11–20 of 65 posts
"blitzscaling isn’t really a recipe for success but rather survivorship bias masquerading as a strategy." That says it all. Really, that's how YC works - fail fast and cheap, profit from the survivors. Great for VCs, not so much for the cannon fodder. "We have reserves."
The fundamental problem with capitalism (not just in silicon valley) is that access to capital is what defines winners and losers. Of course I'm being simplistic and there will always be underdog stories, but the reason any company becomes as big as it is, is capital, plain and simple. The immediate effect of gaining massive capital is tremendous. Outcompeting for both workers as well as getting to market sooner is a…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Interesting thoughts, really. But maybe change contexts—would you call Coca Cola a monopoly? Certainly Pepsi gives them a good run for their money, even if they aren't as large technically speaking (I have no idea). I mean, people will always have their preferences. I'm not sure if that makes for a monopoly on its own. How much that preference is formed by the company's inherent pursuit of a monopoly, well... I'm not…
FWIW - PepsiCo is far bigger than CocaCola
Anyway I think it still makes sense, yeah?
There's a broader historical perspective that's missing in this article. The Second Industrial Revolution (1870-1914) was much like today. You had extremely rapid growth of new industries fueled by widespread availability of capital; a pervasive bubble economy punctuated by massive stock market panics & depressions; rapid development of new technologies; widespread fraud & corruption; a feeling that the common man wa…
On Monopoly: It has been a though I have for some time. I wonder how could they not form monopolies. Who has 4-5 taxi apps on their phone? Who has 2-3 social profiles? Who has the habits of jumping from a searching engine to another? A minority. Their product are almost natural monopolies. They are very difficult to fight against monopolies because when they have user commitment, the need for the product is filled en…
Uber, Lyft, and some smaller competitors already exist yet people don't need all the apps; they just choose one and it works fine. Likewise with search engines: some people use Google, some use Bing, some use DDG. It's suboptimal but monopolies are suboptimal in different ways.
The problem with network effects was solved in the 1980s breakup of AT&T where the telcos all federated with each other. Federated protocols like SMTP and XMPP existed before Facebook and Twitter; rather than a historical accident they made a decision to pursue lock-in.
There's a broader historical perspective that's missing in this article. The Second Industrial Revolution (1870-1914) was much like today. You had extremely rapid growth of new industries fueled by widespread availability of capital; a pervasive bubble economy punctuated by massive stock market panics & depressions; rapid development of new technologies; widespread fraud & corruption; a feeling that the common man wa…
I agree with you on the effect of massive capital investment : bringing us the future faster ; at the cost of social turmoils. However the necessity of going through those turmoils is false : why don't we really have a choice ?
This looks different at different scales. On an individual level, it's being passed over for promotion because the blowhard in the next cube has this great idea for how to apply deep learning, or losing out on a job to the college kid who's up-to-date in Solidity and React while you still work in VB.NET and SQL Server. On a company level, it's going bankrupt because some new startup offers critical new features at 1/10th the price. On a societal level, it's being conquered by other societies that have adopted the new technologies at the cost of the social turmoil and then choose to inflict it upon you. Each attempt to stop the turmoil by fiat just escalates it up a level: if you declare you're never laying people off, your company goes bankrupt, while if you declare that nobody is allowed to innovate your society collapses. (Either from within, where your people look at the technologies other societies enjoy and say "We want that", or from outside, where an invading army lands on your shores and kills you all.)
Americans are particularly blind to this dynamic on the societal level because we're usually the ones inflicting it upon others. "Manifest destiny" was all about inflicting progress upon the Native Americans who didn't want it, while the Cold War & fight against Communism was about a richer, more powerful empire inflicting the way of life that made us richer & more powerful at the expense of social stability on stagnant, poorer, but in-theory more egalitarian and stable societies.
This article adds to that notion.
"blitzscaling isn’t really a recipe for success but rather survivorship bias masquerading as a strategy." That says it all. Really, that's how YC works - fail fast and cheap, profit from the survivors. Great for VCs, not so much for the cannon fodder. "We have reserves."
On Monopoly: It has been a though I have for some time. I wonder how could they not form monopolies. Who has 4-5 taxi apps on their phone? Who has 2-3 social profiles? Who has the habits of jumping from a searching engine to another? A minority. Their product are almost natural monopolies. They are very difficult to fight against monopolies because when they have user commitment, the need for the product is filled en…
Who has 4-5 taxi apps on their phone? Who has 2-3 social profiles? Who has the habits of jumping from a searching engine to another? Uber, Lyft, and some smaller competitors already exist yet people don't need all the apps; they just choose one and it works fine. Likewise with search engines: some people use Google, some use Bing, some use DDG. It's suboptimal but monopolies are suboptimal in different ways. The prob…
To me, the problem comes when you provide a service. The service market seems much more difficult to diversify than the product market. When the need is well filled by one company, it is difficult to keep competition alive. It is obviously not binary. It depends on the service.
For instance, for the product side; Nike, Adidas, etc. are constantly trying to improve and change their products to keep up with the complex shoe market even if they are pretty colossal companies. Because the user need for a new shoe pair is coming on a really short scale and the competition is fierce.
I'm not seeing the same kind of competition with services. When you use a service that fills the need, you don't change in general. Or at least, people change on a very long scale. Some times, it even takes a cultural shift to change habits.
On the google vs bing example: Well, ok some uses bing, but in majority because microsoft makes it easy to do so on their systems ;-). There exists some very good alternatives, like duckduckgo, but it represents a minority.
On Monopoly: It has been a though I have for some time. I wonder how could they not form monopolies. Who has 4-5 taxi apps on their phone? Who has 2-3 social profiles? Who has the habits of jumping from a searching engine to another? A minority. Their product are almost natural monopolies. They are very difficult to fight against monopolies because when they have user commitment, the need for the product is filled en…
There are a number of options, and not all of them are splitting the company into a bunch of fully co-equal units, which is a process that works better when things cover an area. In telecom, it was typical, due to regulation, that you'd have different parts of the business that couldn't interact at all. I wasn't permitted to talk to people with certain badges because of their business unit. You could easily do this w…