Earlier quoted context omitted.
Certainly you can make money at integration, vast amounts of money are made. But as one friend in the business really did tell me once "your job is taking one piece of crap and another piece of crap, get them to talk to each other and so turn them into a third larger piece of crap". Integration "works" but overall often makes the problem worse or at best allows you to run place. Imagine when something else has to tal…
> For good or ill, The start-up ideal is generally to solve problems broadly, to disrupt an entire industry rather than build one more extension to that industry. But which start-up has ever done that? Not even Google or Facebook did disrupt an entire industry – they just built one more extension to an existing industry.
Come-on, look at my context. Of course, disruption is never a fundamental up-end, just a streamlining towards a simpler and more productive approach - Uber and airBnB being the classics (whatever their social value or lack there-of).
The start-up approach (or disruption, the most archetypical part of it) is aiming for more streamlining at the end of the process - rather than aiming to be one more orifice slurping up money from one of the vast streams of money that already exist. Contrast AirBnB with a company that might "let you reserve rooms with ten of the largest hotel chains in the world" - sure, both change things, neither absolutely change the world but AirBnB is still a more fundamental change (again, in values-free terms).