaterFool 11y ago

Now that TC announced it, it's official people! Time to close shop, pack your bags and leave. Startup gold-rush is anything but over. Tell me this: if not into startups, where will the money go to find possible returns? Negative interest rates, oil price can't find the bottom and stocks aren't really going anywhere either. So where will this money go?

venomsnake 11y ago
Vancouver, Mayfair, Manhattan, San Francisco
marcosdumay 11y ago
The usual way that this unfolds is that first the money disappears (into thin air, exactly where it came from earlier), and then investments dry up. Has the US experimented monetary deflation since the half of last year?
jMyles 11y ago
> Now that TC announced it, it's official people! Time to close shop, pack your bags and leave. I had the same thought - TC is pretty much an eye-roll-and-move-on for me at this point. However... > Tell me this: if not into startups, where will the money go to find possible returns? Negative interest rates, oil price can't find the bottom and stocks aren't really going anywhere either. So where will this money go? I think that the point here isn't that entrepreneurship is suddenly dead, but rather that > [the big players] have co-opted the same technologies startups used to attack them” and so “until there is another fundamental technology disruption, the window of opportunity for startups is limited to more traditional markets with less competitive players.” The various *AAS models may be coming to the end of their usefulness as a disruptive media, but there's plenty of "fundamental technology disruption" ahead: mesh networking, crypto-blockchains, embedded, VR, and on and on.
eggie 11y ago
It will go into the giants, for whom the zero interest rate regime provided exactly the right conditions to monopolize by buying up their competitors. Things will only get more extreme in this regard until we accept that change is beneficial and let the giants. The article provides no clear metric for success, just impressions based on brand success. Things are not so rosy for its darlings as it implies. A price to earnings ratio of 70+ is quite a risk, no matter how sure it seems that such a company becomes a permanent monopoly. I feel that the low (now negative!) interest rates offered by central banks are fueling a huge bubble in the valuation of these companies.

johnrob 11y ago

All of these claims are true in any market, but we ignore them during booms because fundraising is easier (and de-risks our startup involvement). The only novelty in this article is a return to honesty.

bsder 11y ago

No the social gold rush is gone. Everybody who wishes to get online is online already with something and you have displace that. And "gold rush" is a good term--"land grab" might be better. The fact that the "disruptive" companies are all now skirting or outright flouting the law shows that the easy land is taken. If it's highly profitable, it's either illegal or difficult. Easy and profitable means that, even if you're first, the horde is inbound. Those of us with real products that can't simply be done with 4 20-year-olds and a dog in Ukraine? We're chugging along, thanks. Yeah, raising money is getting really annoying, but, if we can't, we'll bootstrap. Funny that, bootstrapping is an option when people pay you money. And, do remember, the people who made all the money in the gold rush weren't the miners, it was the people who sold shovels and alcohol.

matheweis 11y ago
> And, do remember, the people who made all the money in the gold rush weren't the miners, it was the people who sold shovels and alcohol. Ssssh, don't give away the secret. ;) Actually, startups designed to sell to other startups will fail too when the whole thing collapses like a stack of cards... Enter Mandrill, which recently found its conversion funnel so ineffective that they suddenly shut the entire system down.
- tdaltonc 11y ago
  Is that what happened to Mandrill? I've read a coherent explanation of what's going on there and why, but I'd love to.
  - matheweis 11y ago
    Well the official answer was "this change isn’t driven by profit–it’s about aligning our culture and core competencies with our core customers’ needs. There are many people who use Mandrill as a (free) utilitarian infrastructure service, who are not our core customers, and who deserve to use a company that’s better set up for that in the long run." https://blog.mailchimp.com/important-changes-to-mandrill/#comment-3356313 https://blog.mailchimp.com/important-changes-to-mandrill/#co...

joslin01 11y ago

It's funny because the means through which big business tech companies have "co-opted the same technologies startups used to attack them" is through buying said startups. So no, I don't think it's all over. You can't type on a keyboard and make an automobile factory that can compete with the big car companies, but in software, you pretty much can. It's a pretty chaotic market for this reason even if there are big dogs.

mapmap 11y ago
It's not over. Big business [anything] companies become slower with each new process and bozo explosion.

jbeales 11y ago

"If you are building something which is genuinely extraordinary, that’s always the right answer." The gold rush is never over for extraordinary companies.

tarr11 11y ago

Then[1] and Now[2] [1] http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/09/technology/09silicon.html http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/09/technology/09silicon.html [2] http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/22/technology/caution-rebuffed-unicorns-and-other-start-ups-fixate-on-rainbows.html?_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/22/technology/caution-rebuffe...

dataker 11y ago
I am not sure of what to infer from these. In the end, the entire macroeconomic background is different.
- tarr11 11y ago
  Even in 2008, there was a lot of denial about the impact of the downturn on Silicon Valley. "And they assert that they are not feeling anything like the pain that followed the collapse of the dot-com bubble, which led to big job losses, an exodus of talent, a plunging commercial real estate market and a significant drop in investment in start-up companies."
  - tim333 11y ago
    Denial? Isn't their statement true that the impact of 2008 on Silicon Valley was not as bad as the dot com crash?

debreuil 11y ago

The gold rush is over because everyone who wants a PC has a PC. -2005ish

calebgilbert 11y ago
Well, actually that wasn't completely inaccurate. The PC has been a place of declining margins, interest, and activity...
douche 11y ago
The hardware hasn't really gotten significantly better in the last 10 years to get people on the upgrade treadmill again. Phones are on that curve now, but eventually they are going to top out too, and your iPhone 10 won't be that significant an upgrade from your iPhone 9.
- mkhpalm 11y ago
  I guess it depends how you measure getting better. If you're just looking at Mhz then maybe I can understand. For me, 10 years ago I had to use a desktop to achieve much of anything. These days I have the power of my desktop except it weighs 2.65 pounds, wireless transfer speeds up to 1300 Mbit/s, has a 13.3in 3200x1800 touch screen, 256GB drive I can read and write much faster than my 3ware RAID0 setup I had back then. Its the size of an actual notebook and runs all day long without getting plugged into anything. Not to mention it only cost me $750 bucks compared to at least twice that for my old desktops. For me, it feels like things have improved fairly significantly.
  - douche 11y ago
    We're sort of out on one end of the bell-curve, really. For Joe Blow, average computer user, email and Word and YouTube works on their decade old hardware. Unless you're a gamer, there's not a lot of call to have the latest and greatest - and you can still run a lot of stuff on lower settings on old hardware. Long-lived console generations and the paucity of PC-first development have kept the minimum specs on even AAA titles pretty low. For instance, my parents are happy as clams using a G4 Macbook and a second-hand HP Pavilion laptop

strommen 11y ago

Maybe the "gold rush" is over. But there's still a heck of a lot of gold to mine. We're not even close to the point where there is no more valuable software to be written (and sold).

cft 11y ago

I agree with this article overall, especially re: Google, but I do not agree about Facebook. Most American users 13-25 do not use Facebook anymore. Facebook will either have to work out a business model that makes it profitable to frequently buy WhatsApps/Instagrams and then Snapchats/Telegrams/etc or they will end too.

monkmartinez 11y ago
I agree. I ask myself this question; "If <x> was to disappear tomorrow, what would happen?" The answer for Facebook and me, is nothing. If Google disappeared tomorrow, I would be hurting for many services I probably take for granted. I suspect if Facebook disappeared tomorrow, most people's lives would not materially change for the worse. Perhaps they would even change for the better.
- ZanyProgrammer 11y ago
  I think a lot of people would be better off without Twitter.
  - cft 11y ago
    I think twtr stock symbol may not exist by 2018 actually
    - askafriend 11y ago
      If you really believe that then put money into it.
      - cft 11y ago
        It's hard to short for such a long time, nearly impossible. Common shorts and puts are short term instruments.

deleted 11y ago

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Periodic 11y ago

As someone who has worked at Google for a few years, I can't agree with the author's characterization of tech behemoths. While they have embraced the start-up mode of doing things for some new projects and are very free with their investing, their core business is everything you'd expect from a big business. I'm not sure it's possible to grow as large as Google, Apple or Facebook and remain agile. The product and organization gains too much inertia on its own. Even if you have a brilliant idea for improving the product there are hundreds of people you need to convince, months worth of meetings and reams of design docs required. The big companies may be innovating on the edges, but their established products are all ripe for disruption. Of course, if you look too disruptive they'll probably just buy you with their mountain of cash.

Eupolemos 11y ago
"Of course, if you look too disruptive they'll probably just buy you with their mountain of cash." Woe! :P
- marssaxman 11y ago
  Woe to the people working for you, at least.
- lubujackson 11y ago
  Unless they decline the offer, like Facebook did and Google did and almost every current big company did at some point. If you are wildly successful there WILL be that option in front of you at some point.
  - tdaltonc 11y ago
    Who offered to acquire google?
    - sogen 11y ago
      Google offered themselves to Excite, also Yahoo.

ogezi 11y ago

This is mostly true but it sounds a bit too gloomy.

kdkooo 11y ago
Agreed.

calebgilbert 11y ago

I've gotta say as someone who is not actively developing full time, most of the comments in here read like people in denial. It doesn't really matter what anyone's opinion is, or what any of us say though - the future will bring what it brings. That said I hedged my bets a couple years ago against the tech world's macro economic future and culture.

willholloway 11y ago

There is truth here, but remember that the age of the intelligent networked machine is just beginning. Look at the YC classes. They are very different from 2005. You can't get rich making a site like reddit today. YC is going international, with X for Y country businesses. I was talking to a friend with a startup in Indonesia. In Asia its like 1998. I think we are just at the end of the easy social/mobile revolution in the West and on the cusp of the next robotics/AI/IoT revolution. And the same process that created cheap and easy tools for software, the same process that dropped the cost of starting a SaaS business 10x will happen for robotics/ai/IoT. Its already relatively cheap and easy to prototype and fabricate things like low power bluetooth wearables. Computers have just gotten tiny, low power, wireless and cheap enough to be disposable. These devices are about to be everywhere. This is not the end of the tech startup gold rush. It's time to learn AI and hardware prototyping.

davemel37 11y ago
> In Asia its like 1998 I can't speak such a broad generalization, but I noticed a learning curve/ trajectory of how people perceive opportunity online and the ideas they get excited about. It seems to depend when someone truly dove into internet and used it for everyday needs. I only have anecdotal evidence to this, but I really think that most follow are following the same trajectory/learning curve about opportunity online and people are currently in place across that curve. We still have fewer than half the world online, and billions who are using the internet today the way we used it in 1994. This is my theory for why old school domainers stopped buying domain names for a premium in 2007, and yet there are still people today paying a ridiculous amount of money for domain names, and thousands more investing in them like it's still a gold rush. That gravy train seemed to dry up in the last decade, yet somehow new people enter the market and fall in love. I bet there are still penny auctions making money and daily deal sites emerging, despite those trends passing years and years ago. Those on the cutting edge need to remember that they don't reflect the bulk of the world, there is lagging opportunity for at least a decade in every space that seems to be owned.
- vonklaus 11y ago
  I registered a domain last week directly from the registrar for $200 a year, which Is a lot for me. I know it is probably at least worth $1000 right now so I could get what I paid out of it at least. The point I am trying to make is that things adopt their real value, domains for an analogy are like real estate. SF/SV/NYC/LON are very desirable areas and it takes a long time to build out that infrastructure. It is a supply/demand mismatch. Domains were these nebulous things no one understood but if you bought one, it was worth way more than you paid for it. However, JET.com and Genius.com were quite expensive because they are pretty desirable domains, nerdy.com just went for 25K. Supply has gone up so the localpetstores.co.com domains aren'rt really worth anything. On balance, technology companies-- companies that are leveraging technology well and constantly improve as part of their business, will continue to do well. However, if you define technology as, with a computer then that sector is as descriptive as American or European. Companies in leveraging technology well: Alphabet Apple FB (oculus) Amazon Intel Companies often referred to as "technology companies" IBM Twitter LinkedIn GE If you look at the highlevel descriptors, both baskets are fairly comparable, and that is the trap!. Amazon has a globally unified distribution for digital media, technology applications, physical things, and a marketplace. Alphabet. Facebook has 1Billion users and owns much of the messaging. It is how people organize social search. They also are able to marry the phone messaging and image/moments, with the online community of the computer and soon bridge the devide to gaming and a truly addictive world of VR. Intel is the world leader in building the thing every one of those companies runs on. etc. The mismatch between value and perceived value is becoming more evident. So it is, to quote our guy Charlie D, both the best of times and rthe worst of times, some have much infront of them and some have nothing, and the pundits will insist that it is a superlative of this or that, when in reality it is sameness: think hard, be more correct and capitalize on your view of the future. edit: just to clarify, I plan on using the domain lest anyone think I am a squatter. Although, I do have a tendency to get sidetracked/change gears so I was using that as an analogy above.

andy_ppp 11y ago

I bet you he's wrong and I intend to prove it.

cornellwright 11y ago

Oh no you have to do something new to get rich. There's still plenty of money, talent, and success out there for new, good ideas. It being hard to fund the same old thing again and again is more of a feature than a bug. And the argument about the last few YC classes - it takes years to see who the stars are. I remember seeing one of the founders of Stripe speak when they were in YC. It wasn't clear they were going anywhere. What they were doing was cool, but there wasn't exactly lots of hype about it. Their success only looks obvious in hindsight.

chinathrow 11y ago

Ctrl-f, thiel, not found. Why the slug?

olivermarks 11y ago

TechCrunch, the over confident tabloid reporters of hype who only a few weeks ago were all breathless about 'unicorns', are now swinging the pendulum to the other extreme. I'm in the bay area and there is a new realism for sure, but the idea that low buck entrepreneurialism is 'over' is absurd. Most of the current wave of tech's origins are in the Web 2.0 'read/write' web that came after the dot com pump and dump funding fiasco...twitter et al grew out of the ashes of the last vc and wall street debacle. we are a similar inflection point IMO, where honest innovation will be more important than megabuck funding fests...

jestrada 11y ago
I think you're right. Most of what we read in media is the latest hype. Unicorns were hype and covered to no end. This weeks hype is the end times of tech. There's no middle ground in most of the news I read. Imo, the markets are tightening up forcing companies at all stages to cut their budgets and/or generate revenue. Tighter markets and harder conditions does not equate to the stagnation of tech. They are not the same. In fact, constraints lead to greater innovation.
- tim333 11y ago
  Yeah, I think it leads to the winner being the company with the best product rather than the company that pulled in the most VC funding.

rm_-rf_slash 11y ago

It's not startups that are losing their luster, it's tech-for-tech's-sake companies. Now that we pretty much have everything we need to be connected, we have to look beyond technology and to the strongest fulcrum of society: culture. Culture companies are the future. When you can get anything anywhere, the brand matters far more than the product. Anyone can make a burger or a pizza, so why are McDonalds and Pizza Hut crushing it across the globe, especially in China? We're already seeing this with news. Traditional media companies are struggling to adapt while media outlets with personality like Vice (and Slate, and Quartz) are doing better than ever. When all the gold is mined, when all the tech is made, the only thing that's left is to sell yourself.

manmal 11y ago
I agree with you that brands will grow even more important. Though, all tech has not been made yet - I suspect tech is taking a short time-out right now before the next big disruptions are enabled by: * VR (cinema, anyone? could even make some 3d printing obsolete) * order-of-magnitude faster mobile internet * cheap(er) robotics * abundant energy supply thanks to fusion or <insert yet unknown source>; also, perhaps break-through battery tech? * self-driving cars (obvious, but I think that in itself will enable a lot of disruptions, like cheap grocery delivery) * cheap(er) drones (= flying cars eventually?)
- rm_-rf_slash 11y ago
  Clarification: tech as in tech for this computational generation (i.e. Smartphones). Pretty much everything there has been done, and it won't be until new platforms that exist (like drones and VR like you mentioned) that interesting things will be made. That being said, such shifts do not often treat incumbents well. Microsoft dominated the PC market in the 90s and early 00s, but their smartphone/tablet is barely a footnote in the market.

edoceo 11y ago

I'm glad I built a profitable business before taking any investment. Seems like I'll have a little better leverage going forward.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

rdlecler1 11y ago

Consumer may be entering a trough but the industrial internet is rising. Social and enterprise SaaS are highly saturated, but these become tools for the next generation of companies. The next wave of technology is characterized by technology that senses and interacts with its environment and this will drive tremendous innovation in the industrial internet (agtech, manufacturing, construction, etc). As these technologies mature, become less expensive and more ubiquitous, we'll see startups start diffusing back into the consumer space and the cycle will repeat again.

steven2012 11y ago

I disagree with the authors premise that there can only be 2-3 behemoths. Has he not been paying attention to how kids use mobile apps these days? No one is locked in to a single ecosystem like they used to be. People use gchat, Facebook, Instagram, snapchat, whatsapp, and iMessage simultaneously, for distinct purposes. And all of their friends do too. As long as the app present value, kids these days have no problems switching back and forth between apps, meaning they can get hundreds of millions or billions of users too.

ilaksh 11y ago
Facebook owns Instagram and WhatsApp. The only app on your list that isn't controlled by a giant company is Snapchat.

tedmiston 11y ago

> Over in The Information, the Lessins argue that “the period where tech startups can readily disrupt larger tech companies is ending for a simple reason: Today’s tech behemoths aren’t the lumbering giants of yesteryear. They are leaner and meaner and more competitive precisely because they have co-opted the same technologies startups used to attack them” and so “until there is another fundamental technology disruption, the window of opportunity for startups is limited to more traditional markets with less competitive players.” Oh, come on. Where there are BigCos, there is inherent bureaucracy slowing them down. Creating a startup gives founder engineers the opportunity to massively create wealth in a way that BigCo simply does not incentivize.

ilaksh 11y ago

After the technopolies will come the decentralized technologies like the block chain etc. Then we will eventually get a common platform built on things like an AST format (e.g. web assembly) with a semantic module registry allowing for creating interfaces across programming languages to integrate and evolve the decentralized tech. Then we will get into competing smart contracts and localized systems that limit company size and regulate social interaction via the technology. Then we will have superintelligent hybrid systems with features we can't anticipate now.

Bjorkbat 11y ago

So, tl;dr version: The dark ages of the tech industry are finally over. Everyone, rejoice, it's a brand new day. Stop working on your social network. Stop trying to simultaneously pick the lowest hanging fruit while going after the biggest pile of cash. Go after problems that matter, rather than gizmos that might get a lot of users, or "eyeballs".

personjerry 11y ago

> Over in The Information, the Lessins argue that “the period where tech startups can readily disrupt larger tech companies is ending for a simple reason: Today’s tech behemoths aren’t the lumbering giants of yesteryear. They are leaner and meaner and more competitive precisely because they have co-opted the same technologies startups used to attack them” I disagree. I am reminded of the comparison of the prisoner and the warden, where the warden [behemoth] has his whole life to think about whereas the prisoner [startup] is only thinking of escape [way to get a leg up on the behemoth]. The difference is that many people see the behemoth with no obvious weaknesses and give up; but if they had the same weaknesses they exploited, that would be too easy wouldn't it?