10 ms·

She seems unclear in her own mind what she thinks the problem with SV is, because this seems to be a combination of all the standard brickbats people throw at t

by pg 15y ago

She seems unclear in her own mind what she thinks the problem with SV is, because this seems to be a combination of all the standard brickbats people throw at the startup world (I wouldn't even say Silicon Valley, since these complaints apply equally well to any startup anywhere): that a lot of startups are "derivative" (like Google was); that startups tend to have exits (investors need them structurally, but founders like them a lot too); that startups solve trivial problems (like writing Basic interpreters for computers used by a few thousand hobbyists); etc.

Locke1689 15y ago
I also think that the criticism that startups are not "big-thinking" enough is more appearance-based. She may be more impressed if startup pitches read like research papers and less like, well, startups. However, there are a number of problems with conflating research problems with startup opportunities, one of the first being that the startup field is now a lot smaller than it was. She talks about Stanford and Harvard students as though they're the best of the best and while it's true that recent graduates may have great potential, what you really want for research-level efforts is domain experts. It usually takes years to become a domain export -- far longer than the typical beginning-phase startup. There are also a number of major problems with funding straight research efforts just from an expected-value point of view. Even Google was mostly working with known quantities (i.e., the exploratory research had already been done) when it started. If the result of a year-long startup effort is "turns out this is impossible" that's pretty bad. Basically, there's a sweet spot for startups in a fiscal and informational sense and I think it will always tend to sound a little less impressive given that context.
- pnathan 15y ago
  It usually takes years to become a domain expert Very true. Suppose you know coding when you're 25. Then you have even more years to study a domain and be able to apply your computational skills to the cutting edge and have that deep domain knowledge to pull off an amazing solution.
- Apocryphon 15y ago
  I would read a research paper-styled startup pitch for Color.
jdp23 15y ago
She seems pretty clear in her own mind to me. I'm not saying she's right, but it seems to me this is the essence of her argument: "Groupon clone after Groupon clone, yawn… yet another social media dashboard, a cloud-based enterprise solution or, worse still, another photo sharing app; I’ve heard pitch after pitch of the same technology and keep wondering why all these highly intelligent, well educated youngsters, many of whom have been educated in the best universities in the world (Stanford, Yale and Harvard) are not putting their brains to good use by solving real-world problems. Instead they’re building technology to solve trivial issues – like apps that show where to spot your nearest tofu cupcake and share it with your friends. I’ve come to the conclusion that entrepreneurship in the Valley has become productized, as organizations like Y Combinator attempt to marginalize, commoditize or manufacture a process that is inherently risky."
- diego 15y ago
  What's ironic is that the very tools she's using to complain are a product of the Silicon Valley. The blog itself runs on WordPress and pushes all its posts on Twitter. If it wasn't for the Silicon Valley model we may not be hearing her.
  - lysol 15y ago
    What you're pointing out doesn't really discount her point. There can be countless Groupon clones and photo sharing apps that blow hard and still be gems like Twitter and Wordpress.
    - ultrasaurus 15y ago
      So her argument is that we should try to only make successful products?
      - justincormack 15y ago
        No, potentially world changing products. Most of which will fail. As most vc funded companies fail the failure is ok. She is complaining that the potential upside is too low due to lack of ambition to really change things radically.
sliverstorm 15y ago
I confess the exit-focus has always been disenchanting. I'm not a founder myself, but it always seemed to me a founder who starts a company with his eye on the door is a bit disingenuous compared to a founder who starts a company for... well, the company's own sake. Ref. Ford, Standard Oil, every hugely successful company from a handful of decades ago.
- jonnathanson 15y ago
  The only thing that really troubles me about exit-focus, to be honest, is the extent to which "a successful exit" can sometimes be conflated with "a successful track record." This definitely happens, and not just in the Bay Area. It's true that the ability to take a company from nothing to exit, and the ability to take a company from nothing to success in the marketplace, are correlated to a degree. Maybe even a large degree. Those skill sets overlap. But they're not perfectly correlated, and sometimes spectacularly not.
  - guelo 15y ago
    Achieving a successful exit is really hard and the vast majority of startups fail to do it. If someone has done it more than once they have demonstrated that they are exceptionally skilled at this game.
    - sliverstorm 15y ago
      Your point does not address what you replied to. Your parent was pointing out that skill at exiting is not necessarily the same as skill at marketplace success, as an exit does not necessarily equate to marketplace success.
      - guelo 15y ago
        He said that multiple exits should not constitute "a successful track record" which is ridiculous. Such a founder is a rockstar and should be courted by all investors.
kemiller 15y ago
Yeah, the piece she seems to be missing is that it is sometimes hard to tell what will be a game changer in the long run when it first appears. (If it were easy, this would be a very different kind of industry!)
redthrowaway 15y ago
I think you're being a bit flippant here, dismissing out of hand a point that she's not making with some examples that are only tangentially relevant. Google was "just" another search engine, sure. But it was far better than any of the other search engines out there. You can't say that of the groupon clones. They're all slightly different ways of doing Groupon, and none of them at this point look like they're offering any significant advantage over eachother. They may be more or less sustainable or profitable than Groupon, but they aren't game changers in the sense that Google was. She wasn't complaining that startups have exits, she was complaining that startups are being designed around exits. None of the counter-examples you listed, nor any established company that anyone can name off hand, was designed for an exit. You can look at the guys who did <s>gmail</s> Google Maps* or Youtube and say yes, they got a good exit, but both companies were designed to do something new, and their exit followed from that. A lot of startups these days seem to be designed to show off design skills and the ability to write an app, rather than actually do something unique and useful. Which brings me to your last point. Writing Basic interpreters for hobbyists wasn't trivial in the sense that the author meant. Finding a cupcake or sharing a photo is trivial: it doesn't much change anyone's life, and it's been done a thousand times before. It's trivial in the sense that a fart app for the iPhone is trivial. Microsoft's innovation was not that it could write basic interpreters, as people wrote basic interpreters for new architectures all the time. Their innovation was that they were an independent software firm who contracted their services out to hardware manufacturers. This is how they came to land the DOS contract with IBM that catapulted them to success. That innovation was as big as the innovation where someone first said, "why are we hosting this on a server in the basement? Why don't we throw it up on some server out there that doesn't care where we are or what device we're using to access it?" If you look at any of the big tech companies around today, they got their start by doing something either a) no one had done before, or b) an order of magnitude better than anyone had ever done it. Most of the startups you see today don't make any effort at a) or b), but they are c) designed to be flipped in a talent acquisition. This is what the author was complaining about, and if you don't accept it as a legitimate criticism then you at least have to address her actual point. *Edit: see response from protagonist_h
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
rdl 15y ago
I also don't really see the investors pushing startups which could be 5-10 year IPO-track big successes into early exits. An IPO or even late-stage M&A into a very related company (e.g. Mint's "takeover" of Intuit...) is really different from a 6-12mo flip talent acquisition, but both are called "exits". If anything, investors want the moon shots more than most founders do.
bhousel 15y ago
She is simply suggesting that startups today aren't working on anything important. I somewhat agree with the article. A criticism like this is difficult for tech-minded nerds to accept, since "importance" is a fuzzy concept lacking clearly definable metrics. But we can test it this way: Pretend a company disappears tomorrow without any warning at all. Do you care? If not, whatever it is that they do isn't very important. I think it's fair to say that those groupon clones and photo sharing apps wouldn't be missed. I don't know what "important" is, but I know it when I (don't) see it.
- fijiaaron 15y ago
  Startups aren't working on anything important these days. It's true. But that's mainly a factor of the economy. The economy isn't doing well and there isn't enough confidence to invest in things that might do something important (read: last over time).

by pg 15y ago

Locke1689 15y ago

I also think that the criticism that startups are not "big-thinking" enough is more appearance-based. She may be more impressed if startup pitches read like research papers and less like, well, startups. However, there are a number of problems with conflating research problems with startup opportunities, one of the first being that the startup field is now a lot smaller than it was. She talks about Stanford and Harvard students as though they're the best of the best and while it's true that recent graduates may have great potential, what you really want for research-level efforts is domain experts. It usually takes years to become a domain export -- far longer than the typical beginning-phase startup. There are also a number of major problems with funding straight research efforts just from an expected-value point of view. Even Google was mostly working with known quantities (i.e., the exploratory research had already been done) when it started. If the result of a year-long startup effort is "turns out this is impossible" that's pretty bad. Basically, there's a sweet spot for startups in a fiscal and informational sense and I think it will always tend to sound a little less impressive given that context.

pnathan 15y ago
It usually takes years to become a domain expert Very true. Suppose you know coding when you're 25. Then you have even more years to study a domain and be able to apply your computational skills to the cutting edge and have that deep domain knowledge to pull off an amazing solution.
Apocryphon 15y ago
I would read a research paper-styled startup pitch for Color.

jdp23 15y ago

She seems pretty clear in her own mind to me. I'm not saying she's right, but it seems to me this is the essence of her argument: "Groupon clone after Groupon clone, yawn… yet another social media dashboard, a cloud-based enterprise solution or, worse still, another photo sharing app; I’ve heard pitch after pitch of the same technology and keep wondering why all these highly intelligent, well educated youngsters, many of whom have been educated in the best universities in the world (Stanford, Yale and Harvard) are not putting their brains to good use by solving real-world problems. Instead they’re building technology to solve trivial issues – like apps that show where to spot your nearest tofu cupcake and share it with your friends. I’ve come to the conclusion that entrepreneurship in the Valley has become productized, as organizations like Y Combinator attempt to marginalize, commoditize or manufacture a process that is inherently risky."

diego 15y ago
What's ironic is that the very tools she's using to complain are a product of the Silicon Valley. The blog itself runs on WordPress and pushes all its posts on Twitter. If it wasn't for the Silicon Valley model we may not be hearing her.
- lysol 15y ago
  What you're pointing out doesn't really discount her point. There can be countless Groupon clones and photo sharing apps that blow hard and still be gems like Twitter and Wordpress.
  - ultrasaurus 15y ago
    So her argument is that we should try to only make successful products?
    - justincormack 15y ago
      No, potentially world changing products. Most of which will fail. As most vc funded companies fail the failure is ok. She is complaining that the potential upside is too low due to lack of ambition to really change things radically.

sliverstorm 15y ago

I confess the exit-focus has always been disenchanting. I'm not a founder myself, but it always seemed to me a founder who starts a company with his eye on the door is a bit disingenuous compared to a founder who starts a company for... well, the company's own sake. Ref. Ford, Standard Oil, every hugely successful company from a handful of decades ago.

jonnathanson 15y ago
The only thing that really troubles me about exit-focus, to be honest, is the extent to which "a successful exit" can sometimes be conflated with "a successful track record." This definitely happens, and not just in the Bay Area. It's true that the ability to take a company from nothing to exit, and the ability to take a company from nothing to success in the marketplace, are correlated to a degree. Maybe even a large degree. Those skill sets overlap. But they're not perfectly correlated, and sometimes spectacularly not.
- guelo 15y ago
  Achieving a successful exit is really hard and the vast majority of startups fail to do it. If someone has done it more than once they have demonstrated that they are exceptionally skilled at this game.
  - sliverstorm 15y ago
    Your point does not address what you replied to. Your parent was pointing out that skill at exiting is not necessarily the same as skill at marketplace success, as an exit does not necessarily equate to marketplace success.
    - guelo 15y ago
      He said that multiple exits should not constitute "a successful track record" which is ridiculous. Such a founder is a rockstar and should be courted by all investors.

kemiller 15y ago

Yeah, the piece she seems to be missing is that it is sometimes hard to tell what will be a game changer in the long run when it first appears. (If it were easy, this would be a very different kind of industry!)

redthrowaway 15y ago

I think you're being a bit flippant here, dismissing out of hand a point that she's not making with some examples that are only tangentially relevant. Google was "just" another search engine, sure. But it was far better than any of the other search engines out there. You can't say that of the groupon clones. They're all slightly different ways of doing Groupon, and none of them at this point look like they're offering any significant advantage over eachother. They may be more or less sustainable or profitable than Groupon, but they aren't game changers in the sense that Google was. She wasn't complaining that startups have exits, she was complaining that startups are being designed around exits. None of the counter-examples you listed, nor any established company that anyone can name off hand, was designed for an exit. You can look at the guys who did <s>gmail</s> Google Maps* or Youtube and say yes, they got a good exit, but both companies were designed to do something new, and their exit followed from that. A lot of startups these days seem to be designed to show off design skills and the ability to write an app, rather than actually do something unique and useful. Which brings me to your last point. Writing Basic interpreters for hobbyists wasn't trivial in the sense that the author meant. Finding a cupcake or sharing a photo is trivial: it doesn't much change anyone's life, and it's been done a thousand times before. It's trivial in the sense that a fart app for the iPhone is trivial. Microsoft's innovation was not that it could write basic interpreters, as people wrote basic interpreters for new architectures all the time. Their innovation was that they were an independent software firm who contracted their services out to hardware manufacturers. This is how they came to land the DOS contract with IBM that catapulted them to success. That innovation was as big as the innovation where someone first said, "why are we hosting this on a server in the basement? Why don't we throw it up on some server out there that doesn't care where we are or what device we're using to access it?" If you look at any of the big tech companies around today, they got their start by doing something either a) no one had done before, or b) an order of magnitude better than anyone had ever done it. Most of the startups you see today don't make any effort at a) or b), but they are c) designed to be flipped in a talent acquisition. This is what the author was complaining about, and if you don't accept it as a legitimate criticism then you at least have to address her actual point. *Edit: see response from protagonist_h

deleted 15y ago
[deleted]

rdl 15y ago

I also don't really see the investors pushing startups which could be 5-10 year IPO-track big successes into early exits. An IPO or even late-stage M&A into a very related company (e.g. Mint's "takeover" of Intuit...) is really different from a 6-12mo flip talent acquisition, but both are called "exits". If anything, investors want the moon shots more than most founders do.

bhousel 15y ago

She is simply suggesting that startups today aren't working on anything important. I somewhat agree with the article. A criticism like this is difficult for tech-minded nerds to accept, since "importance" is a fuzzy concept lacking clearly definable metrics. But we can test it this way: Pretend a company disappears tomorrow without any warning at all. Do you care? If not, whatever it is that they do isn't very important. I think it's fair to say that those groupon clones and photo sharing apps wouldn't be missed. I don't know what "important" is, but I know it when I (don't) see it.

fijiaaron 15y ago
Startups aren't working on anything important these days. It's true. But that's mainly a factor of the economy. The economy isn't doing well and there isn't enough confidence to invest in things that might do something important (read: last over time).