After the end of the startup era

One killer for startups is the weakening of patents. After eBay vs. MercExchange, easy post-grant re-examination, and Seagate[1], the worst-case penalty for infringing a patent is only paying the royalties that would have been paid if a license had been negotiated. So there's no incentive left for big companies to buy technology; they can just steal it.

This is new. All those things changed in the last 15 years. The result is that VCs have gone for market share, not technology. (Or they've gone for pharma, where patents still work.) Until about 2000, Silicon Valley VCs wanted startups to show that they had a strong intellectual property position. That all changed in the first dot-com boom, when it started being about buying market share.

This hurts innovation. Why work on a hard problem?

[1] http://www.fulcrum.com/punitive_damages_are_now/

You can also leverage Google's apis and their expertise. These kind of articles forget about the api economy. Then we have new technologies like "serverless" that radically lower the bar to entry for new business to get into the game. Why did I work for the guy who founded Geocities instead of founding something myself? Up to my neck in studio loans and remember in 1998 you had to cough up $1 million for a starter oracle license to go big, today you can scale as you go. The only thing that will end the startup is a lack of creativity and vision, it keeps getting easier and easier to jump in.

I see other 'startups' that I think are missed by the SV folks. They aren't tech, but may use tech in their startup. I see quite a few of them.

They are people starting their own business. A friend borrowed some money to start a business where he drives a remote control vehicle down pipes to examine them from the inside. The space didn't have much 'local' competition and he was able to spot that, take advantage of it, and now has a dozen employees, has repaid the money, and is seeking to expand his operations. A similar experience was loaning my sibling some money so he could start a plumbing company - except it is more niche and not residential. They use some tech but they aren't tech companies.

It seems to me that the SV pundits see the tech startups while not seeing the guy who does vehicle power washing on-site, the interior decorator that uses 3D modeling and VR, or the folks who opened a diner where they have automated the food ordering process.

"640K ought to be enough for anyone" - Bill Gates, ~1985

> today’s new technologies are complicated, expensive, and favor organizations that have huge amounts of scale and capital already.

That is not a fact of life or act of nature, but to a great degree it is a choice. Decades ago, engineers built many technologies that were conceptually simple, elegant, open, free-as-in-liberty, and hackable - not by accident, but to empower hackers and end-users. Those efforts created the environment, platforms and tools that the startups thrived on. What are today's engineers building for the next generation?

For example, I recently had to learn in-depth how computers boot these days - down in the weeds with ME, TPM, UEFI, SEDs, PXEs, GPT, and more:

First, the complexity of that small step to starting your computer is beyond an individual's comprehension; just one spec was 2,500 pages; many technologies' roles overlap and it's not clear why there is redundancy or how they integrate with each other. Perhaps there is someone who specializes in this narrow field as a full-time job and actually grasps it all, or maybe if I had a year to dedicate to it - but I can't imagine some new teenage hacker mastering it.

Second, much of it is proprietary or at least not free. TPM and ME, for example, are ultimately outside the user's control.

Compare that to the former system of POST - BIOS - MBR - boot loader. I'm not saying change is bad and that we couldn't have improved on it, but clearly nobody thought about making it hackable or empowering end-users.

I'll go a little further and say it reflects - I can't support a causal connection - a broader loss of interest in the 'American Dream', equality of opportunity (or at least an abundance of it for all), and empowering the little guy and underdog. The U.S. also cuts back education and other programs that give opportunity to less advantaged citizens, often with the idea that the powerful should not be hindered by taxes or government. Polls show interest in democracy is slipping, with the US government saying it's not worth promoting abroad (the White House and State Dept both explicitly said it) - democracy is political empowerment of the little guy; everyone gets a vote and is equal. Some political groups even explicitly argue that their group should dominate the others. I'm not starting a political debate; I'm just pointing out that it's a much different outlook.