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This is true of a lot of Silicon Valley startups I've seen lately as well. They make a big show of how they can do things better, faster, more efficiently, and

This is true of a lot of Silicon Valley startups I've seen lately as well. They make a big show of how they can do things better, faster, more efficiently, and cheaper than existing incumbents, until the government comes in and says "Did you buy your insurance? Are you paying your employees (or treating them as employees in the first place)? Are you providing benefits? Are you certified?" Then suddenly, the SV companies say "hey, this is BS, we can't be competitive like this! If we have to do all these things then we can't be cheaper than the incumbents!" Joel Spolsky said it pretty well[0]: There’s a subtle reason that programmers always want to throw away the code and start over. The reason is that they think the old code is a mess. And here is the interesting observation: they are probably wrong. The reason that they think the old code is a mess is because of a cardinal, fundamental law of programming: it’s harder to read code than to write it. Now we've gotten to the point where people are taking entire buildings and making them short-term rentals (they're called Hotels), ride-sharing services are talking about multi-person trips to and from designated locations (it's called a bus or shuttle), and so on. Everyone wants to be Stripe or Square and reinvent and simplify things that people hate, but no one stops to think if this is an area that's complicated on purpose or if people just think they're smarter than everyone else who came before them. [0] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-never-do-part-i/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...

hectorr1 9y ago
Airbnb and Uber going into hotels and public transportation respectively are examples of successful companies diversifying their income. The point is that their core innovation has provided the capital and human resources to tackle higher level challenges. It had to be a substantial improvement on the original problem to get that kind of traction in the first place. The hotel experience needed improvement. So did the taxi experience. Incumbents were preventing competition through monopoly and regulatory capture. They won, and in doing so they lost their edge. Some of the regulations Airbnb and Uber skirted have good reasons. Others had good reasons, but new ideas and technologies made these reasons less important. And some were just bad and anti-competitive. The same is true in financial services. 'You shouldn't do that because it is illegal' argument is actually not an argument, it's an appeal to authority. Opening the Overton window to consider why we have the regulations we do, how we got there, and what makes sense moving forward is key to progress. And it often takes unreasonable people (eg: Kalanick) to make that happen.
- jstandard 9y ago
  It seems like you're responding to a different argument u/danudey isn't making. Their point seems more about people getting too caught up in "disruption for disruption's sake". To a certain degree, watching the evolution of cryptocurrency is like watching techies reinvent banking, one scam or lost transaction at a time. Don't get me wrong, I absolutely see value of many blockchain-related innovations. Distributed ledgers. Decentralized transactions. Smart contracts for IoT. But, I've also met many folks who are more enamored with the concept of "disrupting banking" without spending much time understanding the what and why of the disruption.

hectorr1 9y ago

Airbnb and Uber going into hotels and public transportation respectively are examples of successful companies diversifying their income. The point is that their core innovation has provided the capital and human resources to tackle higher level challenges. It had to be a substantial improvement on the original problem to get that kind of traction in the first place. The hotel experience needed improvement. So did the taxi experience. Incumbents were preventing competition through monopoly and regulatory capture. They won, and in doing so they lost their edge. Some of the regulations Airbnb and Uber skirted have good reasons. Others had good reasons, but new ideas and technologies made these reasons less important. And some were just bad and anti-competitive. The same is true in financial services. 'You shouldn't do that because it is illegal' argument is actually not an argument, it's an appeal to authority. Opening the Overton window to consider why we have the regulations we do, how we got there, and what makes sense moving forward is key to progress. And it often takes unreasonable people (eg: Kalanick) to make that happen.

jstandard 9y ago
It seems like you're responding to a different argument u/danudey isn't making. Their point seems more about people getting too caught up in "disruption for disruption's sake". To a certain degree, watching the evolution of cryptocurrency is like watching techies reinvent banking, one scam or lost transaction at a time. Don't get me wrong, I absolutely see value of many blockchain-related innovations. Distributed ledgers. Decentralized transactions. Smart contracts for IoT. But, I've also met many folks who are more enamored with the concept of "disrupting banking" without spending much time understanding the what and why of the disruption.