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Two things. One positive and one negative. Positive. The author understands the gist of what's going on. Places like YC focus on Minimum Viable Product and doi

Two things. One positive and one negative. Positive. The author understands the gist of what's going on. Places like YC focus on Minimum Viable Product and doing just one thing that people want. These are great and wise strategies for both investors and entrepreneurs, but there's also another term for it that's not as flattering: bottom-feeding. Going after the little bits of value here and there, not being a hunter, existing by providing the least amount of value possible. There are huge bottom-feeders! Facebook is one of them. But it's little tidbit work. Stuff like reminding me when I like to scratch my nose, or a service for recommending dog groomers. Negative. The problem here is that the author seems to think he knows where technology is headed, and that's always a foolish bet. His view is that we should be making complex things and solving hard problems. While I agree that hard problems need to be solved, I don't think you can decide ahead of time which problems are going to be the ones that gain traction. This is like the government or VCs "deciding" that one area of effort is going to give more results than another. Nobody knows. This is the risk of startups. It's why the smart move is to do the little stuff. More to the point, there are two kinds of innovation (to steal from Kuhn). There is "normal" innovation, where people take existing tech and put it together in new ways to make trivially more usable things than existed before. Then there is paradigm-changing innovation, where completely new things appear. By far, normal innovation is the norm. Probably 99.9% of all innovation is normal. Maybe more. Systems change from the ground-up, not from the top-down. Eventually a bunch of little things reach critical mass and a paradigm-changing innovation occurs. But hell, most of the time you can't force the little innovations to work, much less the big ones. I love the contrarian tone, but it's just not a realistic article.

brendonjason 16y ago
Regardless of whether its wise to bet on where technology is heading, the point I got from this was that more thought should be going in to what technologies should be focused on as a matter of principle, regardless of "what sells to the masses at the moment." We've seen where demand (Wall Street) driven acute focus on the short term has brought many companies today, ie, over-reliance on what was once popular but quickly hit the dust the second something slightly more trendy came along. Of course, making so many rapid platform adjustments drives people into borrowing ... from Wall Street. But companies were told over and over by a barage of management consulting gurus that things were so fast and blurry, they couldn't afford to not keep borrowing more and more money to pump out more and more crap to keep up with the almost instantly changing trends. On the other hand, look at apple - just over a decade ago they were considering bankruptcy, and instead of giving in to the urge to "do what would sell at the moment" they decided to ignore "expert advice" and instead invest in a simple but well-thought out development plan (iPad seems new but is really just a long-held fantasy of Newton II) and chart their own long-term course of doing what they wanted at a time when it wasn't certain there was going to be a long term for them. Now of course everybody praises them for their determination to do what they wanted rather than catering to the fickle whims of the market. Now look where they are. They define the market. They don't make what you want - they tell you what you want and make sure you get the hint that they know what you want even better than you do. And more and more people seem to agree. I think that's what this article highlights - what will the world be like 5 years from now (more of the same) if facebook keeps getting more and more money to hire more talented people so they can figure out clever new ways to help people keep each other up to date on useless banalities that do nothing to advance anything other than their intimate familiarity with useless and ephemeral trivia about their sometimes friends but mostly loose associates. The world is facing more and more problems ... exponential inter-relationships between these problems will at some point overwhelm us ... and smart people are figuring out how to steal money from grandparents on wall street or how to better allow you to tell everyone you ever bumped into in life that you got a new refridgerator. Path dependency is very real and we may come to a point where we can't solve the important problems anymore even if we want to or need to.
jacquesm 16y ago
That read like two negatives to me.
- DanielBMarkham 16y ago
  I agree with the author's critique of the trivial nature of most start-ups. Lots of guys are simply trying to make widgets more shiny, and that's a shame because they could do so much more. I disagree that there is something we can do about it. It's the natural state of affairs. (My rewrites always take 400-word explanations and turn them into 2 sentences. Writing is much like code golf. Sigh)
  - zoomzoom 16y ago
    I agree that things seem more shiny than innovative. Maybe "easy" problems are a natural way of increasing our general software competency across the general population. Before we can get to the big-problem innovation in things like AI and nano tech we have some steps to take. That probably explains why it a seems so natural.
by 16y ago
Your description of Minimum Viable Product appears to classify the MVP as the end-point of the process. My thinking is that the MVP is the starting point of an iterative development process. Its value is that it allows users to participate in the product design, and from this feedback you can modify and extend the initial product with the things they actually want rather than the things you imagine they want. The MVP is the first question you ask your users "Is this what you want?". Users find it very difficult to engage with design documents or specifications, but put a product in front of them and they will understand you and tell you what they want different.
mlinsey 16y ago
What constitutes a minimum viable product depends on the space. You still have a MVP even if you are in an ambitious space and building something with deep technology. Clustrix is a YC company and I assume they don't qualify as a bottom-feeder.
Dn_Ab 16y ago
tl;dr - some little thing that the bottom feeder made for his dog nose scratcher recommender tool may prove useful in attacking cancer. ---------------------------- Kuhn's paradigm shifts are an idealization. An extreme. Technology doesn't advance in sudden priorly unimaginable leaps of innovations by giants. See, I do not agree with your delineation nor your presentation but I do agree with your core premise. Because we cannot know what will be useful (your negative) we cannot say whether the bottom feeders or those pushing against the hard problems will have the biggest impacts. Likely some from both. The thing is "paradigm changing shifts" are of the same kind as "normal innovation". They are not grander or more special. Allow me to belabour. Most paradigm shifts are the synthesis of lots of little disparate ideas that someone was crafty enough to put in a creative combination. Anyone with sufficient imagination (super intelligence not necessary), the requisite need and correct knowledge could have taken the necessary steps. Quantum Mechanics, Newton's principia, Calculus, special relativity, steam engine and most inventions are like this. There are exceptions (i can think of Cantor's set theory and Grassman's algebra from maths) but they number very few. This is why it is not so surprising that we find often, all of a sudden the same inventions/discoveries appear around the same time by different people - some further along than others (but not necessarily the ones which gain recognition) but all containing pieces of what would come to be studied as a whole by latter generations. In order that these paradigm shifts be made all the requisite concepts needed to have been unlocked. Once so, those skilled at taking in and creating broad vistas of theory shine brightest. As well often times, things are invented that the inventor did not think much of and were just tools on his or her path to something they felt was larger. Of particular relevance to this crowd, Church was trying to provide a foundation for maths and the lambda calculus was just a tool. Or consider that scholars thinking about grain yield for various patches of farm land would eventually lead the way to a theory of determinants and eventually matrices. Most paradigm shifts like zero seem so obvious in hindsight, we struggle to imagine that people took centuries to nail it. In the same way these "big data" and facebook are pushing the state of the art in mining data, maintaining and querying large data stores and pushing computational intelligence, applying non-trivial techniques to solve very menial tasks - like reminding you to go to some club or providing stupid recommendations.. Various companies contributing bits and pieces some combination of which may prove to be vital tools in unravelling things like genetic disorders or cancer later on. Who would have thought that gambling in games of chance would later lead to the mathematics of probability and later to statistical inference and then machine learning. The way I see it, what we need is a change in education. And I don't mean all this university is useless or public schools are failing chatter. Those are another story. What I mean is, as the problems become harder and the people working on them number larger, the silos of knowledge will inevitably become taller and deeper. Unless some framework is developed where it is easy to describe and transfer the core and relations of different theories; the ability to take a step back, look at the pieces and come up with a paradigm shifting generalization will become ever more difficult. With progress slowing as we continually reinvent the same broken pieces over and over again in our little corners of expertise.

brendonjason 16y ago

Regardless of whether its wise to bet on where technology is heading, the point I got from this was that more thought should be going in to what technologies should be focused on as a matter of principle, regardless of "what sells to the masses at the moment." We've seen where demand (Wall Street) driven acute focus on the short term has brought many companies today, ie, over-reliance on what was once popular but quickly hit the dust the second something slightly more trendy came along. Of course, making so many rapid platform adjustments drives people into borrowing ... from Wall Street. But companies were told over and over by a barage of management consulting gurus that things were so fast and blurry, they couldn't afford to not keep borrowing more and more money to pump out more and more crap to keep up with the almost instantly changing trends. On the other hand, look at apple - just over a decade ago they were considering bankruptcy, and instead of giving in to the urge to "do what would sell at the moment" they decided to ignore "expert advice" and instead invest in a simple but well-thought out development plan (iPad seems new but is really just a long-held fantasy of Newton II) and chart their own long-term course of doing what they wanted at a time when it wasn't certain there was going to be a long term for them. Now of course everybody praises them for their determination to do what they wanted rather than catering to the fickle whims of the market. Now look where they are. They define the market. They don't make what you want - they tell you what you want and make sure you get the hint that they know what you want even better than you do. And more and more people seem to agree. I think that's what this article highlights - what will the world be like 5 years from now (more of the same) if facebook keeps getting more and more money to hire more talented people so they can figure out clever new ways to help people keep each other up to date on useless banalities that do nothing to advance anything other than their intimate familiarity with useless and ephemeral trivia about their sometimes friends but mostly loose associates. The world is facing more and more problems ... exponential inter-relationships between these problems will at some point overwhelm us ... and smart people are figuring out how to steal money from grandparents on wall street or how to better allow you to tell everyone you ever bumped into in life that you got a new refridgerator. Path dependency is very real and we may come to a point where we can't solve the important problems anymore even if we want to or need to.

jacquesm 16y ago

That read like two negatives to me.

DanielBMarkham 16y ago
I agree with the author's critique of the trivial nature of most start-ups. Lots of guys are simply trying to make widgets more shiny, and that's a shame because they could do so much more. I disagree that there is something we can do about it. It's the natural state of affairs. (My rewrites always take 400-word explanations and turn them into 2 sentences. Writing is much like code golf. Sigh)
- zoomzoom 16y ago
  I agree that things seem more shiny than innovative. Maybe "easy" problems are a natural way of increasing our general software competency across the general population. Before we can get to the big-problem innovation in things like AI and nano tech we have some steps to take. That probably explains why it a seems so natural.

by 16y ago

Your description of Minimum Viable Product appears to classify the MVP as the end-point of the process. My thinking is that the MVP is the starting point of an iterative development process. Its value is that it allows users to participate in the product design, and from this feedback you can modify and extend the initial product with the things they actually want rather than the things you imagine they want. The MVP is the first question you ask your users "Is this what you want?". Users find it very difficult to engage with design documents or specifications, but put a product in front of them and they will understand you and tell you what they want different.

mlinsey 16y ago

What constitutes a minimum viable product depends on the space. You still have a MVP even if you are in an ambitious space and building something with deep technology. Clustrix is a YC company and I assume they don't qualify as a bottom-feeder.

Dn_Ab 16y ago

tl;dr - some little thing that the bottom feeder made for his dog nose scratcher recommender tool may prove useful in attacking cancer. ---------------------------- Kuhn's paradigm shifts are an idealization. An extreme. Technology doesn't advance in sudden priorly unimaginable leaps of innovations by giants. See, I do not agree with your delineation nor your presentation but I do agree with your core premise. Because we cannot know what will be useful (your negative) we cannot say whether the bottom feeders or those pushing against the hard problems will have the biggest impacts. Likely some from both. The thing is "paradigm changing shifts" are of the same kind as "normal innovation". They are not grander or more special. Allow me to belabour. Most paradigm shifts are the synthesis of lots of little disparate ideas that someone was crafty enough to put in a creative combination. Anyone with sufficient imagination (super intelligence not necessary), the requisite need and correct knowledge could have taken the necessary steps. Quantum Mechanics, Newton's principia, Calculus, special relativity, steam engine and most inventions are like this. There are exceptions (i can think of Cantor's set theory and Grassman's algebra from maths) but they number very few. This is why it is not so surprising that we find often, all of a sudden the same inventions/discoveries appear around the same time by different people - some further along than others (but not necessarily the ones which gain recognition) but all containing pieces of what would come to be studied as a whole by latter generations. In order that these paradigm shifts be made all the requisite concepts needed to have been unlocked. Once so, those skilled at taking in and creating broad vistas of theory shine brightest. As well often times, things are invented that the inventor did not think much of and were just tools on his or her path to something they felt was larger. Of particular relevance to this crowd, Church was trying to provide a foundation for maths and the lambda calculus was just a tool. Or consider that scholars thinking about grain yield for various patches of farm land would eventually lead the way to a theory of determinants and eventually matrices. Most paradigm shifts like zero seem so obvious in hindsight, we struggle to imagine that people took centuries to nail it. In the same way these "big data" and facebook are pushing the state of the art in mining data, maintaining and querying large data stores and pushing computational intelligence, applying non-trivial techniques to solve very menial tasks - like reminding you to go to some club or providing stupid recommendations.. Various companies contributing bits and pieces some combination of which may prove to be vital tools in unravelling things like genetic disorders or cancer later on. Who would have thought that gambling in games of chance would later lead to the mathematics of probability and later to statistical inference and then machine learning. The way I see it, what we need is a change in education. And I don't mean all this university is useless or public schools are failing chatter. Those are another story. What I mean is, as the problems become harder and the people working on them number larger, the silos of knowledge will inevitably become taller and deeper. Unless some framework is developed where it is easy to describe and transfer the core and relations of different theories; the ability to take a step back, look at the pieces and come up with a paradigm shifting generalization will become ever more difficult. With progress slowing as we continually reinvent the same broken pieces over and over again in our little corners of expertise.