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Internet is a Kondratieff cycle: It’s a long economic cycle. 40+ years. - At the beginning, you innovate, and there are 100 car manufacturers in your city (Lyo
by laurent92 6y ago
Internet is a Kondratieff cycle: It’s a long economic cycle. 40+ years.
- At the beginning, you innovate, and there are 100 car manufacturers in your city (Lyon, France) and every employee can build a car from A to Z.
- Then you mature. You need to build the petrol station in every corner of the city, and put pollution everywhere especially on cathedrals (and passwords spill all over the place). Employees have a scope and become replaceable, but at least it’s a skill that _can_ be taught at school so you build schools to output a nation’s worth of engineers, not PhDs.
- Then it concentrates. You still make more and more cars every year, but legal requirements rise and less than a dozen manufacturers per continent make it, it is extremely capital-intensive and return on investment is around the interest rate. Employees have a mundane job, there is even a job description, which would be an insult to most of the previous generation.
- Then global warming comes and you need to remove petrol stations and cheat on tests to prove that you comply to regulatory emissions.
Startups are at phase 2. Regulatory burden is so immense that the only way to comply to SOCs/PII/Health/GDPR requirements is to build inside of AWS. The job is becoming 1. either work for Atlasssian or Amazon 2. or be independent and built a toy inside their containers, with pre-approved APIs that insurances cover you for.
Your comment is a sign that we’re entering phase 3: It’s hard to launch a startup and comply by the correct security and redundancy requirements, the talent has to be great, funding is absolutely necessary to have enough lawyers and designers, it’s capital intensive but still has excellent potential growth.
But soon, launching a startup will be as hard as launching a clothing brand: You’ll need support from stars to get famous, advertising power of the soap industry, and you’ll only make 4% above market rate.