
The Culling of the Herd - pavornyoh
http://techcrunch.com/2015/11/14/aileen-lee-has-much-to-answer-for-although-you-have-to-admire-her-neological-powers/
======
iamleppert
The thing is, you don't have to be party to any of this as an engineer if you
don't want to.

There are still many interesting companies working on hard problems, real
science, and real engineering. Don't get caught up in working for one of the
startup darlings just for the name recognition. Go for what interests you and
motivates you, and if given the choice between real technology and some kind
of rudimentary "app", go for the real tech. You'll learn a lot more and spend
a lot less time dealing with product managers, business people and fighting
with incompetent co-workers. You became interested in tech because of your
love for solving problems and for making things work, so find a place where
you can do that.

When evaluating companies I often ask myself what the business would look like
before the age of computers -- if we didn't have smart phones and the
Internet, what would the business look like? Would I still want to be working
there? What is the actual business? In many cases you'll find it's driving
people around, cleaning people's houses, or serving as a glorified bulletin
board for services. Would you still want to work there if you removed all the
tech? Or is the only reason tech is involved is to serve some ancillary
purpose to the business?

~~~
richardbatty
How do you find companies working on important problems? When I look at the
London software scene, I mostly find trivial (or dull corporate) web and
mobile apps.

Which kinds of industries have software engineers working on real technology
problems?

~~~
noname123
Just in UK, I can think of Sanger Institute (genomics research), Malaria
Consortium (GIS involved in real-time malaria drug resistance monitoring),
Oxford Nanopore Technologies (USB stick genome sequencing for clinical
diagnosis); The Children's Investment Hedge Fund (used to be the hedge fund
arm of the Children's Fund). AstroZeneca and Glaxo also have wet and dry lab
spaces with lots of informatics needs. I am positive there are tons more but I
am only mostly familiar with the biotech space.

------
hwstar
This gem:

"Once, technology meant stuff that went to the moon…cured fatal
diseases…extended the human lifespan […] miraculous breakthroughs that altered
lives […] Now, “tech” means something very different: apps that…hails
taxis…summon butlers…automatically call dog walkers…gadgets that remind you
have a meeting…turn on your thermostat for you […] It’s not that the latter is
bad. But it is a fact that the latter is trivial."

The VC crowd is hooked short term development which has the potential to make
them rich quickly. This may be about to change. Very few software-only tech
companies have not been focusing solving hard problems which are not trivial,
as these types of problems require much longer product development schedules,
and a therefore much more capital to invest.

~~~
sounds
The low-barrier-to-entry plays are getting lots of attention, while the ones
that take more capital, research, a breakthrough, or all three, are also
getting some attention.

The article also simply states the obvious: trivial stuff "is trivial."

This "culling of the herd" can happen continuously, or there can be a flood of
investment leading to a bubble. Lots has been blogged about how to make
different mistakes [1], how to think different [2], or just how this time will
be different [3].

Failing is part of innovating.

"We avoided dying till we got rich." \- pg [4]

[1] Just one of many: [http://www.inc.com/niel-robertson/brilliant-
failures/dot-com...](http://www.inc.com/niel-robertson/brilliant-failures/dot-
com-mistake-silicon-valley-start-ups-still-make.html)

[2] [http://www.thenational.ae/business/technology/apple-is-
the-t...](http://www.thenational.ae/business/technology/apple-is-the-true-
survivor-of-the-dotcom-bubble)

[3] [https://avataric.wordpress.com/2015/08/14/startup-culture-
ev...](https://avataric.wordpress.com/2015/08/14/startup-culture-everything-
old-is-new-again/)

[4] [http://www.paulgraham.com/die.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/die.html)

~~~
eevilspock
> The low-barrier-to-entry plays

One of the reasons the barrier is so low is because you often don't have to
ask your users to pay. One of the many ways advertising undermines the way the
free market is supposed to work.

------
louprado
"And often, paradoxically, despite their privileged backgrounds, they have
much less appetite for risk".

Here's my co-founder litmus test: Work this phrase into a conversation, "We're
going to be working on our start-up for the next 4 to 6 years..." and if you
get cut-off with a response like "No way! We'll get bought-out way before
then", then you should either leave the team altogether or bill the team as a
consultant. To be clear bill for money not equity.

------
n0us
I hate this attitude that the "pretty people" are going to ruin the "party"
for the people who were already there. What a gross over generalization not
based on any sturdy foundation of reason. The author just feels like companies
are worth too much without any experience or justification to make that claim.
He hasn't seen the term sheets for these companies, he hasn't been there for
investor meetings and board meetings to discuss long term strategy. But people
from the upper middle class make a nice target, so he just blames an entire
vague socioeconomic group for a problem he can't connect them to. I'm sorry
but articles like this are why I sometimes can't take the tech media as
seriously as I'd like to.

~~~
vonklaus
I agree. I don't want to fall prey to the same problems the article does, and
fold tech crunch in as a single entity as well as a single sector, but:

It is pretty fucking laughable that an article in techcrunch is decrying the
glorification of unicorn / startup culture. What, if not publications like
this, created that culture?

This isn't some hyper exclusive off-campus party in college. Shoe companies
need backend accounting software. Every company _needs_ technology?

> He hasn't seen the term sheets for these companies, he hasn't been there for
> investor meetings and board meetings to discuss long term strategy

Obviously, one can to some extent predict how "valuable" a company is. But
people are pretty fucking quick to write off M & A and VC deals as "bad" or
"overvalued".

Paul Graham said something like, 'when I saw how much snapchat was worth I
thought wow, it was like someone had measured it and that was the value'. I
bet that the team of people and consultants tearing through he books on due
diligence, weighing the synergy and value gained by integrating it into the
acquiring company, and all of the long term trend analysis, of both companies
their unreleased products and long term strategies, have a better picture than
me.

------
venning
Can someone please explain this sentence:

> _Now, it’s true that yesterday’s technology is tomorrow’s tech._

I don't quite grasp the distinction.

~~~
Terr_
It's explained in the quote he's responding to.

~~~
venning
Thanks. Guess I didn't make the connection.

Seems odd to call out yesterday's technology as non-trivial only to imply that
it will become trivial tomorrow, or at least that appears to be the author's
logic.

------
vonklaus
this article sums up my attitude around a year ago. however, so fucking what.
everyone is quick to dismiss theranos but that was a big idea.

the world isn't some binary settlement where technology is either social
messaging or von neumann probes.

no one knows to what extent these companies will help humanity. what if the
kid who dreamed of building the next fusion reactor got in early with snapchat
and cashes out to build his next company?

what if Uber evolves into an automated logostics transportation company,
serving as Level 3/Cogent to Amazon's time warner cable.

the world and technology is complex. naivly dismissing "pretty people" for
getting into tech is borderline laughable. now more than ever technology is
important. more people and capital isn't only good, but straight up fucking
inevitable.

so i will support companies who fund big ideas like theranos and clinkle along
side these companies i find less than appealing for my personal everyday use.

I am not arrogant enough to predict the future or try and architect it. more
people building things is probably good, so i will continue to support that.

edit: I just reread the article. This is the most elitist hipster fucking
thing I have seen in a while.

> The whole point of the Valley VC culture is to empower founders to change
> the world in their first at-bat.

What fucking founder was successful on their first go around, with a venture
that changed the entire world?

* Traf-O-Data wasn't a big household name, And didn't exactly change the world.[0]

* CL 9 was a novel idea, but the world would largely be the same place without it.[1]

* Zip2 was an online version of the yellow pages. A great way to index information, but not the "big idea" we would encourage founders to do now[2]

* Facebook changed the world and was built by an upper middle class white kid, who possibly wouldn't have moved forward without prompting from the Winkelvoss twins.

Should we discount it because:

* it is a social app?

* it was founded by someone who was upper middle class?

* it was backed by upper class non-technical interlopers?

What do we want to optimize as a society?

I hope people continue building great products. Let's recall that Peter Theil
was "an upper middle class paty crasher" by this definition. I think he has
added a lot of value to the world.

So let's try to be less elitist as fuck, step back from our naive assumption
that we know exactly what the world needs (and if you believe this, run for
president, the republicans could really use some organization), and recognize
that despite what tech crunch says, people _are_ working on big ideas. They
are just harder.

There will be a lot more apps than scalable renewable energy companies, but
that doesn't mean we shouldn't have both.

I agree with Jon, yes it is frustrating that these companies aren't huge
scientific breakthroughs. I personally have made plenty of snarky critiques of
them. However, I am starting to realize that facebook, dropbox, evernote and
snapchat add a lot of value to society which is why a lot of fucking people
use them. A lot of great companies use slack to collaborate. Facebook allows
people to stay connected with the people they may not regularly see. Snapchat
let's horny 18 year olds to see nude they may not have otherwise seen. Okay,
not super sure how much we need snapchat, but people seem to like it, and
that's fine. Etc. So, let people keep building whatever they want. As long as
they keep building.

[0][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traf-O-
Data](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traf-O-Data)
[1][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CL_9](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CL_9)
[2][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elon_Musk](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elon_Musk)

~~~
sokoloff
CL 9 was post-Apple, not a first-time founder endeavor.

~~~
vonklaus
yeah botched the timeline a bit. Wozniak did awesome stuff before, during and
after apple. He is just a great guy with a big heart. I don't want to speak
for him, but I think given what I know about his life he would be open to more
people getting into technology, in any capacity and from any socio-economic
class.

