Tim O'Reilly: Stop throwing sheep, do something worthy

http://news.cnet.com/8301-17939_109-10045321-2.html

by raghus • 18 years ago

79 81 18 years ago

news.cnet.com

ivankirigin2• 18 years ago

In his Ignite Boston talk he basically said "startups are not where it's at. do something that matters"

hugh3• 18 years ago

Startups, or only frivolous (sheep-throwing) startups?

ivankirigin2• 18 years ago

It was an overly broad statement, for sure

dfranke3• 18 years ago

I think Tim is behind the curve on this one and startups have already stepped up to this challenge. Startups that create social networks or other semi-frivolous toys have already had a stigma attached to them for at least a year now.

quasimojo7• 18 years ago

tell me a startup that is not creating a frivolous toy

dfranke3• 18 years ago

Well, to choose the one that most obviously addresses Tim's challenge, CO2Stats.

DaniFong6• 18 years ago

We're aiming to create practical, beautiful, inexpensive compressed air powered vehicles.

davidw• 18 years ago

With Hecl, I'm trying to make it easier for people to write programs for mobile phones. That is potentially a lot of people and a lot of programs.

acangiano• 18 years ago

> tell me a startup that is not creating a frivolous toy

https://www.23andme.com/

azharcs3• 18 years ago

I totally agree with O'Reilly, Companies like Slide and RockYou do not deserve half a billion valuation and I am pretty much sure Max Levchin can do better than make social apps for Social-Networks.

tptacek4• 18 years ago

How do you decide what's worth half a billion dollars? If a social network app will drive half a billion dollars worth of advertising profit over N years, then it's worth half a billion dollars, even if the same effort is better spent combating malaria.

jwilliams• 18 years ago

I think he recognises that - the article quotes him as saying "I really believe in markets, and I believe in the power we all have to build great companies that change things.".

azharcs3• 18 years ago

Do you really think SuperPoke or Top Friends has the potential to make a Billion, I really don't think so. Throwing a sheep or sending a drink is of no value, it might excite someone in short-term but it really has no value in long-term business sense.

brandonkm• 18 years ago

Advertising revenues on social networks have historically been pretty poor.

I think what O'Reilly was getting at was people forming their startups that essentially chase the latest trends in what now amounts to a bubble. He makes a valid argument and we could all be looking back at what he said in the future and only realize then just how spot on he was.

snorkel• 18 years ago

I am proud of not knowing what "throwing sheep" meant because it is Facebook related afterall.

hugh3• 18 years ago

Do you also enjoy telling people that you don't watch television?

Eliezer2• 18 years ago

Television rots the brain. Only watch anime on your computer monitor.

iigs• 18 years ago

If the iBeer thing is what I think it is, it's an application that will find you the nearest store to purchase beer when you tap the glass with your finger.

I don't see how that's some scathing critique of the devolution of society, moreso than the phone itself at least.

People can ignore what's going on in the world and contribute to the "downfall of society" or choose to live in a perpetual state of guilt about the success that the "first world" lives in at the moment, neither has a moral high ground. Your attitude doesn't matter -- but your contribution does.

The fact that the US is losing its edge in technology has as much to do with the rest of the world catching up or exceeding where we are. That's not cause for tears and somber attitudes, that's the third world gaining prosperity and health, and the second world joining the first world party. The luddites and idiots have been a problem as long as there has been humanity; that they've been in a leadership role in the US is a minor anomoly at best, and a self solving problem at worst.

I'm almost the perfect pessimist, but even I'm seeing the glass as half full at this point in history. Web 2.0's pretty overrated on the whole though -- maybe he could reclaim the conference time for something more useful.

dmose• 18 years ago

No I think he's talking about the app that uses the accelerometer to simulate chugging a beer. That's it.

Eliezer2• 18 years ago

I think a good rule of thumb at this point is to be extremely skeptical of anything advertising supported. If people won't pay you, are you really creating enough value to society to justify awarding yourself any warm fuzzies?

I suppose exceptions could be made for services like Google, which people would pay $1000/year for if that's what all the providers charged, but which happen to be advertising-supported.

"Make something people want enough to pay for." Now there's a terrifying heuristic.

nostrademons2• 18 years ago

This was exactly the common wisdom in 01/02. And then the economy turned around, and ad-supported was all the rage again.

So you're right - now. But if you've got enough cash to wait out the downturn, ad-supported businesses could be very profitable. It's always a mistake to try and extrapolate the present out indefinitely...

anthonyrubin• 18 years ago

I don't think the question is whether or not you can run a profitable ad-supported business. The question is whether your product truly matters if people wouldn't pay for it.

I believe there are ad-supported products that matter, but I'm tired of being advertised to. I will pay for good products.

dejb• 18 years ago

> I suppose exceptions could be made for services like Google, which people would pay $1000/year for if that's what all the providers charged

Nobody would have paid $1000 a year for google. If they had started of trying to charge users then nobody would know about them.

Most classes of online consumer apps are dominated by advertising supported models - search, email, social networking, social news, forums, productivity, etc. The transaction cost/hassle associated with paying is too large for most users to bother with.

maurycy• 18 years ago

"Make something people need enough to pay for."

Even better.

wensing2• 18 years ago

We've made way more through voluntary payments than ads.

13ren• 18 years ago

If we're headed for a depression: what business types flourished during the Great Depression?

Is it really true that facilitating laughter and connection isn't worthy?

hellfishburnsy• 18 years ago

Entertainment flourished. People needed a way to forget their troubles, even if it's temporary.

yters• 18 years ago

Escapist entertainment only helps proliferate troubles. We need entertainment that improves us too. Classically, it was thought the two go hand in hand.

quasimojo7• 18 years ago

what business types flourished during the Great Depression?

repo men

nostrademons2• 18 years ago

Alcohol & cigarettes. Board games. Movies. Also automobiles, radio, defense.

bokonist5• 18 years ago

The other day I had a crazy realization. If you add up the actual labor time required to create a lifetime's worth of standard goods and services, you get something like 5-10 man years. You can do something "worthy" that makes humans more productive, but since we are already so productive it doesn't make a huge difference. The $64,000 question is, if technology has increased our productivity so much over the past 50 years, why are we actually working more hours, and liking our jobs less? Why aren't we all retiring at 30 to do what we love?

alexkay• 18 years ago

Because "standard goods and services" are redefined as productivity increases. 20 years ago we couldn't afford half the stuff that is "standard" now.

quasimojo7• 18 years ago

AMEN. go into any food bank and ask the "clients" how many of them have cable tv and cell phones with data plans

bokonist5• 18 years ago

I'm taking that into account. HDTV's, laptops, iPods, etc, don't take many man hours to produce. My point was that the man years of labor necessary to support a comfortable, modern standard of living are actually quite few.

quasimojo7• 18 years ago

The $64,000 question is, if technology has increased our productivity so much over the past 50 years, why are we actually working more hours than ever, and liking our jobs less?

because we are donkeys who fetishize work. pretty much the whole theme of this site is work fetishization.

aditya• 18 years ago

Here's the video: http://blip.tv/play/AbTEA4a8DQ

quasimojo7• 18 years ago

the market will sort it out. have any of the yc guys gotten rich lately? in the end, no one but the franciscans is really interested in a vow of poverty.

beyond seed capital it doesn't even seem that rockyou and slide are swimming in cash. from yelp to loopt to twitter...at some point it will be put up or shut up on the revenue side.

wensing2• 18 years ago

This summary is more robust: http://greensear.ch/2008/09/18/tim-oreilly-keynote-at-the-we...

And I found out through a Google Alert that O'Reilly mentioned Stormpulse.

rgrieselhuber• 18 years ago

In reading some of the comments here, I wonder if O'Reilly's point is being addressed?

Most of the focus in the comments is on what makes a viable business model (ad-supported vs. pay-for-use) or a rational valuation (is Slide really worth half a billion?), but my reading made me think that O'Reilly was trying to get people focus on something bigger, specifically, is what you're working on worthwhile?

Like, if you got hit by a bus tomorrow, will you consider your life well-spent to have built that sheep thrower when you could have been doing something else?

bbgm• 18 years ago

He was definitely emphasizing a focus on something "bigger" and a shift away from many of the current crop of apps/startups. Can't say I disagree with him either. There are so many smart people out there. We can definitely do more.

jamescoops• 18 years ago

he is echoing bubblegeneration.com

thomasmallen• 18 years ago

You can't funnel creativity. For every satellite we send to Mars, there will be 20,000 things like SuperPoke and iBeer, and that's not a problem.

time_management• 18 years ago

Amen.

For all the buzz about "Facebook apps", has anyone looked at most of these things? Bug-ridden, ugly, utter shit. Facebook is slouching toward the Gomorrah of clutter. I hope something better comes along. I never liked Facebook (originally Thefacebook, lulz-on-a-vomit-pie) or that Zuckerberg clown, and I only use it because my friends do.

Sheep-throwing is a case of the exception attempting to drive the rule. SuperPoke is a mediocre idea that has achieved some measure of viral success. It makes "success" (high user count) look easy, and that's a catchy idea to many people. Does the "Million Dollar Homepage" really scale? Of course not, but it's an attractive idea that some kid out there can make $1m from a mediocre, one-flash concept.

With the right infrastructure and some luck, mediocre ideas can lead to smashing success, even reliably. Take the board game Monopoly. The design of the game is quite primitive; not nearly on the level of Settlers of Catan, much less Tigris and Euphrates or Puerto Rico. But mass-producing and marketing a board game during the Great Depression was not easy, and there was a high barrier to entry, so the designer who was able to surmount this barrier was able to collect. Now that the barrier to entry for most ideas is low, the mediocre ideas that achieve lasting success are going to be very rare.

In terms of the money and talent being wasted on mediocre ideas, one source of this problem is inherent to the VC culture. MBAs, by definition, are risk-averse people. It's an incredibly risk-averse move to trade two years and $100,000 (if you have, or can borrow, the money) for an assurance of elevated career status. Elite MBA programs are, compared to similar law, medical, or PhD programs, extremely unselective, and getting an MBA is a way to reach the executive level by (wait for it) schmoozing and taking classes-- in other words, without accomplishing or risking anything. To the extent that most VCs are elite MBAs, of course they're going to be throwing their money after me-too social networking sites, which can be compared to other such sites on paper-- rather than original ideas that only the marketplace can evaluate. Investing money in social networking and "Web 2.0" is like buying the proverbial IBM, for which nobody was ever fired.

HeyLaughingBoy• 18 years ago

In a way, I hate to say it because I'm the kind of person who always thinks that people should do with their time or resources whatever they damn well please. BUT I wonder the same thing all the time: why are all these smart people spending their effort on yet another social/media website when there are so many other profitable or meaningful businesses to start.

ojbyrne• 18 years ago

While reading the part - "and certainly aren't helping the environment by distributing tons of press kits and swag--not to mention flying in hundreds of attendees in a massive spurt of carbon emissions." - I got the feeling that the author wanted to continue on to say O'Reilly makes his money selling dead trees, but stopped short.

Tichy• 18 years ago

So basically, creating games is not worthy? How about creating art, or creating music? Writing novels?

Tim O'Reilly: Stop throwing sheep, do something worthy

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