The Culling of the Herd

http://techcrunch.com/2015/11/14/aileen-lee-has-much-to-answer-for-although-you-have-to-admire-her-neological-powers/

by pavornyoh • 11 years ago

45 20 11 years ago

hwstar• 11 years ago

This gem:

"Once, technology meant stuff that went to the moon…cured fatal diseases…extended the human lifespan […] miraculous breakthroughs that altered lives […] Now, “tech” means something very different: apps that…hails taxis…summon butlers…automatically call dog walkers…gadgets that remind you have a meeting…turn on your thermostat for you […] It’s not that the latter is bad. But it is a fact that the latter is trivial."

The VC crowd is hooked short term development which has the potential to make them rich quickly. This may be about to change. Very few software-only tech companies have not been focusing solving hard problems which are not trivial, as these types of problems require much longer product development schedules, and a therefore much more capital to invest.

sounds• 11 years ago

The low-barrier-to-entry plays are getting lots of attention, while the ones that take more capital, research, a breakthrough, or all three, are also getting some attention.

The article also simply states the obvious: trivial stuff "is trivial."

This "culling of the herd" can happen continuously, or there can be a flood of investment leading to a bubble. Lots has been blogged about how to make different mistakes [1], how to think different [2], or just how this time will be different [3].

Failing is part of innovating.

"We avoided dying till we got rich." - pg [4]

[1] Just one of many: http://www.inc.com/niel-robertson/brilliant-failures/dot-com...

[2] http://www.thenational.ae/business/technology/apple-is-the-t...

[3] https://avataric.wordpress.com/2015/08/14/startup-culture-ev...

[4] http://www.paulgraham.com/die.html

eevilspock• 11 years ago

The low-barrier-to-entry plays

One of the reasons the barrier is so low is because you often don't have to ask your users to pay. One of the many ways advertising undermines the way the free market is supposed to work.

iamleppert2• 11 years ago

The thing is, you don't have to be party to any of this as an engineer if you don't want to.

There are still many interesting companies working on hard problems, real science, and real engineering. Don't get caught up in working for one of the startup darlings just for the name recognition. Go for what interests you and motivates you, and if given the choice between real technology and some kind of rudimentary "app", go for the real tech. You'll learn a lot more and spend a lot less time dealing with product managers, business people and fighting with incompetent co-workers. You became interested in tech because of your love for solving problems and for making things work, so find a place where you can do that.

When evaluating companies I often ask myself what the business would look like before the age of computers -- if we didn't have smart phones and the Internet, what would the business look like? Would I still want to be working there? What is the actual business? In many cases you'll find it's driving people around, cleaning people's houses, or serving as a glorified bulletin board for services. Would you still want to work there if you removed all the tech? Or is the only reason tech is involved is to serve some ancillary purpose to the business?

richardbatty• 11 years ago

How do you find companies working on important problems? When I look at the London software scene, I mostly find trivial (or dull corporate) web and mobile apps.

Which kinds of industries have software engineers working on real technology problems?

craigyk• 11 years ago

Big, old, "boring" companies. Academia.

noname123• 11 years ago

Just in UK, I can think of Sanger Institute (genomics research), Malaria Consortium (GIS involved in real-time malaria drug resistance monitoring), Oxford Nanopore Technologies (USB stick genome sequencing for clinical diagnosis); The Children's Investment Hedge Fund (used to be the hedge fund arm of the Children's Fund). AstroZeneca and Glaxo also have wet and dry lab spaces with lots of informatics needs. I am positive there are tons more but I am only mostly familiar with the biotech space.

sokoloff2• 11 years ago

I'm not sure how useful that line of inquiry is.

Surely, working for 2001 Amazon isn't just like working for a bookstore nor 2015 Amazon just like working for a catalog retailer.

At some point, the tech is actually the thing. I wouldn't be falling all over myself to work at my company in the 1890's incarnation of it (~printing industry), but I love the 2015 version.

seiji• 11 years ago

Don't get caught up in working for one of the startup darlings just for the name recognition.

I've avoided working for trendy startups, but I know a dozen people in my same age cohort who did go for the trendy startups. Now they are out buying teslas and giving away $10 million to charity just for fun.

Can't be successful from the sidelines.

iamleppert2• 11 years ago

I guess that depends on your definition of "success" and "fulfillment".

louprado• 11 years ago

"And often, paradoxically, despite their privileged backgrounds, they have much less appetite for risk".

Here's my co-founder litmus test: Work this phrase into a conversation, "We're going to be working on our start-up for the next 4 to 6 years..." and if you get cut-off with a response like "No way! We'll get bought-out way before then", then you should either leave the team altogether or bill the team as a consultant. To be clear bill for money not equity.

n0us• 11 years ago

I hate this attitude that the "pretty people" are going to ruin the "party" for the people who were already there. What a gross over generalization not based on any sturdy foundation of reason. The author just feels like companies are worth too much without any experience or justification to make that claim. He hasn't seen the term sheets for these companies, he hasn't been there for investor meetings and board meetings to discuss long term strategy. But people from the upper middle class make a nice target, so he just blames an entire vague socioeconomic group for a problem he can't connect them to. I'm sorry but articles like this are why I sometimes can't take the tech media as seriously as I'd like to.

vonklaus3• 11 years ago

I agree. I don't want to fall prey to the same problems the article does, and fold tech crunch in as a single entity as well as a single sector, but:

It is pretty fucking laughable that an article in techcrunch is decrying the glorification of unicorn / startup culture. What, if not publications like this, created that culture?

This isn't some hyper exclusive off-campus party in college. Shoe companies need backend accounting software. Every company needs technology?

He hasn't seen the term sheets for these companies, he hasn't been there for investor meetings and board meetings to discuss long term strategy

Obviously, one can to some extent predict how "valuable" a company is. But people are pretty fucking quick to write off M & A and VC deals as "bad" or "overvalued".

Paul Graham said something like, 'when I saw how much snapchat was worth I thought wow, it was like someone had measured it and that was the value'. I bet that the team of people and consultants tearing through he books on due diligence, weighing the synergy and value gained by integrating it into the acquiring company, and all of the long term trend analysis, of both companies their unreleased products and long term strategies, have a better picture than me.

vonklaus3• 11 years ago

this article sums up my attitude around a year ago. however, so fucking what. everyone is quick to dismiss theranos but that was a big idea.

the world isn't some binary settlement where technology is either social messaging or von neumann probes.

no one knows to what extent these companies will help humanity. what if the kid who dreamed of building the next fusion reactor got in early with snapchat and cashes out to build his next company?

what if Uber evolves into an automated logostics transportation company, serving as Level 3/Cogent to Amazon's time warner cable.

the world and technology is complex. naivly dismissing "pretty people" for getting into tech is borderline laughable. now more than ever technology is important. more people and capital isn't only good, but straight up fucking inevitable.

so i will support companies who fund big ideas like theranos and clinkle along side these companies i find less than appealing for my personal everyday use.

I am not arrogant enough to predict the future or try and architect it. more people building things is probably good, so i will continue to support that.

edit: I just reread the article. This is the most elitist hipster fucking thing I have seen in a while.

The whole point of the Valley VC culture is to empower founders to change the world in their first at-bat.

What fucking founder was successful on their first go around, with a venture that changed the entire world?

* Traf-O-Data wasn't a big household name, And didn't exactly change the world.[0]

* CL 9 was a novel idea, but the world would largely be the same place without it.[1]

* Zip2 was an online version of the yellow pages. A great way to index information, but not the "big idea" we would encourage founders to do now[2]

* Facebook changed the world and was built by an upper middle class white kid, who possibly wouldn't have moved forward without prompting from the Winkelvoss twins.

Should we discount it because:

* it is a social app?

* it was founded by someone who was upper middle class?

* it was backed by upper class non-technical interlopers?

What do we want to optimize as a society?

I hope people continue building great products. Let's recall that Peter Theil was "an upper middle class paty crasher" by this definition. I think he has added a lot of value to the world.

So let's try to be less elitist as fuck, step back from our naive assumption that we know exactly what the world needs (and if you believe this, run for president, the republicans could really use some organization), and recognize that despite what tech crunch says, people are working on big ideas. They are just harder.

There will be a lot more apps than scalable renewable energy companies, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't have both.

I agree with Jon, yes it is frustrating that these companies aren't huge scientific breakthroughs. I personally have made plenty of snarky critiques of them. However, I am starting to realize that facebook, dropbox, evernote and snapchat add a lot of value to society which is why a lot of fucking people use them. A lot of great companies use slack to collaborate. Facebook allows people to stay connected with the people they may not regularly see. Snapchat let's horny 18 year olds to see nude they may not have otherwise seen. Okay, not super sure how much we need snapchat, but people seem to like it, and that's fine. Etc. So, let people keep building whatever they want. As long as they keep building.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traf-O-Data [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CL_9 [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elon_Musk

sokoloff2• 11 years ago

CL 9 was post-Apple, not a first-time founder endeavor.

vonklaus3• 11 years ago

yeah botched the timeline a bit. Wozniak did awesome stuff before, during and after apple. He is just a great guy with a big heart. I don't want to speak for him, but I think given what I know about his life he would be open to more people getting into technology, in any capacity and from any socio-economic class.

gitah• 11 years ago

Completely agree with you on the author being an arrogant hipster elitist. I was surprised this article was upvoted onto the front page.

Cherry picking the major technology achievements of a span of 100 years and comparing it against current startups in Silicon Valley is simply ridiculous.

venning2• 11 years ago

Can someone please explain this sentence:

Now, it’s true that yesterday’s technology is tomorrow’s tech.

I don't quite grasp the distinction.

Terr_• 11 years ago

It's explained in the quote he's responding to.

venning2• 11 years ago

Thanks. Guess I didn't make the connection.

Seems odd to call out yesterday's technology as non-trivial only to imply that it will become trivial tomorrow, or at least that appears to be the author's logic.

The Culling of the Herd

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