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The music was new, black polished chrome / And came over the summer like liquid night The DJ's took pills to stay awake / And play for seven days Andreesen's
by netcan 7y ago
The music was new, black polished chrome / And came over the summer like liquid night
The DJ's took pills to stay awake / And play for seven days
Andreesen's 'Software Eats The World,' Mosaic & associated perspectives emerged from the fresh green fields of internet-enabled personal computing in the 90s and 2000s. Everything was young and novel. The software itself. The business models. The cultural impact. The companies and personas. Everything was a disruption.
There was a time when the record industry was fresh & jukeboxes were a disruptive new "channel." With it came new business models, genres of music. Music became imbued with new cultural & artistic significance.
There was a time when gentleman scientists were inventing the institution of science at home. A time before "publish-or-perish," tenure-tracks and grant applications.
Everything was young once. Mechanised farming. Production line manufacturing. The Americas. Nothing stays young, however.
Pondering why & how institutions go from new to old is something we've been doing forever. Ibn Khaldun, father of social science, had his barbarians-vs-civilisations theories in the 1300s.
These theories tend to get ideological. Marxism was a (Khaldun-ish) theory that "late-stage capitalism" was upon us(them). Ayn Rand thought everything had gotten infested with parasitic "looters." Both fantasised about revolutionary moments, where the old world dies and is reborn new & fresh. Today, we like terms like regulatory capture/burden, incumbent effects, path dependencies, low hanging fruit depletion or somesuch. All characterisations of "corruption" infesting mature institutions.
There are lots of examples. NASA's achievements in early decades vs the 90s. How a 3 person startup with 1 month of code can add featureX to their product orders of magnitude more easily than an established company with a mature code base. Twitter once served their product to the whole world with 50 people. It was a similar twitter, but doing it with just 1,000 people today would be a massive challenge.
Everything starts young. Everything gets old.
- Aperocky 7y ago> It was a similar twitter, but doing it with just 1,000 people today would be a massive challenge. Is that true though? We know that instagram had less than 100 people running it before Facebook bought it for $19B. There's a tendency for successful companies to add headcounts and grow - and it's very hard to convince yourself not to - maybe just maybe they would be able to serve the whole world with about 50 people, on a smaller revenue but huge revenue/headcount.
- jppope 7y agopart of the way investors create valuation for companies is based on employees. Thats why its not a wild west of software contractors everywhere.
- jimbokun 7y agoThat's like counting lines of code to create the valuation for software.
- bananabreakfast 7y agoInstagram was bought for $2B. You're thinking of WhatsApp.
- tsieling 7y ago$1B, but it landed at about $750M because of the FB shares that took a tumble just after.
- chrisco255 7y agoYeah but how much did those shares reach before hitting maturity?
- TuringNYC 7y agoInstagram and WhatsApp are anomalies. To try and find general tendencies, we should try and cite the typical story, not a three sigma exception case. Secondly, headcount is a darling of many HR systems. You might cite exceptions with Google or Stripe but your typical corporate environment will not put much effort into fairly evaluating career advancement (e.g., measuring impacts, outcomes, risk) for anyone. If you are sales or profit focused, lucky you. But outside of that, most HR systems will use simple metrics like "how many people report to you" or "how much budget do you control" to evaluate your promotions and pay. Some will even have literal formulas (e.g., you need 6 reports to go to Director; you need 6 Director reports to go to Executive Director; etc.) It is done because it is easy and convenient for HR. Unfortunately, obviously, people then try to game the system and over-hire. You might have to produce an "impacts report" at EOY but that is often HR-theater. Get down to "why" and you will find it came down to how many direct reports you had. Or how much budget you burned. If your incentive system rewards hiring over results, expect headcount to grow I urge those in governance positions to ensure their organizations have a real impacts assessment system to evaluate employee progress. There is no better way to kill motivation among workers than tell them that impact has no effect.