I rarely get such a viscerally negative reaction to reading something as I did reading this article.
The party is not over. It’s never over. There are always always always more ideas, great businesses waiting to be built, and wonderful opportunities for clever people.
Of course the “obvious” apps/website have been built — do you know why? Because they only seem obvious in retrospect - most weren’t obvious at the time they were built. And even if they were, implementing was harder than you’d think and adoption was even harder.
Argh this frustrates me so much.
HNers: Don’t give up - don’t throw in the towel, and definitely don’t assume there are no more ideas to build with a good brain and a keyboard at your disposal.
I had a negative reaction to your negative reaction because I think you are mischaracterizing his argument. I don't think he's saying "you're guaranteed to fail, just give up", but rather the expectations of "valuation to effort" is skewed by the 2002-2014 time period, and with that I wholeheartedly agree. If anything, I would argue it would be a better startup community if people had realistic expectations about how much effort hard things take, instead of yet another food delivery app.
Ok that's a fair point, and I just read the article again with this in mind. I understand where you (and the author) are coming from.
My strong reaction came from "all the obvious ideas are taken" and I still think you can build a billion-dollar company from your bedroom.
I actually agree with the author that the YC model of accomplishing something huge and meaningful and hockey-stick-like in 12 weeks is unrealistic. (I actually think it's been unrealistic from the start but that's a different argument for a different time).
Thanks for pointing this out! The core of my response still stands but I see the nuance of the author's post now.
I don't see the point of just not addressing the article. It quite specifically argues that as technology isn't emerging any more so startups can't commercialize those emerging technologies.
Many of these companies were absolutely obvious, just hard to get right. "Everyone" were creating social networks at one point when Myspace was big and Facebook hadn't yet won. And music streaming after Napster, or "mobile blogging" as an Instagram predecessor, or video streaming with Flash, or ... .
Of course it was hard to get it right, but that is why you had a shot to make something with "a good brain and a keyboard". Many companies who didn't make it all the way still sold on some merit of technology. Many VC firms aren't looking for that any more, but things like marketing and sales.
Niantic - founded 2010, first launch in 2012 (Ingress) then Pokemon Go in 2016.
Quip - founded 2015, acquired by Salesforce for ~800mm.
All examples of ~multi-billion dollar companies founded in Silicon Valley in the past few years solving real problems and scaling fast.
I can keep listing more but I think my point has been made.
Sure the market is more mature, but there's still tremendous potential out there and there always will be. It's too convenient to think all the easy problems have been solved (but yes, many have) and that the big guys will crush you (but when is that not a possibility?).
I think this article is just pessimistic with no substance. It's quite fashionable to be pessimistic about Silicon Valley.
the article specifically points out the period of 2002 to 2014. You've listed 3 from 2015, but the article didn't sound too fixated on the year 2014 so I think some wiggle room should be allowed.
But please, I would love to see your list from 2016/2017. That would be very interesting.
It's easy to choose an arbitrary timescale to fit a viewpoint. The author chose a massive timescale from 2002 to 2014 (presenting it as if that period of activity were simply unremarkable) - and then made a bold, unsubstantiated claim. I'm not going to give the author any more wiggle room, sorry.
I listed multiple BILLION dollar opportunities created in the just the past few years during the tail end of that author's range. I think this shows that the author's argument is weak at best and completely unsubstantiated at worst.
The ones founded in 2016/2017 haven't had time to mature yet. I suspect we'll see more breakouts hit ~$1B valuations soon enough.
But sure I'll give you examples:
* Brex was founded in 2017 and is now worth $2B.
* Whatever you think of scooter companies, Lime and Bird were both founded in 2017, and are now $1B+ companies.
* Nuro was founded in 2016 and is a $2.7B+ company.
I agree with your overall viewpoint, that the timeframe is pretty arbitrary. And after all, it's kind of a catch 22 to say "It's going to take a lot more effort to become a billion dollar company now" and then in the same breath say "Aha, see, no billion dollar companies from the past 3-4 years."
At the same time, I strongly caution interpreting any VC-funding-round-extrapolated-total-valuation as a true valuation.
VC valuations are based on what they estimate they can pump a company up to before dumping it on the open market. Not on the value or long term viability of the company.
This seems unnecessarily pessimistic. I mean they're still funding amazingly dumb ideas like pogo sticks as a service right now. One day, a startup will resist getting acqui-hired just like Google resisted getting acqui-hired by Yahoo and it will disrupt its incumbent. But I'm guessing it won't be a company focused on pogo sticks as a service. As for the harder and more beneficial challenges out there, the Silicon Valley MVP model never worked for them in the first place because they are hard and they take time. I'm not seeing the vision to go after those problems emerging in any serious way yet.
> Today I would argue that you should expect it to take five years to build anything that matters.
Setting aside for the moment whether this is true, if you're unwilling to invest 5 years of your time into a business, I would argue you're not committed enough to it for it to succeed. I suspect investors will think similarly.
Perhaps, but setting aside whether or not that's true completely ignores the point of the article, which is that all of the low-hanging fruit has already been plucked.
I predict the hardware device startup party is just getting started. Hardware today is where Linux was 20 years ago. Once people catch on to the shift, traditional manufacturing companies won’t have a chance of keeping up.
"All the before mentioned unicorns are solving a fairly narrow band of problems around connecting people and services and extracting arbitrage from existing things."
I upvoted because I think we should have this discussion, but I disagree strongly. As an example, I was reading recently about the growth of SAAS companies. Lookup the stocks OKTA, WDAY, TWLO, MDB, SHOP, etc. They have grown hockey stick in the last 2-3 years.
In general I think the opportunities in non-direct-to-consumer business will be great in the short term (there are a lot of inefficiencies that are hard to solve in-house by the big corps).
> there are a lot of inefficiencies that are hard to solve in-house by the big corps
The problem is that it's much harder to sell to big companies than it is to sell to consumers. While a consumer may be receptive to an unreliable app with MVP-level functionality, a big company isn't going to risk the stability of its business operations on that quality of product. They're going to want stability, scalability and support, and they won't want to deal with a startup that's at high risk of not existing a year from now. One exception would be if the startup offered a unique product that couldn't be replicated internally. But if all they offer is the promise of better efficiency, what's the point of risking your business on it?
If a startup has survived long enough to achieve this kind of stability (like the already-public companies you cited), then it has a better chance selling to big corporations. But it's going to take a significant amount funding and growth for them to get to that point.
The companies that are seem to be winning the most at selling services to big companies are huge, established businesses like AWS, Microsoft and Google.
It's important to notice parallels though. For instance, I have no good, novel startup ideas now, just like in 2003, 2008, and 2011. Oh wait, that's been true every year :(
> Yet our culture still think its ten years ago. Everyone expects a release in 6 months, and 20% month over month growth at scale
It was never the case that this was trivial or easy. During the time period he lists (2002-2014), it was extremely difficult to reach mainstream success.
"The party" is as much in swing as it ever was. Which is to say if you're rich or lucky you get to be part of it. It was never easy to have a megahit.
Maybe read the last paragraph, too. He especially talks about meaningful software:
> I want to change the world, but real problems are hard. There are huge opportunities, in transportation, energy, computing, healthcare, manufacturing, but none of them can be solved on the kind of timelines and expectations that the startup community have. So many companies I see have great ideas, but aren't realistic and serious enough to realize them. I worry that we wont solve these solvable problems, because everyone just want to party like its 2009.
I agree with his overall message - it's hard (and takes time) to actually do something valuable. And I agree that we're in an age where iterative startups ("Uber for X") outnumber innovative startups.
But there is just so much wrong with this article. One of the most egregious errors is the assertion that the conditions which enabled unicorns are no longer present.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
The only accurate assertion of the article - that it's genuinely hard to add value - was already obvious.
It's a modern Version of:
"everything that can be invented has been invented."
Charles H. Duell, 1899 suggested to close the patent offices. As we know today, he was wrong then.
That said, there is a point in the article that, some longer term investments are probably just not happening because a big amount of the investments is going to "short term VC gambling". E.g. personally I'm also not very happy with the little progress that robotics made electro mechanically in the last 40 years...
I guess that investing into the next messenger app to topple the current #1 is a) more likely to succeed and b) has an average return rate below 5 years. Sad but I don't see how that is going to change anytime soon. They will keep innovating.
The party is not over. It’s never over. There are always always always more ideas, great businesses waiting to be built, and wonderful opportunities for clever people.
Of course the “obvious” apps/website have been built — do you know why? Because they only seem obvious in retrospect - most weren’t obvious at the time they were built. And even if they were, implementing was harder than you’d think and adoption was even harder.
Argh this frustrates me so much.
HNers: Don’t give up - don’t throw in the towel, and definitely don’t assume there are no more ideas to build with a good brain and a keyboard at your disposal.