
Startups are a great start, but not the goal - tim333
http://www.economist.com/blogs/schumpeter/2014/04/invitation-dan-breznitz
======
camillomiller
If you cash out early, as many vc would like you to be able to do, startups
are definitively the goal. Unfortunately this is a quite established path for
many successful startups and the VC system is naturally inclined towards this
scenario. That's not bad per se, but it's certainly not the way to be
innovative on the long term -- do something cool enough to be gobbled up by a
bigger fish.

~~~
davidw
Sometimes having your own cash to spend as you want _lets_ you do something
bigger and better. There would be no YC without Yahoo and Viaweb.

~~~
k__
Well, some people don't want to do something big. They want to do their own
thing and sell it when it starts getting to big for their taste :)

------
jdmitch
_Growth does not happen in the lab, it happens in the markets over long
period_ [sic] _of time in a slow process of diffusion, improvement, and
recombination._

This is an interesting observation, but doesn't square with my experience (and
I expect that of many HN readers), because he is obviously talking about two
different types of growth (incubation vs evolution? blossoming vs mature
development?) but doesn't specify what they are either within the biological
metaphor, or the business paradigm.

~~~
tormeh
This article is written from a public policy point of view. It's growth for
society they're talking about. The benefits to the startup and its customers
are offset by the decline of competitors or old solutions and overhead as
workers go into unemployment and have to look for new jobs.

That it's possible to be so individualistic that you can't even grasp the idea
of the growth The Economist is talking about being not growth for the
startups... That's truly flabbergasting.

