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After the Gold Rush

techcrunch.com

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Re: After the Gold Rush

#51

Post by willholloway »

There is truth here, but remember that the age of the intelligent networked machine is just beginning.

Look at the YC classes. They are very different from 2005. You can't get rich making a site like reddit today. YC is going international, with X for Y country businesses.

I was talking to a friend with a startup in Indonesia. In Asia its like 1998.

I think we are just at the end of the easy social/mobile revolution in the West and on the cusp of the next robotics/AI/IoT revolution.

And the same process that created cheap and easy tools for software, the same process that dropped the cost of starting a SaaS business 10x will happen for robotics/ai/IoT.

Its already relatively cheap and easy to prototype and fabricate things like low power bluetooth wearables.

Computers have just gotten tiny, low power, wireless and cheap enough to be disposable. These devices are about to be everywhere.

This is not the end of the tech startup gold rush. It's time to learn AI and hardware prototyping.

Re: After the Gold Rush

#53

Post by nostrademons »

crdoconnor wrote: post #50
Periodic wrote: post #42

As someone who has worked at Google for a few years, I can't agree with the author's characterization of tech behemoths. While they have embraced the start-up mode of doing things for some new projects and are very free with their investing, their core business is everything you'd expect from a big business. I'm not sure it's possible to grow as large as Google, Apple or Facebook and remain agile. The product and org…

>Of course, if you look too disruptive they'll probably just buy you with their mountain of cash. Or just copy you. Even if they are 10-20% worse, they have a bigger, cheaper distribution channel than you which they can stuff their product into.

That's only if that distribution channel is your only access to the customer. If you have other alternatives, you can (and often will) still win.

Google Videos vs YouTube. Orkut vs Facebook vs Google+. Facebook status messages vs Twitter. Google Offers vs Groupon. Google Flights vs Kayak or Hipmunk. iMessage vs Whatsapp. Google Local vs Yelp.

There're plenty of examples where the big company came out with a competitor (often getting to market first, eg Google Video or Orkut), stuffed it through the distribution channel, but lost to a startup that nailed the user experience. Having a big channel doesn't matter if your conversion rate sucks.

Re: After the Gold Rush

#54

Post by davemel37 »

willholloway wrote: post #51

There is truth here, but remember that the age of the intelligent networked machine is just beginning. Look at the YC classes. They are very different from 2005. You can't get rich making a site like reddit today. YC is going international, with X for Y country businesses. I was talking to a friend with a startup in Indonesia. In Asia its like 1998. I think we are just at the end of the easy social/mobile revolution…

> In Asia its like 1998

I can't speak such a broad generalization, but I noticed a learning curve/ trajectory of how people perceive opportunity online and the ideas they get excited about. It seems to depend when someone truly dove into internet and used it for everyday needs.

I only have anecdotal evidence to this, but I really think that most follow are following the same trajectory/learning curve about opportunity online and people are currently in place across that curve. We still have fewer than half the world online, and billions who are using the internet today the way we used it in 1994.

This is my theory for why old school domainers stopped buying domain names for a premium in 2007, and yet there are still people today paying a ridiculous amount of money for domain names, and thousands more investing in them like it's still a gold rush. That gravy train seemed to dry up in the last decade, yet somehow new people enter the market and fall in love. I bet there are still penny auctions making money and daily deal sites emerging, despite those trends passing years and years ago.

Those on the cutting edge need to remember that they don't reflect the bulk of the world, there is lagging opportunity for at least a decade in every space that seems to be owned.

Re: After the Gold Rush

#55

Post by cornellwright »

Oh no you have to do something new to get rich.

There's still plenty of money, talent, and success out there for new, good ideas. It being hard to fund the same old thing again and again is more of a feature than a bug.

And the argument about the last few YC classes - it takes years to see who the stars are. I remember seeing one of the founders of Stripe speak when they were in YC. It wasn't clear they were going anywhere. What they were doing was cool, but there wasn't exactly lots of hype about it. Their success only looks obvious in hindsight.

Re: After the Gold Rush

#56

Post by udkl »

Periodic wrote: post #42

As someone who has worked at Google for a few years, I can't agree with the author's characterization of tech behemoths. While they have embraced the start-up mode of doing things for some new projects and are very free with their investing, their core business is everything you'd expect from a big business. I'm not sure it's possible to grow as large as Google, Apple or Facebook and remain agile. The product and org…

> "The big companies may be innovating on the edges, but their established products are all ripe for disruption."

It looks like a cycle. Come up with new product with a small team, add more employees, add more managers, add more cruft, slow down.

Then a startup comes along, moving faster, innovating faster, disrupting until it grows and starts to add more employees, add more managers, add more cruft, slow down.

And Then a startup comes along ......

Re: After the Gold Rush

#58

Post by nostrademons »

diminish wrote: post #25
roymurdock wrote: post #7

I like to scan these articles for numbers before reading. If I don't see any, I exit out. If you're going to talk about financial/economic phenomena please at least conduct a modicum of quantitative research and give us some concrete data to discuss, not just opinions in a void.

There's maybe one small number observation, I m not sure if it's correct as there maybe high growth YC companies which will soon pass those 3/4. "In 2011, Y Combinator’s poster-child alumni were — already — AirBNB, Dropbox, and Stripe. Can you think of any Y Combinator companies from the last five years as well-positioned today as those Big Three were then? Maybe Instacart, if their unit economics work. That’s it."

That observation has a huge amount of hindsight bias. AirBnB was founded in 2006, DropBox was founded in 2007, and Stripe was founded in 2010. What did the ideal startup look like in 2007? It was one of:

"A social network for X, like Facebook"

"A social news site for X, like Digg"

"A way to massively improve your e-mail experience, like GMail"

In other words, people always chase the massive startup that got popular about 3 years previously. This article is pretty much on-time if it's holding up AirBNB, DropBox, and Stripe - those are the massive startups that got popular about 3-4 years ago.

But in 2007, these were most decidedly not the hot industries to go into. Hotels were a done deal: Hilton, Marriott, Holiday Inn, and others chains owned it, and who would think a tiny team could take them on? Filesharing was an incredibly crowded market with 20-30 players, and in any case, if it got popular Google was going to crush them with Google Drive. PayPal owned payments; everybody knew it was a regulated industry with strong network effects, so why bother to compete?

Re: After the Gold Rush

#59

Post by olivermarks »

TechCrunch, the over confident tabloid reporters of hype who only a few weeks ago were all breathless about 'unicorns', are now swinging the pendulum to the other extreme. I'm in the bay area and there is a new realism for sure, but the idea that low buck entrepreneurialism is 'over' is absurd.

Most of the current wave of tech's origins are in the Web 2.0 'read/write' web that came after the dot com pump and dump funding fiasco...twitter et al grew out of the ashes of the last vc and wall street debacle. we are a similar inflection point IMO, where honest innovation will be more important than megabuck funding fests...

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