41–50 of 304 posts
This is a tautology and reflective of the mindset that produces articles like this one. There is only one Zuckerberg. Unicorns are by definition rare, and disrupting entrenched business interests is rare because they are entrenched. That's what it means.
Extrapolating scientifically from the sample of 1, it would seem that a small loss of excitement over trying new services and apps over the larger population would be enough to prevent the fabled hockey stick growth. No hockey sticks -> no unicorns -> less VC money for new startup -> articles about the death of startups -> comments on HN about articles about the death of startups
"Where are all the startups? U.S. entrepreneurship near 40-year low"
http://money.cnn.com/2016/09/08/news/economy/us-startups-nea...
In recent weeks, this issue has been discussed several times on Hacker News. I recall someone recently wrote a comment and said, "We should distinguish between new businesses, like a pizza shop, and real startups, that might become big companies." But why exclude a little pizza shop that might become the next PizzaHut or Dominos or Little Caesars? During the real startup era, in the mid 20th century, there were hundreds of successful pizza startups that turned into big companies. If we say "We won't count small pizza places because they can not possibly become big companies that get listed on Wall Street" then we are simply assuming our conclusions. If we exclude all of the categories which were once hot, and which should be hot right now, and only focus on the handful of sectors that still have some life in them, then we can end up believing that the era of startups is still happening right now, but we are blinding ourselves to reality.
When the economy is healthy, small businesses, with the right leadership, can make the jump to the big time. It is from the frothy, primordial soup of little mom and pop shops that new giants emerge. Two examples off the top of my head: both McDonalds and Barnes & Noble were small family businesses, for decades, before new management took over and found a way to turn them into giants.
Focusing on the tech sector, and acting as if it is the only sector that matters, allows us to ignore the sclerosis that has crept over the USA economy since the end of the post-war boom, back in 1973. We should take a step back and look at the long-term trend. The economy has been increasingly sick for 40 years now.
We should ask ourselves, where does this trend end? How large do the monopolies grow? Will there ever be an era when the USA returns to creating new businesses at a rate that would have been normal for most of the 20th century?
The world does not need more Mark Zuckerbergs, it needs millions of small and mid-size businesses working on the build out of low carbon energy sources. Converting the world electricity supply to run off renewable sources will require tens of trillions of dollars of investment over a period of decades. It's not a small opportunity, but unlike the app economy, it's not a winner take all market. This is mostly a good t…
The world does not need more Mark Zuckerbergs, it needs millions of small and mid-size businesses working on the build out of low carbon energy sources. Converting the world electricity supply to run off renewable sources will require tens of trillions of dollars of investment over a period of decades. It's not a small opportunity, but unlike the app economy, it's not a winner take all market. This is mostly a good t…
I agree the future is built on small businesses. But to have the most impact on the environment we could all just stop eating so much meat.
Sounds promising. Maybe you can build a small or medium sized organization around trying to make that happen.
I've already lost a few bets on the future. I didn't see Uber/Lyft although I thoroughly hated taxis. What do I know?
> Big businesses and executives, rather than startups and entrepreneurs, will own the next decade; today’s graduates are much more likely to work for Mark Zuckerberg than follow in his footsteps This is a tautology and reflective of the mindset that produces articles like this one. There is only one Zuckerberg. Unicorns are by definition rare, and disrupting entrenched business interests is rare because they are entr…
It only seems like everyone is a founder because that's how it was in SV. It only seems like every stopped creating startups because that's how it is in SV. But like everything else in the world, trends start at the coasts and work their way inward, to the point where SV tech growth may be stagnating or declining, but Midwest startups are booming. And if the Midwest is firing up, African startups are virtually exploding.
Big businesses have always owned every decade of capitalism, and that's not going to change. Economies of scale is too hard to turn away from. But startups aren't dying, they're just taking on less sexy, harder problems that don't impact SV. So of course SV thinks entrepreneurship is dying.
I feel like this is the public's idea of "iot," while I've learned after a year of working for an iot stack provider that the real "internet of things" explosion is found in places nobody looks except the procurement guys - the stadium lights, the refrigerators, the factory doors, etc. Small, single-minded decided sending one or two bytes of data, spread en masse through an industrial area.
So 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 "…
Many thing had to come together from 1975 to 1995 to enable the things you're referencing. The list you made is not impressive versus the past, it's normal.
What happened from 1995 to 2015 that was more important than the Internet, transistor, microprocessor, router, DRAM or the GUI? Good luck resolving that debate.
Many thing had to to come together from 1955 to 1975 to....
I don't know how old you are and how familiar you might be with the prior half century plus in tech, but we could be here all day listing the incredible inventions and leaps forward in tech during each of those 20 year periods of time.
Nothing has changed fundamentally about what's occurring in tech. The process continues as before. Each new generation thinks what has happened during its era is particularly special or unique versus the past. We see the same generational bias in most everything, from music to politics.
Clickbait. ML won’t require mass amounts of data forever. One-shot learning will get solved.
> One-shot learning will get solved. This is nonsense. I would challenge you to show any few-shot learning work that isn't basically some form of transfer learning in disguise. Few-shot learning is super useful if you're in a position where you don't have much data, but will never compete with huge stacks of data.
"I would challenge you to show proof of X" in ML is an empty challenge when the technology is in its infancy. You might as well say "I challenge you to stream HD video over the internet" in 1989. Theoretically possible but technically impossible for the time. We proved it possible as tech improved, though.
The problem with cynicism is it costs nothing but still makes you look like an expert.