If the smartphone boom was “2007-2016” it’s premature to claim nothing is next. It’s too soon to say “there is no such revolution en route”, when we had one practically yesterday!
After the end of the startup era
21–30 of 304 posts
Re: After the end of the startup era
#22The evidence is likely in the data housed by Y Combinator, 500 Startups, and others in their market. Chart the statistical mean valuation of each cohort by year since graduation and see if that mean is changing. If Evans is correct, the mean should be declining for each successive cohort. Alternatively, since the number of funded startups seems to be increasing, you may prefer to look at total valuation over time sin…
> 'there are no good startup ideas left in this technology era'
The low-hanging fruit has been thoroughly picked, 'tis all
Re: After the end of the startup era
#23I don’t think it’s the end of the startup era at all. It might be the end of startup hype ending on itself, with valuations not tight to reality and companies without business.
Re: After the end of the startup era
#24I agree with this premise. I knew it was over about 2 years ago when I noticed that about half of new startups were built to sell to other startups, or to serve the existing startup market in someway. That’s a sign of saturation. Another paradigm shift in media (like recorded sound, recorded video, radio, tv, computing, web, and mobile) is what’s needed to produce another startup boom. It all comes down to media—�—th…
Money as a medium, from McLuhan's Understanding Media, as an encouragement to think of cryptocurrency as a medial paradigm shift...
“Money talks” because money is a metaphor, a transfer, and a bridge. Like words and language, money is a storehouse of communally achieved work, skill, and experience. Money, however, is also a specialist technology like writing; and as writing intensifies the visual aspect of speech and order, and as the clock visually separates time from space, so money separates work from the other social functions. Even today money is a language for translating the work of the farmer into the work of the barber, doctor, engineer, or plumber. As a vast social metaphor, bridge, or translator, money—like writing—speeds up exchange and tightens the bonds of interdependence in any community. It gives great spatial expansion and control to political organizations, just as writing does, or the calendar.
Re: After the end of the startup era
#25I agree with this premise. I knew it was over about 2 years ago when I noticed that about half of new startups were built to sell to other startups, or to serve the existing startup market in someway. That’s a sign of saturation. Another paradigm shift in media (like recorded sound, recorded video, radio, tv, computing, web, and mobile) is what’s needed to produce another startup boom. It all comes down to media—�—th…
VR/AR fits that bill. It's just that no one has nailed the form factor and hardware yet so that it can reach mass adoption.
Re: After the end of the startup era
#26So the premise is that the startup era is ending: > ...because we’ve all lived through back-to-back massive worldwide hardware revolutions — the growth of the Internet, and the adoption of smartphones — we erroneously think another one is around the corner, and once again, a few kids in a garage can write a little software to take advantage of it. [...] But there is no such revolution en route... Then it says: > It i…
Well, the argument that 1995 through 2015 was a cycle completely different from whatever the next one will be, is not without merit. I mean, it is easy to forget, but many, many things had to come together at one time in order for this to pop off like it did: * high speed internet * widespread consumer demand for high speed internet and services * multi-core, low-power hardware that gave us smartphones and cheapish "…
The recent past does appear very special but I wouldn't discount the near future either. e.g. the tech for AlphaGo was made by a startup.
In any case I took the piece at it's title's face value, where startups are nowhere near over. Unicorns shouldn't really factor into that.
Re: After the end of the startup era
#27> It is widely accepted that the next wave of important technologies consists of AI, drones, AR/VR, cryptocurrencies, self-driving cars, and the "Internet of Things." While I agree with a lot of this analysis, the fact that the author seems not to understand the difference between cryptocurrency and blockchain doesn't exactly signal credibility in this domain.
I think each one of those platforms are growing rapidly. So what if they haven't hit critical mass yet? Each one has that potential. What are we looking at then, a few years before one or several of those become as big as mobile?
Re: After the end of the startup era
#28The evidence is likely in the data housed by Y Combinator, 500 Startups, and others in their market. Chart the statistical mean valuation of each cohort by year since graduation and see if that mean is changing. If Evans is correct, the mean should be declining for each successive cohort. Alternatively, since the number of funded startups seems to be increasing, you may prefer to look at total valuation over time sin…
I think there is something to the notion that we have for the time exhausted the low-hanging fruit produced by smartphone market penetration. There are still plenty of good and potentially extremely lucrative startup ideas, but the untapped market potential will not come from taking advantage of mobile alone.
Re: After the end of the startup era
#29No one wants to be called the next Yahoo, so even a whiff of competition means the startup gets acquired. This considering FAANG companies have so much cash on their books, not to mention ease at which credit can be had.
Re: After the end of the startup era
#30The evidence is likely in the data housed by Y Combinator, 500 Startups, and others in their market. Chart the statistical mean valuation of each cohort by year since graduation and see if that mean is changing. If Evans is correct, the mean should be declining for each successive cohort. Alternatively, since the number of funded startups seems to be increasing, you may prefer to look at total valuation over time sin…
This reminds me of when Pando went to Demo Day and saw no interesting companies and a bunch of knock offs https://pando.com/2013/03/26/y-combinator-demo-day-2013-stil.... They completely missed Zenefits, Teespring, and a few others.
I’m not convinced that the dominant YC companies looked obviously dominant at their early stages; they only seem dominant in retrospect.
As for why the giant companies at YC are still the dominant winners, it’s because the winners just keep growing. We don’t have a sense of scale; when Airbnb was a $500m company it was YC’s poster child. Now Airbnb is worth many billion dollars, and of course it still is the poster child, while companies like LendUp are valued at $500m but are not even talked about.
It’s not that because YC and startups are less successful, it’s that some are so incredibly successful you stop paying attention to the successful ones.
If the measure is valuations coming out of YC, Airbnb raised at a $3m valuation. A lot of YC companies raised $3m at a $14m+ valuation, but that’s more an indication of the market than of the likelihood of success of those companies.