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On one hand, absolutely. The current wash of investment means that there's plenty of CRUD startups that get funded that wouldn't otherwise. They'll get acquih

On one hand, absolutely. The current wash of investment means that there's plenty of CRUD startups that get funded that wouldn't otherwise. They'll get acquihired at best and the cycle continues. On the other hand I don't think that founders will say "Oh, I won't pursue that technical passion project - I'll just build another Twitter!" The incentives to plunge into hard technical problems are not (at their core) based on money. That's just a plus. And lots of investor money means that those with the skills are more likely to found a company instead of letting a side project languish on a hard drive somewhere. So those who can build amazing things will continue to do so. The current funding environment isn't stopping them. Having more CRUD apps than you can shake a RAM stick at is a small price to pay for enabling the next Stripe or Heroku.

mahyarm 12y ago
The thing is, there is a lot of interesting things that you could reduce into 'crud' per say. Or crud with servers. For example, would bitcoin be a 'crud app'? Is mint a 'crud app'? Is pinterest a 'crud app'? Facebook or Instagram?
- RKoutnik 12y ago
  BTC: No, there's an astounding amount of cryptography there. You can build CRUD stuff on top of it. Mint: (assuming the financial tracker) No, ask anyone who's worked with bank software before - it ain't pretty. Pinterest/FB/Instagram: Possibly. At the start? Absolutely. What makes those companies valuable is their network effect - everyone you know is already there. Supporting users at that scale takes a lot more than just reading up on the latest APIs. FB invented a (sorta) new language to tackle their scaling problems.
  - kevan 12y ago
    For more info there's the Bitcoin whitepaper: https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf
- lsc 12y ago
  >For example, would bitcoin be a 'crud app'? Is mint a 'crud app'? Is pinterest a 'crud app'? Facebook or Instagram? Hm. It sounds like you don't know what CRUD means http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Create,_read,_update_and_delete http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Create,_read,_update_and_delete bitcoin doesn't belong on that list, as the primary thing about bitcoin is the database, not the interface. You could certainly call pinterest, facebook, mint and instagram CRUD apps at their core, though obviously, the CRUD nature is not what makes them special or interesting; but yes, the core facebook app Creates, Reads, Updates (though maybe doesn't delete) from a database; same with twitter and facebook and mint (though, of course, the technically hard part of facebook is getting the equivalent of a tremendously massive join to scale, not writing an app to display the data. Not figuring that problem out, I'm given to understand, is what killed friendster) Of course, all of those apps, well, it's more about marketing than about the technical stuff. You have to come up with something people want, and coming up with something people want is a very different thing from solving technical problems. Now, of course, if it doesn't work nobody is gonna want it, so you have to have a minimum level of technical competency for your scale; friendster showed that. But the truth of the matter is that 95% of what you build is stuff that nobody is going to want. And there is no way of knowing ahead of time if you are working on that 95% or on the 5%; So most people build version one cheap. They cut corners. They take on technical debt. Because they only need to build it to work long enough to make it obvious that it's something people want. After it is shown that this is a thing people might actually like, you can dump a bunch of money into rewriting it properly and/or propping up the crap you have. I mean... look at how much effort facebook has put into... PHP. The danger here, of course, is demonstrated by friendster. If you have enough interest to make your cheap demo fall over, you need to move fast in propping the goddamn thing up and then hiring some real engineers to build something that can actually scale.
- rayiner 12y ago
  Bitcoin (probably) wasn't created in the Valley.

mahyarm 12y ago

The thing is, there is a lot of interesting things that you could reduce into 'crud' per say. Or crud with servers. For example, would bitcoin be a 'crud app'? Is mint a 'crud app'? Is pinterest a 'crud app'? Facebook or Instagram?

RKoutnik 12y ago
BTC: No, there's an astounding amount of cryptography there. You can build CRUD stuff on top of it. Mint: (assuming the financial tracker) No, ask anyone who's worked with bank software before - it ain't pretty. Pinterest/FB/Instagram: Possibly. At the start? Absolutely. What makes those companies valuable is their network effect - everyone you know is already there. Supporting users at that scale takes a lot more than just reading up on the latest APIs. FB invented a (sorta) new language to tackle their scaling problems.
- kevan 12y ago
  For more info there's the Bitcoin whitepaper: https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf
lsc 12y ago
>For example, would bitcoin be a 'crud app'? Is mint a 'crud app'? Is pinterest a 'crud app'? Facebook or Instagram? Hm. It sounds like you don't know what CRUD means http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Create,_read,_update_and_delete http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Create,_read,_update_and_delete bitcoin doesn't belong on that list, as the primary thing about bitcoin is the database, not the interface. You could certainly call pinterest, facebook, mint and instagram CRUD apps at their core, though obviously, the CRUD nature is not what makes them special or interesting; but yes, the core facebook app Creates, Reads, Updates (though maybe doesn't delete) from a database; same with twitter and facebook and mint (though, of course, the technically hard part of facebook is getting the equivalent of a tremendously massive join to scale, not writing an app to display the data. Not figuring that problem out, I'm given to understand, is what killed friendster) Of course, all of those apps, well, it's more about marketing than about the technical stuff. You have to come up with something people want, and coming up with something people want is a very different thing from solving technical problems. Now, of course, if it doesn't work nobody is gonna want it, so you have to have a minimum level of technical competency for your scale; friendster showed that. But the truth of the matter is that 95% of what you build is stuff that nobody is going to want. And there is no way of knowing ahead of time if you are working on that 95% or on the 5%; So most people build version one cheap. They cut corners. They take on technical debt. Because they only need to build it to work long enough to make it obvious that it's something people want. After it is shown that this is a thing people might actually like, you can dump a bunch of money into rewriting it properly and/or propping up the crap you have. I mean... look at how much effort facebook has put into... PHP. The danger here, of course, is demonstrated by friendster. If you have enough interest to make your cheap demo fall over, you need to move fast in propping the goddamn thing up and then hiring some real engineers to build something that can actually scale.
rayiner 12y ago
Bitcoin (probably) wasn't created in the Valley.