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On the last point: "The industry has matured. The low-hanging fruit of the mobile/web era has largely been picked, making truly innovative opportunities harder

On the last point: "The industry has matured. The low-hanging fruit of the mobile/web era has largely been picked, making truly innovative opportunities harder to find." It is a repeating pattern in history that people think technology and science have reached a dead end. Michelsen (falsely attributed to Kelvin) declared principles of physics were already established before quantum mechanics. Watson said there was demand for maybe five computers in the world. These inevitably tend to be wrong because they misunderstand the dynamics of progress. Because technology is fractal, every invention spawns several others. The explosion of web was built on top of a lot of technology, and has supported a lot of technology too. Being an app or website has lots some of its initial novelty, but really this novelty was lost many years ago. Web itself has spawned many other frontiers - like innumerable frameworks, databases, languages etc. Those will spawn their own, etc.

wslh 2y ago
The point is about a specific technology, like software, not technology at all. For example, we continue to use the same vehicles (e.g. cars) with a well known technology while SpaceX is advancing on sending rockets to the space. Technology is advancing but some technology is well known. This is not to say that software is not evolving but most startups don't have an issue with building software but with business development (e.g. selling).
- schappim 2y ago
  I 100% agree with this. It is now a lot easier to create software, but it does feel harder to reach customers, especially via Google/Meta Ads.
- flyinglizard 2y ago
  But while cars are a well known technology, the last 15 years have spawned a 1.3T company in that space - Tesla. There's room to innovate anywhere, maybe but the most basic commodities.
  - InkCanon 2y ago
    This. Virtually anything that can be changed, can be innovated. And people seem to underestimate how complex the world is. Even something as unchanging as a commodity can increase in demand massively because of second order effects - like lithium and electric cars.
- InkCanon 2y ago
  But there's still a ton of innovation going on in cars. Tesla and BYD are some of the biggest companies in the world. And conversely, rockets was regarded as a sleepy, government contracting business for a long time. I don't particularly understand why (some) people say X technology has stagnated, like web or apps. There's a ton of innovation going on - off the top of my head, WebGPU and WASM will unlock huge amounts of performance for web apps, creating a lot of possibilities like much more powerful web game engines. There seems to be widespread beliefs that the market is "saturated" or "well developed". This always struck me like saying automotive startups won't work because rubber tyre technology has stagnated. Webs and apps are just the delivery mechanism for software. I think there's two flawed reasons people think this. One is that they only perceive the change in people using it. So they think anything which has a lot of people already using it means it's saturated. Two, they as consumers don't perceive the vast, complex systems used to deliver those services. So a website is a website to most people, but they don't understand the massive changes it has undergone over the decades. The only technology that really dies is very specific ones competing with others in a narrow field. For example vacuum tubes lost to the transistor.
  - wslh 2y ago
    There is innovation, but you’re operating within the same business domain. I wasn’t talking about stagnation but addressing the point made in the article as a software-based founder: will you compete with NVIDIA? Highly unlikely. Will you create an AAA game? Unlikely. Will you advance AI at a fundamental level? Again, highly unlikely. When I said “no way” I meant the chances are close to epsilon. In the past, there was more room for improvement and breakthroughs in these fields. This doesn’t mean you can’t create a successful startup based on AI, but its success will likely stem more from the business development side than the software itself. The secret lies in bizdev.
    - InkCanon 2y ago
      IMO thinking about it as business domains first isn't good. From "first principles" you have technology (which is rapidly changing). After the technology has been made sellable, people come up with a label for it to put what it is in a box. So business domains are always lagging indicators . And inside there's this deeply buried implicit assumption that anything in the same business domains delivers the same value, plus some market CGAR. It doesn't how value generated by products can change radically. To do that you really need to understand the technology itself. Not me personally because most of what you listed requires deep expertise and founder fit. But certainly a lot of people are. It was always unlikely a startup would succeed, but from a technological perspective, the opportunities have just blown up because of AI. For example compiler/programming language startups like Mojo are back in vogue (the last major one being Java) because of the increased demands of AI/heterogenous hardware. There's many hardware startups like Cerebras. There's people trying to find use cases for AI - education, healthcare, automation, etc. Several incredibly successful games were startups recently - Genshin Impact, Black Myth Wukong. Yes you're unlikely to make an impact in a very specific field - like going head to head against OpenAI, DeepSeek, Anthrophic etc on SOTA models. But there's these hundred other innovation opportunities opening up precisely because these models do so well. Historically the greatest errors in thinking about innovation have been thinking about it like a linear progression of increasing the supply of a commodity to meet demand, like if you have enough computers that's going to be it. It's really like a tree, with an exponential explosion of the surface area of innovation opportunities. If you want a forward looking model, you need to think this technology X has gotten huge, what other technologies will this lead to?
escapecharacter 2y ago
People also believe fall into this trap with political philosophy! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_of_History_and_the_Last_Man https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_of_History_and_the_Las...
adamc 2y ago
There will always be more to find out, but there are a ton of counter-examples to your claims. Engineering related to radio was huge in the 1920s and 1930s and is... not today. A lot of key problems got solved and the focus turned to other industries and other problems. The world will continue to have interesting problems. Whether those will have much intersection with writing software is less certain.

wslh 2y ago

The point is about a specific technology, like software, not technology at all. For example, we continue to use the same vehicles (e.g. cars) with a well known technology while SpaceX is advancing on sending rockets to the space. Technology is advancing but some technology is well known. This is not to say that software is not evolving but most startups don't have an issue with building software but with business development (e.g. selling).

schappim 2y ago
I 100% agree with this. It is now a lot easier to create software, but it does feel harder to reach customers, especially via Google/Meta Ads.
flyinglizard 2y ago
But while cars are a well known technology, the last 15 years have spawned a 1.3T company in that space - Tesla. There's room to innovate anywhere, maybe but the most basic commodities.
- InkCanon 2y ago
  This. Virtually anything that can be changed, can be innovated. And people seem to underestimate how complex the world is. Even something as unchanging as a commodity can increase in demand massively because of second order effects - like lithium and electric cars.
InkCanon 2y ago
But there's still a ton of innovation going on in cars. Tesla and BYD are some of the biggest companies in the world. And conversely, rockets was regarded as a sleepy, government contracting business for a long time. I don't particularly understand why (some) people say X technology has stagnated, like web or apps. There's a ton of innovation going on - off the top of my head, WebGPU and WASM will unlock huge amounts of performance for web apps, creating a lot of possibilities like much more powerful web game engines. There seems to be widespread beliefs that the market is "saturated" or "well developed". This always struck me like saying automotive startups won't work because rubber tyre technology has stagnated. Webs and apps are just the delivery mechanism for software. I think there's two flawed reasons people think this. One is that they only perceive the change in people using it. So they think anything which has a lot of people already using it means it's saturated. Two, they as consumers don't perceive the vast, complex systems used to deliver those services. So a website is a website to most people, but they don't understand the massive changes it has undergone over the decades. The only technology that really dies is very specific ones competing with others in a narrow field. For example vacuum tubes lost to the transistor.
- wslh 2y ago
  There is innovation, but you’re operating within the same business domain. I wasn’t talking about stagnation but addressing the point made in the article as a software-based founder: will you compete with NVIDIA? Highly unlikely. Will you create an AAA game? Unlikely. Will you advance AI at a fundamental level? Again, highly unlikely. When I said “no way” I meant the chances are close to epsilon. In the past, there was more room for improvement and breakthroughs in these fields. This doesn’t mean you can’t create a successful startup based on AI, but its success will likely stem more from the business development side than the software itself. The secret lies in bizdev.
  - InkCanon 2y ago
    IMO thinking about it as business domains first isn't good. From "first principles" you have technology (which is rapidly changing). After the technology has been made sellable, people come up with a label for it to put what it is in a box. So business domains are always lagging indicators . And inside there's this deeply buried implicit assumption that anything in the same business domains delivers the same value, plus some market CGAR. It doesn't how value generated by products can change radically. To do that you really need to understand the technology itself. Not me personally because most of what you listed requires deep expertise and founder fit. But certainly a lot of people are. It was always unlikely a startup would succeed, but from a technological perspective, the opportunities have just blown up because of AI. For example compiler/programming language startups like Mojo are back in vogue (the last major one being Java) because of the increased demands of AI/heterogenous hardware. There's many hardware startups like Cerebras. There's people trying to find use cases for AI - education, healthcare, automation, etc. Several incredibly successful games were startups recently - Genshin Impact, Black Myth Wukong. Yes you're unlikely to make an impact in a very specific field - like going head to head against OpenAI, DeepSeek, Anthrophic etc on SOTA models. But there's these hundred other innovation opportunities opening up precisely because these models do so well. Historically the greatest errors in thinking about innovation have been thinking about it like a linear progression of increasing the supply of a commodity to meet demand, like if you have enough computers that's going to be it. It's really like a tree, with an exponential explosion of the surface area of innovation opportunities. If you want a forward looking model, you need to think this technology X has gotten huge, what other technologies will this lead to?

escapecharacter 2y ago

People also believe fall into this trap with political philosophy! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_of_History_and_the_Last_Man https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_of_History_and_the_Las...

adamc 2y ago

There will always be more to find out, but there are a ton of counter-examples to your claims. Engineering related to radio was huge in the 1920s and 1930s and is... not today. A lot of key problems got solved and the focus turned to other industries and other problems. The world will continue to have interesting problems. Whether those will have much intersection with writing software is less certain.