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It's because every market inefficiency eventually disappears as entrepreneurs capitalize on it. It's like there's an optimal architecture for the economy at a

It's because every market inefficiency eventually disappears as entrepreneurs capitalize on it. It's like there's an optimal architecture for the economy at a given technology level, and the job of the entrepreneur is to find that architecture and refactor the economy, piece by piece. And if they're successful, they get to take everything of value in the old, obsolete parts of the economy that get destroyed. When YC was formed the Internet was young; it had just dramatically changed the equilibrium point for the economy, but people didn't know it yet. YC's investment thesis was that many more startups could be founded than were being founded, so they set about funding them. And they were right, and so their early investments found fertile new markets that were ripe for disruption. Now founding a startup is mainstream, so wannabe entrepreneurs have picked clean most of the big profitable market niches. And that's why all the later YC startups tend to be smaller and less successful. The big successes already happened. I could see AI spawning a few more successful startups - it is a technological change, after all - but not to the scale of the Internet. (Honestly, I see solar and genetic engineering as spawning more. Freeman Dyson wrote a prophetic book in 1999 entitled "The sun, the genome, and the Internet" about the 3 technologies that would define the 21st century, and IMHO he was totally on point.)

RGamma 2y ago
And when the new equilibrium point involves a huge amount of centralization and off-shoring and therefore wealth concentration and loss of livelihood, the proletariat becomes angry. In that context it's a fiendishly genius move to atomize and distract the "obsolete parts of the economy" and have them vote for their own disempowerment. It's maddeningly obvious and feels unrelentingly deterministic. If the plutocrats fail to properly cement their position however, we already know what happens next.

RGamma 2y ago

And when the new equilibrium point involves a huge amount of centralization and off-shoring and therefore wealth concentration and loss of livelihood, the proletariat becomes angry. In that context it's a fiendishly genius move to atomize and distract the "obsolete parts of the economy" and have them vote for their own disempowerment. It's maddeningly obvious and feels unrelentingly deterministic. If the plutocrats fail to properly cement their position however, we already know what happens next.