17 ms·

Ideas are easy to find, it's just that the bounds that we have been limited to work within, both economically and societally, have become tighter and tighter.

by moosey 6y ago

Ideas are easy to find, it's just that the bounds that we have been limited to work within, both economically and societally, have become tighter and tighter. Today, the leadership of the vast majority of private institutions have only the goal of increasing their own economic power, and similarly there is constant media production reminding people how important the almighty economy is, causing people to focus on any potential fear of economic pain. Regret being one of the most powerful emotional responses that we have. We don't have to look far in any direction for solutions that improve our education systems, our research output, and the general welfare of humanity. Unfortunately, the forces of corruption will always be strong, and it will take a more creative and imaginative people to implement them.

highfrequency 6y ago
Is there reason to think that people in the past were more selfless and less economically motivated? I'd wager that throughout history, most great ideas and optimizations came from people who were either seeking profit or other kinds of status (eg recognition from peers).
- eli_gottlieb 6y ago
  > Is there reason to think that people in the past were more selfless and less economically motivated? Einstein certainly was.
  - eindiran 6y ago
    I don't think your parent comment meant "is is not the case that there exists at least one person in the past who was more selfless and less economically motivated".
- claudiawerner 6y ago
  > Is there reason to think that people in the past were more selfless and less economically motivated? Perhaps, but perhaps not. The point isn't about some innate feature of humans that has only increased recently, but rather that throughout history humans (and the great classes therein) have faced material (not only economic) hardships. It is material conditions which drive history. I think there is a huge dividing line between inventing to seek profit and seeking "other kinds of status". The only thing in common these motivations have is that they arise due to our relations with other humans. Likewise, many motivations, depending on the predominant point of view (which certainly does change with time and place) can be viewed either altruistically or selfishly. I'd wager that a cynical society, or one dominated by the totalizing logic of capital ("accumulate!") would have a tendency to see previous motivations as selfish, because it's very hard to empathize with people through history. In other words, we view things in a certain way because it is unimaginable to us to see it any other way, since we have no experience with those times and places and the motivations therein. The ancient world is filled with proverbs and sayings and stories of heroism for some kind of greater good, certainly without looking for some kind of profit, and more often than not, without looking for some kind of recognition. As to whether these are just stories we tell or whether there is some truth to them is an important question. It's probably worth asking anthropology, or at the very least sociology. The latter has discovered huge changes in public consciousness since the industrial revolution.
- dasil003 6y ago
  Probably hard to quantify economic motivation over long periods of time with very different cultural environments. Economic motivation seems a strange label for what would have been basic survival for early agricultural societies. I think what feels strange now is that we've had these massive increases in productivity over 150 years, but it hasn't translated to more leisure or less stress. I also think there's a difference between an inventor coming up with an idea in hopes of selling it, versus the modern VC-funded apparatus of blitzing social media, adtech, and blackhat SEO to generate. In the past there were gate-keepers to distribution which have in many cases been disintermediated, and for a while there was a golden age where small independent producers could get internet distribution because the old giants (Apple, Microsoft) were too big and slow to capture it. But once Google and Facebook came of age, and VCs figured out the playbook, independents are once again at a disadvantage.
  - jlawson 6y ago
    The last 150 years have absolutely seen huge increases in leisure time. Notice that in the Bible, there is only one day of Sabbath, the rest of the week is work. A 6.5 day work week was standard for millennia. This idea of a relaxed bucolic existence like a Monet painting was always a myth. "Less stress" isn't defined enough to discuss, but I for one will say I don't stress about finding food over winter. My ancestors did at that time though.
    - aspaceman 6y ago
      You say 150 years, and then reference the bible? That happened more than 150 years ago.
    - pojzon 6y ago
      Thats not exactly true, actually our ancestors rested a lot more than we do now.
    - pojzon 6y ago
      Thats not exactly true, actually our ancestors rested a lot more than we do now. The same myth is that serfdom is/was worse than 9-7 office work.. when in fact you could work 1 day for someone else and 6 days for yourself. Now you work 5 days for someone else and 2 days for yourself.
- paganel 6y ago
  > Is there reason to think that people in the past were more selfless and less economically motivated? Not sure if more selfless but the common ownership of agricultural/pastoral land was a thing in the rural parts of my country (Romania) until relatively recently. The community-owned rural pastures (called "islaz") are the last to go right at this moment, it's like seeing the English enclosures play out with 200 years difference right in front of one's eyes (the "islaz" from my parents' village has been sold out to a private entity only 4 or 5 years ago). We also used to have common ownership and common use of the agricultural land in the Middle Ages, with some remnants of that system still extant in some mountainous communities until the late 1700s - early 1800s. They were called "obști" [1] > The obște (pl. obști) was an autonomous agricultural community of the Romanians/Vlachs during the Middle Ages. Mixing private and common ownership, the communities generally employed an open field system. The obști were usually based on one or more extended families. This system of organization was similar throughout the Vlach-inhabited areas and it generally receded as overlords assumed more power over the rural communities and as the peasants lost their freedom by becoming serfs.
- flukus 6y ago
  > Is there reason to think that people in the past were more selfless and less economically motivated? They were certainly less consumerist and didn't have the constant onslaught of advertising telling them to buy shiny new things. They were far more self reliant and able to repair things for themselves, which tends to constantly breeds it's own innovations. Lots of little tricks and custom devices tend to crop up (over engineering isn't just for programmers) yet very few will get commercialize, at best they'll be passed along to future generations but many will get lost. > 'd wager that throughout history, most great ideas and optimizations came from people who were either seeking profit or other kinds of status I'd wager most were out of necessity and/or laziness and most died out or were replaced by newer technology. Swords, scythes and shoes didn't have single inventors, they had generations of hackers tweaking them.
nicbou 6y ago
This reminds me of an idea I fell in love with: an app can be a home-cooked meal. https://www.robinsloan.com/notes/home-cooked-app/ https://www.robinsloan.com/notes/home-cooked-app/ We can build software that can't scale and won't sell, solely for the enjoyment of those we love. We're not running out of ideas. We're just limiting ourselves to the small subset of problems that are worth solving for money.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- riantogo 6y ago
  While we are at it, I created an app for my 3rd grader. Just her. It has 1 user.
  - fludlight 6y ago
    What does it do?
    - riantogo 6y ago
      Math practice http://arcadejack.com http://arcadejack.com
      - tribaal 6y ago
        This is exactly what my son needs right now. Thank you so much!
        nicbou 6y ago
        2x the userbase overnight? Is this growth hacking?
        riantogo 6y ago
        Found that hockey stick growth. Time to call up some VCs.
Hypx 6y ago
> Ideas are easy to find, it's just that the bounds that we have been limited to work within, both economically and societally, have become tighter and tighter. An idea I've been having lately, and one that might be unpopular on this site, is that we've found all the low-hanging in electronics, networking, and software. So the main reason why it seems like there are no new ideas is because we're only looking at places where there are few new ideas to be found. If we stop equating "tech" with computers, and instead search the vast parameter space of new technologies, we'll quickly find lots of interesting new ideas. Unfortunately, that also means we've more or less reach the end of the growth era of Silicon Valley, and from here on out SV just becomes another old fashion industry with minimal avenues for new growth.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- eagsalazar2 6y ago
  There are still millions of ideas. You just need to look around a little more and massive problems (opportunities) are everywhere. In my job (tech leadership consulting, dev, etc) we deep dive on a new company/industry every few weeks when kicking off new projects and it seems like every niche industry or business has like 50 grotesque inefficiencies and incumbent crappy solutions providers just waiting for someone with the right design and software skills to come by, make the investment, and grab the business. If you are lacking in inspiration, go work for a consulting company for a year and your idea bucket will be full to overflowing.
  - aaron-lebo 6y ago
    This was originally in response to your parent, but gonna attach it to your comment instead, cause you're right. I don't believe we've found the low-hanging fruit at all, it's still all over the place. There are hundreds of pieces of software and hardware that are expensive, or unintuitive, or user-hostile, many are all of the above. HN complains every day about bad software. Is this really the best we've got? There's just no way. What it does take is people willing to take a step off the usual treadmill and getting their talent and ability sucked into large companies and willing to take a risk to build their own stuff. That ability is there, the will is not. Some people have 30,000 HN comments. You're telling me 10k of those detailed thoughtful comments aren't absorbing time that can be put into building better stuff? Hardware is thousands of times more powerful and cheaper than it was 20 years ago. Software is likewise more capable, or at the very least, libraries are way more abundant.. Say what you want about new languages, but I'll take the option of Rust, Nim, Go, Clojure, etc, than what existed 15 years ago any day. Not that that stuff was bad, but today you have the option, and it's fucking cheap to build. Why aren't we building? Why do we act like we need millions of dollars in funding to do stuff you can do in your underwear? Do we really believe all the good ideas are gone or have been executed well? That seems crazy to me. I just think we're lacking imagination and we've adopted a woe is me attitude (I know I struggle with this all the time). That's just software, where greenfield stuff is cheaper than anything in the world, where implementing your thoughts is a matter of sitting down. If you've worked in any business, you know of the inefficiencies within, and if you've worked in a big one, you really know about them. There is so much low hanging fruit! Just about any product you can pick up in your house, any regular process you go through, there's a major opportunity to look at that and think about how that can be done better and cheaper and more reliably. What's more, that's about the easiest thing to do, because it's just working off what already exists. Sorry if I'm not more specific, but there's gonna be people looing back in ten or twenty or two years and wondering how so many people missed x or y or z, which in retrospect is so obvious.
totemandtoken 6y ago
In some ways this reminds me of Joseph Tainter's Collapse of Complex Societies. It's been a while since I've read it, but I recall he correlated increasing social complexity with a decrease in innovation. Although, I think he measured "innovation" as patents, copyrights, and other intellectual property which I think is a poor measure of ingenuity or innovation. Still, interesting hypothesis...
jadbox 6y ago
There's a lot of interesting stuff happening in crypto community that is like what you're talking about, especially DAOs which are being used to democratically power everything from decentralized finance to non-profit fundraising platforms.
maram 6y ago
>Ideas are easy to find Regis McKenna, the marketer who introduced first Apple, first microprocessor Intel. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Z13NI0SuyA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Z13NI0SuyA at 4:30 "The span of my existence in the valley is going to collapse to about a third, maybe less in your lifetime and the challenges that you are going to have in the office and the opportunities is going to be very very significant but it's going to require a lot of you much more than of me or of anybody in the past because the technology moved actually fairly slowly"
lkrubner 6y ago
Agreed. In the world of business, there has been a glut of leaders who arrive at positions of leadership without any formal training in leadership, and so they rule with "instincts" which are sometimes no more than primitive impulses or ego. This limits how far any project can go. Just for a moment, assume there is an abundance of people with interesting ideas that deserve to be pursued, but for some reason these people are being stifled. Why are they being stifled, and are there ways we can better support them, so they can move forward? On this theme, and speaking of a specific startup where I worked, where some of us were deeply excited about the project, I was recently writing a response to some criticism I received in response to "How To Destroy A Startup In Three Easy Steps": https://www.amazon.com/Destroy-Tech-Startup-Easy-Steps/dp/0998997617/ https://www.amazon.com/Destroy-Tech-Startup-Easy-Steps/dp/09... In response to the criticism I received, I wrote: ------------------------------ Leimgruber phrased it best, in his review on Amazon, so I quote him here, to answer everyone: Personally, I find the book most interesting not for the absurdly lousy management characters, but for giving a glimpse into the mind of a person that accepts this kind of treatment as okay, shoulders unreasonable burdens, and seems repeatably drawn into difficult situations with the corresponding drama that inevitably ensues. This begs the question for me (and likely much of this book's readership): Why are many talented software developers drawn to solving impossible problems, drinking unhealthy amounts of coffee, neglecting their sleep and personal lives, and constantly trying to fix everthing and everyone around them while ignoring their own psychosocial needs? To my mind, the interesting question runs in the other direction. Why is bad leadership so common? Why is it so universally accepted? To anyone who suggests that we should quit our jobs after some disagreements with management, I would ask why is it that we need to leave? Why doesn't the leadership leave? Shouldn't management resign, if they are unfit to get the mission done? Some questions have large implications. Why are so many leaders so completely self-destructive? If Milton had simply been greedy, in a rational way, he would have allowed me to work on the technology that might have eventually generated a lot of money for him. But I find that business leaders are rarely rational. Impulses and ego seem to be the most common forms of decision making. Why is this accepted? The second comment I'd like to respond to was written by "Antoni" on Goodreads: I loved the first 80% of it, which is enough to give a positive opinion I guess. What I didn't like really is that the book is written from the perspective of startup employee, not the founder. So there's only part of the story. Only information that the writer assumes. He uses a lot of exaggerations as well that are fun to read and enjoyable but some dialogues are hard to believe to be true. I would recommend it to people working in tech startups, to feel good about the environment that they work for rather than take some valuable lesson from the book since it's more about management tyranny, mobbing and lack of transparency rather than actual reasons why startup failed from a perspective of a person that had full picture (instead of an employee). In response, please consider these four ideas: 1.) The failure of any venture is always a complex event, and no one can easily say why it failed. Consider when an airplane crashes, it often takes an army of investigators years to figure out why the accident occurred, even though the investigators are guided by the experience of all previous airplane failures. A startup with an entirely novel idea will be too unique for anyone to easily diagnose its failure. There are too many variables, and too many embedded assumptions. 2.) A good leader over-communicates in a crisis, and every day is a new crisis for a startup. Above all else, the leadership needs to "listen real loud." A startup is either a transparent learning organization or it is dead. Milton's crass hoarding of secrets was a self-inflicted injury. While there might be some other reasons why the startup failed, it is absolutely true that our lack of communication was the starting point of all the other problems that we faced. Since I was central to the technology effort, the startup could only succeed if I was well-informed about our real needs. Keeping me in the dark was a problem for the whole company. I'm confused how anyone could complain that this book is about "lack of transparency rather than the actual reasons why the startup failed." I've tried to be clear about this, but I'll repeat it here again: lack of transparency was one of the reasons why the startup failed. We can debate whether it was the most important factor, but it was obviously a significant factor. 3.) Antoni says they wished the book was told "from the perspective of a person that had the full picture (instead of an employee)." Possibly I failed to emphasize this enough, but no one at Celelot had the full picture. Just like the three blind men in the fable, we were each touching a different part of the elephant, and we were reaching different conclusions about its shape. I was holding onto the technology, so I believed one thing, while Milton was holding onto the sales leads, so he believed something else. This much is completely normal at all businesses, it is a problem with a standard solution: lots of honest communication. Sadly, honesty was lacking. A series of lies were told about the company's finances, so myself and Kwan were constantly guessing at the truth. At some points we felt we were working at a well-capitalized firm, other times we thought the whole place was about to run out of money. But neither Milton nor John knew much about the company, either. At no point did Milton sit down and have a good faith conversation with me about the status of the code at the company. At first I was elated with the level of autonomy I'd been granted, then later I realized that the leadership was operating with assumptions that were out of line with reality. A ship captain who has no idea of their location near the coast is a ship captain who is about to run aground, and likewise, Milton's ignorance of our progress meant the whole company was slipping toward hidden reefs. If Milton were to write a book about Celelot, he could fill in his side of things, but his side of things would not represent the total truth. 4.) We have suffered a glut of books that aim to build a cult of personality around certain entrepreneurs. This tendency has gone furthest with Steve Jobs. What is remarkable is that this trend should get going at a time when innovation from Silicon Valley is clearly decreasing. In his 2006 book, The HP Way, David Packard talks about the process by which he and Bill Hewlett grew Hewlett–Packard. In their rejection of standard corporate hierarchies and their hunger for input from everyone, they were clearly blazing a radically new path in both management style and technology. It is noteworthy that when they were at their most creative, in the 1940s and 1950s and 1960s, no one set out to create a cult of personality around them. In 1968, when Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore founded Intel, no one thought to write them up as heroic characters, but it was in that era that their technology was creating the most profound shifts in industry. At some point after 2000 the rate of innovation in Silicon Valley began to slow, and yet this was the era when the rhetoric about visionary geniuses and innovation began to take on the tone formerly reserved for artists and military conquerors. Real leadership is rare, so we should celebrate it whenever it appears, but we should remember it comes as often from the lower ranks as the upper ranks, so a series of books that only looks at the upper ranks must automatically leave us with a skewed picture of reality. My point is, we need more honesty about what is actually happening in these companies. We need less books written by or about founders, and more books written by those who are in the trenches, working everyday to build something new. Above all else, we need better documentation of the ways that management often sabotages the worker's efforts to invent the future. ---------------------------- A final point for Hacker News to consider: some of these distortions that we are seeing, regarding misalignment of leadership styles, and in particular misalignment between short-term goals and what the team is committed to building, is a political question that very much goes back to the question "Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?" Now as always, there are a lot of people with interesting ideas. Are they getting the support they need to move forward with their ideas? Or are they being stifled?

by moosey 6y ago

highfrequency 6y ago

Is there reason to think that people in the past were more selfless and less economically motivated? I'd wager that throughout history, most great ideas and optimizations came from people who were either seeking profit or other kinds of status (eg recognition from peers).

eli_gottlieb 6y ago
> Is there reason to think that people in the past were more selfless and less economically motivated? Einstein certainly was.
- eindiran 6y ago
  I don't think your parent comment meant "is is not the case that there exists at least one person in the past who was more selfless and less economically motivated".
claudiawerner 6y ago
> Is there reason to think that people in the past were more selfless and less economically motivated? Perhaps, but perhaps not. The point isn't about some innate feature of humans that has only increased recently, but rather that throughout history humans (and the great classes therein) have faced material (not only economic) hardships. It is material conditions which drive history. I think there is a huge dividing line between inventing to seek profit and seeking "other kinds of status". The only thing in common these motivations have is that they arise due to our relations with other humans. Likewise, many motivations, depending on the predominant point of view (which certainly does change with time and place) can be viewed either altruistically or selfishly. I'd wager that a cynical society, or one dominated by the totalizing logic of capital ("accumulate!") would have a tendency to see previous motivations as selfish, because it's very hard to empathize with people through history. In other words, we view things in a certain way because it is unimaginable to us to see it any other way, since we have no experience with those times and places and the motivations therein. The ancient world is filled with proverbs and sayings and stories of heroism for some kind of greater good, certainly without looking for some kind of profit, and more often than not, without looking for some kind of recognition. As to whether these are just stories we tell or whether there is some truth to them is an important question. It's probably worth asking anthropology, or at the very least sociology. The latter has discovered huge changes in public consciousness since the industrial revolution.
dasil003 6y ago
Probably hard to quantify economic motivation over long periods of time with very different cultural environments. Economic motivation seems a strange label for what would have been basic survival for early agricultural societies. I think what feels strange now is that we've had these massive increases in productivity over 150 years, but it hasn't translated to more leisure or less stress. I also think there's a difference between an inventor coming up with an idea in hopes of selling it, versus the modern VC-funded apparatus of blitzing social media, adtech, and blackhat SEO to generate. In the past there were gate-keepers to distribution which have in many cases been disintermediated, and for a while there was a golden age where small independent producers could get internet distribution because the old giants (Apple, Microsoft) were too big and slow to capture it. But once Google and Facebook came of age, and VCs figured out the playbook, independents are once again at a disadvantage.
- jlawson 6y ago
  The last 150 years have absolutely seen huge increases in leisure time. Notice that in the Bible, there is only one day of Sabbath, the rest of the week is work. A 6.5 day work week was standard for millennia. This idea of a relaxed bucolic existence like a Monet painting was always a myth. "Less stress" isn't defined enough to discuss, but I for one will say I don't stress about finding food over winter. My ancestors did at that time though.
  - aspaceman 6y ago
    You say 150 years, and then reference the bible? That happened more than 150 years ago.
  - pojzon 6y ago
    Thats not exactly true, actually our ancestors rested a lot more than we do now.
  - pojzon 6y ago
    Thats not exactly true, actually our ancestors rested a lot more than we do now. The same myth is that serfdom is/was worse than 9-7 office work.. when in fact you could work 1 day for someone else and 6 days for yourself. Now you work 5 days for someone else and 2 days for yourself.
paganel 6y ago
> Is there reason to think that people in the past were more selfless and less economically motivated? Not sure if more selfless but the common ownership of agricultural/pastoral land was a thing in the rural parts of my country (Romania) until relatively recently. The community-owned rural pastures (called "islaz") are the last to go right at this moment, it's like seeing the English enclosures play out with 200 years difference right in front of one's eyes (the "islaz" from my parents' village has been sold out to a private entity only 4 or 5 years ago). We also used to have common ownership and common use of the agricultural land in the Middle Ages, with some remnants of that system still extant in some mountainous communities until the late 1700s - early 1800s. They were called "obști" [1] > The obște (pl. obști) was an autonomous agricultural community of the Romanians/Vlachs during the Middle Ages. Mixing private and common ownership, the communities generally employed an open field system. The obști were usually based on one or more extended families. This system of organization was similar throughout the Vlach-inhabited areas and it generally receded as overlords assumed more power over the rural communities and as the peasants lost their freedom by becoming serfs.
flukus 6y ago
> Is there reason to think that people in the past were more selfless and less economically motivated? They were certainly less consumerist and didn't have the constant onslaught of advertising telling them to buy shiny new things. They were far more self reliant and able to repair things for themselves, which tends to constantly breeds it's own innovations. Lots of little tricks and custom devices tend to crop up (over engineering isn't just for programmers) yet very few will get commercialize, at best they'll be passed along to future generations but many will get lost. > 'd wager that throughout history, most great ideas and optimizations came from people who were either seeking profit or other kinds of status I'd wager most were out of necessity and/or laziness and most died out or were replaced by newer technology. Swords, scythes and shoes didn't have single inventors, they had generations of hackers tweaking them.

nicbou 6y ago

This reminds me of an idea I fell in love with: an app can be a home-cooked meal. https://www.robinsloan.com/notes/home-cooked-app/ https://www.robinsloan.com/notes/home-cooked-app/ We can build software that can't scale and won't sell, solely for the enjoyment of those we love. We're not running out of ideas. We're just limiting ourselves to the small subset of problems that are worth solving for money.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
riantogo 6y ago
While we are at it, I created an app for my 3rd grader. Just her. It has 1 user.
- fludlight 6y ago
  What does it do?
  - riantogo 6y ago
    Math practice http://arcadejack.com http://arcadejack.com
    - tribaal 6y ago
      This is exactly what my son needs right now. Thank you so much!
      - nicbou 6y ago
        2x the userbase overnight? Is this growth hacking?
        riantogo 6y ago
        Found that hockey stick growth. Time to call up some VCs.

Hypx 6y ago

> Ideas are easy to find, it's just that the bounds that we have been limited to work within, both economically and societally, have become tighter and tighter. An idea I've been having lately, and one that might be unpopular on this site, is that we've found all the low-hanging in electronics, networking, and software. So the main reason why it seems like there are no new ideas is because we're only looking at places where there are few new ideas to be found. If we stop equating "tech" with computers, and instead search the vast parameter space of new technologies, we'll quickly find lots of interesting new ideas. Unfortunately, that also means we've more or less reach the end of the growth era of Silicon Valley, and from here on out SV just becomes another old fashion industry with minimal avenues for new growth.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
eagsalazar2 6y ago
There are still millions of ideas. You just need to look around a little more and massive problems (opportunities) are everywhere. In my job (tech leadership consulting, dev, etc) we deep dive on a new company/industry every few weeks when kicking off new projects and it seems like every niche industry or business has like 50 grotesque inefficiencies and incumbent crappy solutions providers just waiting for someone with the right design and software skills to come by, make the investment, and grab the business. If you are lacking in inspiration, go work for a consulting company for a year and your idea bucket will be full to overflowing.
- aaron-lebo 6y ago
  This was originally in response to your parent, but gonna attach it to your comment instead, cause you're right. I don't believe we've found the low-hanging fruit at all, it's still all over the place. There are hundreds of pieces of software and hardware that are expensive, or unintuitive, or user-hostile, many are all of the above. HN complains every day about bad software. Is this really the best we've got? There's just no way. What it does take is people willing to take a step off the usual treadmill and getting their talent and ability sucked into large companies and willing to take a risk to build their own stuff. That ability is there, the will is not. Some people have 30,000 HN comments. You're telling me 10k of those detailed thoughtful comments aren't absorbing time that can be put into building better stuff? Hardware is thousands of times more powerful and cheaper than it was 20 years ago. Software is likewise more capable, or at the very least, libraries are way more abundant.. Say what you want about new languages, but I'll take the option of Rust, Nim, Go, Clojure, etc, than what existed 15 years ago any day. Not that that stuff was bad, but today you have the option, and it's fucking cheap to build. Why aren't we building? Why do we act like we need millions of dollars in funding to do stuff you can do in your underwear? Do we really believe all the good ideas are gone or have been executed well? That seems crazy to me. I just think we're lacking imagination and we've adopted a woe is me attitude (I know I struggle with this all the time). That's just software, where greenfield stuff is cheaper than anything in the world, where implementing your thoughts is a matter of sitting down. If you've worked in any business, you know of the inefficiencies within, and if you've worked in a big one, you really know about them. There is so much low hanging fruit! Just about any product you can pick up in your house, any regular process you go through, there's a major opportunity to look at that and think about how that can be done better and cheaper and more reliably. What's more, that's about the easiest thing to do, because it's just working off what already exists. Sorry if I'm not more specific, but there's gonna be people looing back in ten or twenty or two years and wondering how so many people missed x or y or z, which in retrospect is so obvious.

totemandtoken 6y ago

In some ways this reminds me of Joseph Tainter's Collapse of Complex Societies. It's been a while since I've read it, but I recall he correlated increasing social complexity with a decrease in innovation. Although, I think he measured "innovation" as patents, copyrights, and other intellectual property which I think is a poor measure of ingenuity or innovation. Still, interesting hypothesis...

jadbox 6y ago

There's a lot of interesting stuff happening in crypto community that is like what you're talking about, especially DAOs which are being used to democratically power everything from decentralized finance to non-profit fundraising platforms.

maram 6y ago

>Ideas are easy to find Regis McKenna, the marketer who introduced first Apple, first microprocessor Intel. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Z13NI0SuyA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Z13NI0SuyA at 4:30 "The span of my existence in the valley is going to collapse to about a third, maybe less in your lifetime and the challenges that you are going to have in the office and the opportunities is going to be very very significant but it's going to require a lot of you much more than of me or of anybody in the past because the technology moved actually fairly slowly"

lkrubner 6y ago

Agreed. In the world of business, there has been a glut of leaders who arrive at positions of leadership without any formal training in leadership, and so they rule with "instincts" which are sometimes no more than primitive impulses or ego. This limits how far any project can go. Just for a moment, assume there is an abundance of people with interesting ideas that deserve to be pursued, but for some reason these people are being stifled. Why are they being stifled, and are there ways we can better support them, so they can move forward? On this theme, and speaking of a specific startup where I worked, where some of us were deeply excited about the project, I was recently writing a response to some criticism I received in response to "How To Destroy A Startup In Three Easy Steps": https://www.amazon.com/Destroy-Tech-Startup-Easy-Steps/dp/0998997617/ https://www.amazon.com/Destroy-Tech-Startup-Easy-Steps/dp/09... In response to the criticism I received, I wrote: ------------------------------ Leimgruber phrased it best, in his review on Amazon, so I quote him here, to answer everyone: Personally, I find the book most interesting not for the absurdly lousy management characters, but for giving a glimpse into the mind of a person that accepts this kind of treatment as okay, shoulders unreasonable burdens, and seems repeatably drawn into difficult situations with the corresponding drama that inevitably ensues. This begs the question for me (and likely much of this book's readership): Why are many talented software developers drawn to solving impossible problems, drinking unhealthy amounts of coffee, neglecting their sleep and personal lives, and constantly trying to fix everthing and everyone around them while ignoring their own psychosocial needs? To my mind, the interesting question runs in the other direction. Why is bad leadership so common? Why is it so universally accepted? To anyone who suggests that we should quit our jobs after some disagreements with management, I would ask why is it that we need to leave? Why doesn't the leadership leave? Shouldn't management resign, if they are unfit to get the mission done? Some questions have large implications. Why are so many leaders so completely self-destructive? If Milton had simply been greedy, in a rational way, he would have allowed me to work on the technology that might have eventually generated a lot of money for him. But I find that business leaders are rarely rational. Impulses and ego seem to be the most common forms of decision making. Why is this accepted? The second comment I'd like to respond to was written by "Antoni" on Goodreads: I loved the first 80% of it, which is enough to give a positive opinion I guess. What I didn't like really is that the book is written from the perspective of startup employee, not the founder. So there's only part of the story. Only information that the writer assumes. He uses a lot of exaggerations as well that are fun to read and enjoyable but some dialogues are hard to believe to be true. I would recommend it to people working in tech startups, to feel good about the environment that they work for rather than take some valuable lesson from the book since it's more about management tyranny, mobbing and lack of transparency rather than actual reasons why startup failed from a perspective of a person that had full picture (instead of an employee). In response, please consider these four ideas: 1.) The failure of any venture is always a complex event, and no one can easily say why it failed. Consider when an airplane crashes, it often takes an army of investigators years to figure out why the accident occurred, even though the investigators are guided by the experience of all previous airplane failures. A startup with an entirely novel idea will be too unique for anyone to easily diagnose its failure. There are too many variables, and too many embedded assumptions. 2.) A good leader over-communicates in a crisis, and every day is a new crisis for a startup. Above all else, the leadership needs to "listen real loud." A startup is either a transparent learning organization or it is dead. Milton's crass hoarding of secrets was a self-inflicted injury. While there might be some other reasons why the startup failed, it is absolutely true that our lack of communication was the starting point of all the other problems that we faced. Since I was central to the technology effort, the startup could only succeed if I was well-informed about our real needs. Keeping me in the dark was a problem for the whole company. I'm confused how anyone could complain that this book is about "lack of transparency rather than the actual reasons why the startup failed." I've tried to be clear about this, but I'll repeat it here again: lack of transparency was one of the reasons why the startup failed. We can debate whether it was the most important factor, but it was obviously a significant factor. 3.) Antoni says they wished the book was told "from the perspective of a person that had the full picture (instead of an employee)." Possibly I failed to emphasize this enough, but no one at Celelot had the full picture. Just like the three blind men in the fable, we were each touching a different part of the elephant, and we were reaching different conclusions about its shape. I was holding onto the technology, so I believed one thing, while Milton was holding onto the sales leads, so he believed something else. This much is completely normal at all businesses, it is a problem with a standard solution: lots of honest communication. Sadly, honesty was lacking. A series of lies were told about the company's finances, so myself and Kwan were constantly guessing at the truth. At some points we felt we were working at a well-capitalized firm, other times we thought the whole place was about to run out of money. But neither Milton nor John knew much about the company, either. At no point did Milton sit down and have a good faith conversation with me about the status of the code at the company. At first I was elated with the level of autonomy I'd been granted, then later I realized that the leadership was operating with assumptions that were out of line with reality. A ship captain who has no idea of their location near the coast is a ship captain who is about to run aground, and likewise, Milton's ignorance of our progress meant the whole company was slipping toward hidden reefs. If Milton were to write a book about Celelot, he could fill in his side of things, but his side of things would not represent the total truth. 4.) We have suffered a glut of books that aim to build a cult of personality around certain entrepreneurs. This tendency has gone furthest with Steve Jobs. What is remarkable is that this trend should get going at a time when innovation from Silicon Valley is clearly decreasing. In his 2006 book, The HP Way, David Packard talks about the process by which he and Bill Hewlett grew Hewlett–Packard. In their rejection of standard corporate hierarchies and their hunger for input from everyone, they were clearly blazing a radically new path in both management style and technology. It is noteworthy that when they were at their most creative, in the 1940s and 1950s and 1960s, no one set out to create a cult of personality around them. In 1968, when Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore founded Intel, no one thought to write them up as heroic characters, but it was in that era that their technology was creating the most profound shifts in industry. At some point after 2000 the rate of innovation in Silicon Valley began to slow, and yet this was the era when the rhetoric about visionary geniuses and innovation began to take on the tone formerly reserved for artists and military conquerors. Real leadership is rare, so we should celebrate it whenever it appears, but we should remember it comes as often from the lower ranks as the upper ranks, so a series of books that only looks at the upper ranks must automatically leave us with a skewed picture of reality. My point is, we need more honesty about what is actually happening in these companies. We need less books written by or about founders, and more books written by those who are in the trenches, working everyday to build something new. Above all else, we need better documentation of the ways that management often sabotages the worker's efforts to invent the future. ---------------------------- A final point for Hacker News to consider: some of these distortions that we are seeing, regarding misalignment of leadership styles, and in particular misalignment between short-term goals and what the team is committed to building, is a political question that very much goes back to the question "Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?" Now as always, there are a lot of people with interesting ideas. Are they getting the support they need to move forward with their ideas? Or are they being stifled?