Things Overheard at TechCrunch Disrupt

Ug. I'm going to defend them despite the easy ability to mock.

Each industry has it's jargon of puff words to convey complex things. In my field of physics, for example, we'll often use a short-hand word to cover a very complicated idea, with the understanding that everyone should know what your talking about... and if they don't they should go learn more about it. Entanglement, emergence, wavefunction.

The problem is when you don't actually understand the complexities of the idea just mimic (or make up) the language.

That said, "let's talk about disrupting the disruptors" is always eye-roll worthy.

That's true in general, but some of those quotes are just gibberish. "Swimming in the social stream"...

I love that this article was written by Kevin Roose :). Had to do a double-take to make sure I wasn't reading an Onion knockoff.

On a more serious note, this article highlights what is a big annoyance of the startup community. Namely that people are focused on building a startup for short term profit rather than (genuinely) trying to change the world in a big way. It's in some ways analogous to the short-term mindset of the finance industry. Instead of thinking 1,2, or 3 decades out, people are thinking "How can I get $40m on this company in a couple years?" I would be much more excited by a community that consisted of people trying to build long term businesses, not acqui-hires, solutions to mundane problems, or another social app.

Don't get me wrong, if people want to flip companies for several million dollars over a couple years, they are will within their right to do so, and I wouldn't blame them. It's just depressing that our best minds are focused on making quick flips instead of sustainable truly game-changing businesses. I look up to people like Steve Jobs (obviously), Elon Musk, Larry Ellison, and Reed Hastings. These are all people who have transformed industries, and were not chasing some cheap hack to get a couple million dollars. They built real products, not sitting in front of their computer, but by going out and meeting customers, building real solutions to real problems, undertaking genuinely difficult technical challenges.