

Disruption? Not if you are making the same people rich - sgy
http://thenextweb.com/entrepreneur/2014/07/13/disruption-making-people-rich/

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zhte415
I agree, and disagree.

Agree: 'Disruption' (as often so-called in start-ups) through 'innovation' (as
often so-called in larger corp internal policies) is about change. But that
change is often incremental, not huge bounds forward (e.g. AT&T in their
halycon days, or HP pre-electronics, examples of huge bounds made by incumbant
firms)

Disagree: Incremental change (one less click to do X, or $5 dollars off
purchase of Y) _is_ important, as when multiplied across multiple product
types in multiple industries, such 'disruption', 'innovation' or 'change' can
have effects that not only have a small effect, but sometimes hit tipping
points. Toyota / pull-based scheduling / LEAN as a big-corp type example.

This view comes from the motivation to embark on a small project right now.
Production (of a physical product) enriches those that have the economies of
scale to produce it (manufacturer) that I am not seeking to 'disrupt' (or,
continue to make the same people rich as the title puts it), but to create
search, delivery and cost savings for the customer. This is unlikely to
'change the world' in the sense of developing AI could, but will lead to
savings that are valuable to thousands of individuals, and hopefully more.

'Disruption' or 'innovation' seems to be an easy target to attack, as it
encompasses a multitude of ideas.

Side note: I have a strong opinion that 'innovation' for many large corps is a
deliberately mis-used term with multiple goals - two principal ones being a
motivational tool to motivate systematically disenfranchised employees, and to
substitute the word 'change' (often viewed negatively) for 'improvement'
(which often lacks).

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ef4
Spare me.

We hear a constant litany of people complaining about being disrupted. You
can't also claim no disruption is happening.

Examples: giant taxi strikes and regulatory fights, the "Google bus" protests
in the bay area, cities fighting against AirBnB, a restaurant suing Google for
putting them out of business, France passing another law to try to stop
Amazon's growth there, proposed laws against drones.

Of course there are lots of silly little startups like "Yo", but that's just
noise. You only hear about them because they're easy fodder for the media.
Everybody in startup land knows that 99% of them amount to nothing. That
doesn't mean the other 1% won't change everything.

~~~
potatolicious
> _" Of course there are lots of silly little startups like "Yo", but that's
> just noise."_

I disagree. For every Uber you have 100 Yo's. For every Google you have 1000
ad-tech analytics startups that kind of all do the same thing in slightly
different ways.

We have the opposite view on this: you seem to think that the bulk of what the
startup scene does is disruptive, with a few idiotic startups giving the rest
a bad name. I believe the balance is in fact the opposite: a few truly
disruptive companies and boatloads of "silly little startups like 'Yo'".

> _" Everybody in startup land knows that 99% of them amount to nothing."_

So... why are the 99% working on things they know will amount to nothing? I
think this is the central thesis of the article. Yeah, there are a _tiny_
number of disruptive companies out there, so what the hell is everyone else
doing?

It's not as if most of these are startups that aimed high and failed, these
are startups where the core idea was never disruptive to begin with. These are
startups purpose-built for the exit, not for the impact of its products.

That is the precise thesis the author is offering: that there are a tiny
number of people in our industry working on real, disruptive change, while
others try to squeeze easy money out of the system while aggrandizing
themselves as innovators.

~~~
ChuckMcM

       > So... why are the 99% working on things they know will 
       > amount to nothing? I think this is the central thesis of 
       > the article. Yeah, there are a tiny number of disruptive 
       > companies out there, so what the hell is everyone else 
       > doing?
    

That is the question that, at some point, I think the author may have started
with, or they may have run through a bunch of tropes and the question sort of
emerged. Had they had a decent editor somewhere, that editor would have kicked
the whole rambling thing back and said, "This is your thesis question, re
structure this pile of nonsense to answer that question." But alas, that did
not happen.

The reasons why people go to work every day vary, but my experience is that
there are some generalizations which can be applied reasonably safely. One is
that some folks work just for a paycheck so that they can get on with the rest
of their life, and some work toward an end goal, some end effect. I have run
into far fewer people who were working to a goal than I have working for a
paycheck.

Sometimes the goal directed folks are aligned with humanitarian causes (like
clean drinking water for Africa) and sometimes the goal is directed purely at
acquiring wealth.

The interesting question for me, is that ratio 1%? Are only 1% of the people
out seeking to make some significant change? If so it would account for 99%
working on random things, but if not it would suggest that there are some
folks who _want_ to make a change but for some reason have been unable yet to
put that into action. I make a hobby of looking for such people, its one of
the things that I see in a lot of YC founder pitches, people who want to make
a change but haven't yet mastered the recipe for turning that into results.
And for me at least it is kind of why founders are founders, here are people
willing to give up all of their earnings and take a chance at losing 2 - 5
years of their productive lifetime, to try to make a dent in the world.

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andyidsinga
before you read it - this article has nothing to do with "disruption" ala
disruption theory found in clayton christensen's work. afaik, disruption
theory isn't concerned with who is getting richer or if its he same people.

~~~
spinlock
That was exactly my thought before reading this. I assume that the same people
are getting richer because they're well diversified and, as such, can benefit
both from the status quo and from disruption. Then I read the article and
realized it's just someone complaining about VC backed startups.

------
sgy
You won't find a startup topic that Paul Graham didn't talk about
([http://www.paulgraham.com/good.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/good.html))

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grimtrigger
Ugh I really hate articles like this.

For one it asserts that we should have an issue with others getting rich. Even
if the net gain for society is 0, what is the problem with other people
getting rich? Does it impoverish you in any way? Maybe you could make a case
for price rises hurting the poor - but the author doesn't mention it and I
don't think that's his/her angle.

There's also an incredible elitism about what a company "should" be.

> Are our kids going to say we boldly explored the range of human possibility
> by putting a million dollars into a mobile app that sends a pointless text
> message saying “Yo”?

Guess what? People like emojis and filters and flappy bird. The author doesn't
have a problem with the "startup scene", he/she has a problem with humanity.

~~~
mp99e99
If we gave everyone a billion dollars except you, does it impoverish you in
anyway? I think so.

I wrote this article because the tech scene is so disconnected from where it
started.

~~~
dreamdu5t
How so, exactly? By having less money than others? Millionaires are
impoverished if you equate it with inequality.

~~~
spinlock
This is actually one of those catch 22's of wealth: if you're in the 50% you
probably feel better about your money than you do if you're in the 2% or --
even worse -- the bottom of the 1%. The reason is that the 49% is almost
exactly like you. They make a few bucks more than you do but it's not
meaningful (i.e. you both have exactly the same standard of living). Now, if
you belong to the 2%, you are an order of magnitude "poorer" than the 1%. If
you just made it to the 1%, you are a couple of orders of magnitude "poorer"
than the 0.1%. And, those differences are meaningful.

It's really one of the sadder aspects of human nature. No one can just enjoy
how good they have it. We always have to grade ourselves on a curve. Shit, if
I compare my life to Rockefeller or JP Morgan, I have it so much better in so
many ways. But, no one over feels bad for Rockefeller because that sucker
lived before the internet.

