Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Blind to Disruption – The CEOs Who Missed the Future

steveblank.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 164 posts

Re: Blind to Disruption – The CEOs Who Missed the Future

#81

Post by andsoitis »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #52
johncole wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think ceos that think this way are a self fulfilling prophecy of doom. If they think of their employees as cogs that can be replaced, they get cogs that can be replaced.

Doesn't matter The median CEO salary is in the millions, they do not have to ever worry about money again if they can just stick around for one CEO gig for a couple of years Granted, people who become CEOs are not likely to think this way But the fact is that when people have so much money they could retire immediately with no consequences, they are basically impossible for a business to hold accountable outside of a…

> they are basically impossible for a business to hold accountable outside of actual illegal activity

False. CEOs are held accountable all the time. At the extreme end, research shows that 1 in 3 CEOs are fired within 18 months.

Re: Blind to Disruption – The CEOs Who Missed the Future

#82

Post by GianFabien »

>In each of the three companies that survived, it was the founders, not hired CEOs that drove the transition.

This is how VCs destroy businesses by bring in adult supervision. CEOs are not incentivized to play the long game.

The difference between the mobility & transportation industry, whether it by carriage and horse, or motor car, was that it was in demand by 99% of the population. AI, on the other hand, is only demanded by say 5%-10% of the population. How many people truly want an AI fridge or dishwasher? They just want fresh food and clean dishes.

Re: Blind to Disruption – The CEOs Who Missed the Future

#84

Post by DrewADesign »

standardUser wrote: post #80
jampa wrote: post #24

I like Steve's content, but the ending misses the mark. With the carriage / car situation, individual transportation is their core business, and most companies are not in the field of Artificial Intelligence. I say this as someone who has worked for 7 years implementing AI research for production, from automated hardware testing to accessibility for nonverbals: I don't think founders need to obsess even more than the…

Mobility is not an analogy for AI, it's an analogy to whichever industry you work in. If you publish a magazine, you may think you're in the 'publishing' business and that AI as a weak competitor, maybe capable of squashing crappy blogs but not prestigious media like yours. But maybe what you're really in is the 'content' business, and you need to recognize that sooner or later, AI is going to beat you at the content…

Or more likely, you are in the publishing business but the tech world unilaterally deemed everything creative to be a fungible commodity and undertook a multi-billion dollar campaign to ingest actual creative content and compete with everyone that creates it in the same market with cheap knockoffs. Our society predictably considers this progress because nothing that could potentially make that much money could possibly be problematic. We continue in the trend of thinking small amounts of good things are not as good as giant piles of crap if the crap can be made more cheaply.

Re: Blind to Disruption – The CEOs Who Missed the Future

#85

Post by hedgehog »

jampa wrote: post #24

I like Steve's content, but the ending misses the mark. With the carriage / car situation, individual transportation is their core business, and most companies are not in the field of Artificial Intelligence. I say this as someone who has worked for 7 years implementing AI research for production, from automated hardware testing to accessibility for nonverbals: I don't think founders need to obsess even more than the…

Viewed from a different angle I think he's probably close. A service provider changing the back end while leaving the front end UI similar is not dissimilar to early cars being built like carriages. But when the product can shift from "give me an app that makes it easier to do my taxes" to "keep me current on my taxes and send me status updates" that's a pretty radical difference in what the customer sees.

Re: Blind to Disruption – The CEOs Who Missed the Future

#86

Post by socalgal2 »

danbruc wrote: post #15

Let us see how this will age. The current generation of AI models will turn out to be essentially a dead end. I have no doubt that AI will eventually fundamentally change a lot of things, but it will not be large language models [1]. And I think there is no path of gradual improvement, we still need some fundamental new ideas. Integration with external tools will help but not overcome fundamental limitations. Once th…

Isn't this entirely missing the point of the article?

> When early automobiles began appearing in the 1890’s — first steam-powered, then electric, then gasoline –most carriage and wagon makers dismissed them. Why wouldn’t they? The first cars were: Loud and unreliable, Expensive and hard to repair, Starved for fuel in a world with no gas stations, Unsuitable for the dirt roads of rural America

That sounds like complaints against today's LLM limitations. It will be interesting to see how your comment ages in 5-10-15 years. You might be technically right that LLMs are a dead end. But the article isn't about LLMs really, it's about the change to an "AI" world from a non-AI world and how the author believes it will be similar to the change from the non-car to the car world.

Re: Blind to Disruption – The CEOs Who Missed the Future

#87

Post by scarface_74 »

djhn wrote: post #68
NitpickLawyer wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The best AI applications are beneath the surface to empower users Not this time, tho. ChatGPT is the iphone moment for "AI" for the masses. And it was surprising and unexpected both for the experts / practitioners and said masses. Working with LLMs pre gpt3.5 was a mess, hackish and "in the background" but way way worse experience overall. Chatgpt made it happen just like the proverbial "you had me at scroll and pi…

I’ll spend an anti-hype token :) ChatGPT wasn’t the iphone moment, because the iphone wasn’t quickly forgotten. Outside of software, most adult professionals in my network had a play with chatgpt and have long since abandoned their accounts. They can’t use chatbots for work (maybe data is sensitive, or their ‘knowledge work’ isn’t the kind that produces text output). Our native language is too poorly supported for li…

ChatGPT has between 800 million and 1 billion weekly users.

Re: Blind to Disruption – The CEOs Who Missed the Future

#88

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

I don't know if the problems at the company that I worked for, came from the CEO, or many of the powerful General Managers.

At my company, "General Manager" positions were the ones that actually set much of the planning priorities. Many of them, eventually got promoted to VP, and even, in the case of my former boss, the Chairman of the Board.

When the iPhone came out, one of my employees got one (the first version). I asked to borrow it, and took it to our Marketing department. I said "This is gonna be trouble for us."

I was laughed out of the room. They were following the strategy set down from the General Managers, which involved a lot of sneering at the competition.

The iPhone (and the various Android devices that accompanied it), ate my company for breakfast, and picked their teeth with our ribs.

A couple of the GMs actually anticipated the issues, but they were similarly laughed out of their rooms.

I saw the same thing happen to Kodak (the ones that actually invented digital photography), with an earlier disruption. I was at a conference, hosted by Kodak, and talked to a bunch of their digital engineers and Marketing folks.

They all had the same story: They were being deliberately kneecapped by the film people (with the direct support of the C-Suite).

At that time, I knew they were "Dead Man Walking." That was in 1996 or so.

Re: Blind to Disruption – The CEOs Who Missed the Future

#89

Post by scarface_74 »

andsoitis wrote: post #83

Kodak is, for me, a leading example of leader in an industry who were unable to disrupt themselves. TV networks, relative to Netflix is another. And who can forget BlackBerry?

All of the owners of the TV networks moved to streaming with varying degrees of success.

- Disney has owned ABC forever and Disney+ is fairly successful

- NBC is owned by Comcast and Comcast has moved more toward being a dumb pipe, streaming and is divesting much of its linear TV business.

- CBS/Paramount just paid off Trump and it yet to be seen what will happen to it

Re: Blind to Disruption – The CEOs Who Missed the Future

#90

Post by scarface_74 »

nailer wrote: post #10
1oooqooq wrote: post #4

nice article, but then end with the brain dead "jump on [current fad]". If this was published a few months ago, it would be telling everyone to jump into web3.

[flagged]

That only happens in the US. Europe has much lower credit card fees and most countries have already figured out cashless low cost payments.
Post reply on HN