
After the end of the startup era - imartin2k
https://techcrunch.com/2017/10/22/ask-not-for-whom-the-deadpool-tolls/
======
rdtsc
I look at it from another end - I feel there is a sort of an app fatigue.
Maybe it is jut me. I used to be excited about Uber-like things, note taking
apps, DropBox, coupon sites, review sites. Installed some of them, used them,
then kind of stopped. Someone at work would say "you should try this new
thing, totally cool" and I'd be inclined to do it, but now would pass it
probably.

Extrapolating scientifically from the sample of 1, it would seem that a small
loss of excitement over trying new services and apps over the larger
population would be enough to prevent the fabled hockey stick growth. No
hockey sticks -> no unicorns -> less VC money for new startup -> articles
about the death of startups -> comments on HN about articles about the death
of startups

~~~
api
Mobile devices are very constrained. The OSes are locked down, the screens are
small, high CPU apps are out, and input is slow and cumbersome.

After trying a lot of apps I have found that a smart phone has only a few
functions:

1\. Talking and texting.

2\. Taking pictures and video.

3\. Maps and directions.

4\. Music, movies, ebooks.

5\. Brief interactions with services like Uber, Lyft, AirBnB, Los Angeles
metro, etc.

6\. Casual web browsing. (I want a bigger screen and a keyboard for anything
in depth.)

7\. edit: Casual gaming.

Looking at how most other people use phones I don't think I am alone.

These devices are limited and I don't think it took us long to exhaust their
potential. There just isn't much else a phone can do well (and that locked
down vendor fiefdoms will allow).

The PC era on the other hand gave us a long, wide, and deep trench of
innovation that is still not exhausted. PCs are more open, more extensible,
and have a much wider IO path to the human in the chair. The breadth of what a
PC can do is incredible.

(The main problem with PCs is antiquated, insecure, bloated operating systems.
Fix that and I think you'd see even more innovation.)

Of course I have been a mobile skeptic since the iPhone. I just saw the next
incarnation of the feature phone. Since it was still locked down by carriers
and vendors and since its bandwidth to the user is poor I knew it would not
deliver lasting innovation.

~~~
Giorgi
Exactly. I always cringe when I hear "build mobile first" that's just stupid,
"flappy-bird" era is dead, agreed! - but there are so much more potential for
full blown websites (or "webapps") that require PC/laptop and larger screen.

~~~
api
Mobile could be more innovative if it were more open and modular. Think of all
the hundreds of things that would never have happened on the PC if they were
as closed as phones.

------
komali2
>IoT devices [are] hard to prototype, generally low-margin, expensive to bring
to market, and very expensive to scale. Just ask Fitbit. Or Jawbone. Or
Juicero. Or HTC.

I feel like this is the public's idea of "iot," while I've learned after a
year of working for an iot stack provider that the real "internet of things"
explosion is found in places nobody looks except the procurement guys - the
stadium lights, the refrigerators, the factory doors, etc. Small, single-
minded decided sending one or two bytes of data, spread en masse through an
industrial area.

~~~
contingencies
_IoT devices [are] hard to prototype_

Here in Shenzhen, I would say no. They are cheap as chips. I have multiple
friends doing consumer IoT devices (lots of BLE) with single-dimensional
backgrounds (often software) who have been able to iterate through multiple
prototypes and produce concepts within months. The chief problems for IoT
products IMHO are marketing and replicability (low security for initial
investment).

The fact that hardware is expensive to tackle in SV just means SV is badly
positioned in this sector, not that it's inherently difficult or expensive.
BTW, we just had the _Hacker Trip to China_ (by _Noisebridge_ founder Mitch
Altman) roll through town here.

~~~
sharemywin
kind of off topic. but, how much markup is there compared to aliexpress? it
seems prototyping using parts from there is pretty inexpensive. I heard about
giant multi story marketplaces in Shenzhen, but I was curious if they were
much cheaper or just a lot faster since everything you need is in one
building.

~~~
contingencies
There's more choice online but you have to pay shipping for everything.
Quantities available, prices and discoverability are less attractive in the
marketplaces but you can potentially save time and there are certain stores
where you can get what amounts to nontrivial free in person implementation or
product selection consulting. In general we buy online because we source so
many things, but if you are starting out in electronics or just need some
standard parts for cheap then the markets are pretty cool.

------
Animats
From the article:

 _" We’re already seeing this. Consider Y Combinator, by all accounts the gold
standard of startup accelerators, famously harder to get into than Harvard.
Then consider its alumni. Five years ago, in 2012, its three poster children
were clearly poised to dominate their markets and become huge companies:
AirBnB, Dropbox, and Stripe. And so it came to pass."_

 _" Fast forward to today, and Y Combinator’s three poster children are…
unchanged. In the last six years YC have funded more than twice as many
startups as they did in their first six — but I challenge you to name any of
their post-2011 alumni as well-positioned today as their Big Three were in
2012. The only one that might have qualified, for a time, was Instacart. But
Amazon broke into that game with Amazon Fresh, and, especially, their purchase
of Whole Foods."_

Look at the list of Ycombinator companies from the 2012 batch.[1] Where are
they now?

[1] [http://yclist.com/](http://yclist.com/)

~~~
hkmurakami
The journalist reveals his or her ignorance by not considering Gusto or
Flexport to be well positioned, imo.

~~~
guaka
Plus the article could do with some basic fact checking.

"The web boom of 1997-2006 brought us Amazon, Facebook, Google, Salesforce,
Airbnb"

Wikipedia AirBnB page: "Founded August 2008; 9 years ago"

~~~
hkmurakami
Also iirc Amazon predates 1997. 1997 is its IPO date.

------
krmboya
Reminds me of what got me to this site many years ago. I was reading a lisp
programming book that had a footnote that somehow got me to HN.

As a teenager I got enamoured by the idea of the future of the tech being
driven by small fast-moving hacker friendly companies rather than big corp, as
portrayed in PG's writings and this site.

I remember how I increasingly became disillusioned as I gradually realized
that many (most?) startups were optimizing for the acquisition by the same big
corp (investors gotta cash out, right?) instead of building long-term
sustainable businesses.

This seems to have attracted the kind of personality that just wants to play
the game, cash out and get rich.

~~~
shopkins
Agreed. Working for a company that optimizes for cashing out loses luster
_really_ quickly. As someone who's been on that hamster wheel for too long,
have to say it'd definitely be more interesting to work for a company that
builds for long-term sustainability.

------
karmakaze
So the premise is that the startup era is ending:

> ...because we’ve all lived through back-to-back massive worldwide hardware
> revolutions — the growth of the Internet, and the adoption of smartphones —
> we erroneously think another one is around the corner, and once again, a few
> kids in a garage can write a little software to take advantage of it. [...]
> But there is no such revolution en route...

Then it says:

> It is widely accepted that the next wave of important technologies consists
> of AI, drones, AR/VR, cryptocurrencies, self-driving cars, and the “Internet
> of Things.” These technologies are, collectively, hugely important and
> consequential — but they are not remotely as accessible to startup
> disruption as the web and smartphones were.

But a real counter to the premise is actually presented:

> (However, in fairness, software and services built atop newly emerging
> hardware are likely an exception to the larger rule here; startups in those
> niches have far better odds than most others.)

So once again, 'a few kides in a garage can write a little software to take
advantage of it.' They start as niches, but we can't say what their potential
is without discovery and development.

~~~
Cacti
Well, the argument that 1995 through 2015 was a cycle completely different
from whatever the next one will be, is not without merit.

I mean, it is easy to forget, but many, many things had to come together at
one time in order for this to pop off like it did:

* high speed internet

* widespread consumer demand for high speed internet and services

* multi-core, low-power hardware that gave us smartphones and cheapish "device" pcs like tivo/roku/etc.

* widespread cellular and wifi networks

* miniturization and improvement of many types of sensors

* widespread data collection of all types

* massive investments and growth in consumer GPU devices, which underwrote the ML boom

and I'm probably missing some things, but you get the idea.

All of these things had to come together at the same time to give us the boom
that we just went through, and it gave us rise to the likes of Google,
Facebook, and so on.

This is very unlikely to repeat itself. Those who grew up in the late 90s,
early 2000s may not really notice, but the difference between 1995 and 2010 is
astronomical.

This is not to say that we're about to crash, or that there won't be another
boom in short order, just that it will likely follow a very different pattern
than the previous one. The period of 1995-2010/2015 was really a very unique
confluence of events, historically speaking, and over what is really a very,
very short time frame. Whereas the current boom is built around leveraging the
smartphone and widespread internt access, the next will not be, as it will
already be filled out by competitors.

~~~
adventured
It is likely entirely without merit.

Many thing had to come together from 1975 to 1995 to enable the things you're
referencing. The list you made is not impressive versus the past, it's normal.

What happened from 1995 to 2015 that was more important than the Internet,
transistor, microprocessor, router, DRAM or the GUI? Good luck resolving that
debate.

Many thing had to to come together from 1955 to 1975 to....

I don't know how old you are and how familiar you might be with the prior half
century plus in tech, but we could be here all day listing the incredible
inventions and leaps forward in tech during each of those 20 year periods of
time.

Nothing has changed fundamentally about what's occurring in tech. The process
continues as before. Each new generation thinks what has happened during its
era is particularly special or unique versus the past. We see the same
generational bias in most everything, from music to politics.

~~~
Cacti
Yes, I am old enough to remember, and I think you are reading more into my
post than was there.

I am not claiming 1995-2015 was unique in the fundamental factors (we are all
riding the exponential curve here), simply that the confluence of advances is
unique to that time period, and gives you a unique distribution of
companies/organizations/industries/etc. that is very different from other time
periods.

------
jorblumesea
This is a trend that's been occurring over the past 50 years in all business
sectors. The conglomeration of everything, from healthcare to food creates a
oligopoly where only the big players have a seat at the table.

Tech was just immune from it because of its immaturity and infancy of the
technology itself. Now that its a mature business its being subjected to the
same pressures and issues of any established industry.

In some ways it's just tech "growing up".

------
11thEarlOfMar
The evidence is likely in the data housed by Y Combinator, 500 Startups, and
others in their market. Chart the statistical mean valuation of each cohort by
year since graduation and see if that mean is changing. If Evans is correct,
the mean should be declining for each successive cohort.

Alternatively, since the number of funded startups seems to be increasing, you
may prefer to look at total valuation over time since graduation. Even if the
mean is decreasing, the total number of 'successful' startups may be
increasing and no 'end' is signaled.

I'm not convinced that 'there are no good startup ideas left in this
technology era' because the big winners are all black swans. By definition,
they defy conventional wisdom.

~~~
austenallred
This reminds me of when Pando went to Demo Day and saw no interesting
companies and a bunch of knock offs
[https://pando.com/2013/03/26/y-combinator-demo-
day-2013-stil...](https://pando.com/2013/03/26/y-combinator-demo-
day-2013-still-looking-for-the-next-airbnb-or-dropbox/). They completely
missed Zenefits, Teespring, and a few others.

I’m not convinced that the dominant YC companies looked obviously dominant at
their early stages; they only seem dominant in retrospect.

As for why the giant companies at YC are still the dominant winners, it’s
because the winners just keep growing. We don’t have a sense of scale; when
Airbnb was a $500m company it was YC’s poster child. Now Airbnb is worth many
billion dollars, and of course it still is the poster child, while companies
like LendUp are valued at $500m but are not even talked about.

It’s not that because YC and startups are less successful, it’s that some are
so incredibly successful you stop paying attention to the successful ones.

If the measure is valuations coming out of YC, Airbnb raised at a $3m
valuation. A lot of YC companies raised $3m at a $14m+ valuation, but that’s
more an indication of the market than of the likelihood of success of those
companies.

~~~
Eridrus
I think this is partly due to the saturation of the consumer space, it's
easier to understand the benefits of AirBnB vs Zenefits.

------
hedora
It’s almost as bad as when we solved all of physics in 1917.

I’d write more, but I have to go to the chemist’s to buy some westinghouse
relays for my Bell systems electrified collating typewriter-telegraph.

~~~
fapjacks
Yes! Jeez, thank you. These articles are nothing but clickbait, but more
insidious clickbait than the other stuff, because it's cloaked behind a faux
point: It's not actually a thoughtful piece of writing, but it's trying to
dress up like one.

------
jv22222
To my way of thinking the pendulum is swinging away from funded startups to
folks bootstrapping side projects.

So, on the "large" end you'll have the googles, facebooks, etc and on the
"micro" end you'll see a bloom of people starting small projects like those
shown on indihackers.

It's something I've been hoping for since 2011!

[http://justinvincent.com/page/1392/entreporn-the-fallacy-
tha...](http://justinvincent.com/page/1392/entreporn-the-fallacy-that-wastes-
your-life)

~~~
RepressedEmu
My short term goal right now is to sell/grow enough side projects to go full
time with prototyping "micro businesses". I feel like a startup studio of 4-8
people could get some serious work done. It would also just be a great time
exploring new ideas and green-field code all day every day. But hey, a young
guy trapped in a megacorp-cube can dream, right?

~~~
jv22222
Same here. Send me an email justin@nugget.one let's chat.

~~~
RepressedEmu
This is why I love HN! Talk soon.

------
Liron
I'm not sure comparing the YC batches is convincing evidence. Off the top of
my head, Coinbase (YC S12) is the 2017 analogue of a company that is "poised
to dominate its industry", already valued at $1B+.

~~~
Liron
Another poised-to-dominate unicorn is Flexport (YC W14).

------
baxman22
I agree with this premise. I knew it was over about 2 years ago when I noticed
that about half of new startups were built to sell to other startups, or to
serve the existing startup market in someway. That’s a sign of saturation.

Another paradigm shift in media (like recorded sound, recorded video, radio,
tv, computing, web, and mobile) is what’s needed to produce another startup
boom. It all comes down to media—�—the media is the message.

~~~
chrisco255
VR/AR fits that bill. It's just that no one has nailed the form factor and
hardware yet so that it can reach mass adoption.

~~~
city41
Or is it a chicken and egg problem? VR interests me, but I don't feel there is
a killer app yet to make the plunge worth it.

~~~
pault
Disregarding the new applications enabled by the medium, think of it as simply
a new display form factor. Once the quality exceeds the best flat screens we
can produce, having one unobtrusively attached to your eyes at all times
becomes a no-brainer (from a cost-benefit perspective; obviously there are
lifestyle-altering implications that each individual will have to embrace or
reject on their own terms).

~~~
KGIII
A poster above mentioned that they experienced VR some 30 years ago. I,
myself, had a chance to work with it in the early 1990s. Truth be told, it was
horrible. It was rudimentary and the graphics were very poor as it was
computationally expensive. Exploration stopped and we reexamined the tech a
decade later, with similar results.

I've long since postulated that I'd absolutely volunteer to 'jack in' to a
neural method to control a computer - complete with my standard joke about
being willing to even have a wifi antenna poking out of my skull.

I wonder, then, if we are going about this the wrong way. We are trying for
ocular stimulation directly. If we could skip that and move to neurological
stimulation directly, I'd expect VR and AR to finally reach the tipping point.
There is, after all, a finite amount of miniaturization that's possible.

It is purely a hunch that tells me VR/AR are not destined for wide-scale
'normal people' adoption until it doesn't require external apparatus to
utilize.

As it is, we already have people who don't even like wearing simple
eyeglasses. However, if it didn't require such, then it may just be something
we humans add to our bodies to augment it.

Thoughts?

~~~
pault
I think the value of the technology hasn't reached a point where it exceeds
the inconvenience of using it; namely the bulky headsets and expensive
hardware. I agree that it won't be more than a niche technology in the near
term future. I guess it all depends on how many more orders of magnitude we
can expect to get out of miniaturization before we hit the wall. If it's
possible to get a minimum of 4k per eye resolution and the graphics
performance of a 2017 high end gaming GPU into a pair of wraparound sunglasses
combined with a smartphone, I see it becoming the dominant display technology.
The convenience of being able to summon any number of arbitrarily large
displays at will is hard to deny, even if you completely disregard any value
proposition involving AR and new forms of human computer interaction.

I'm sitting in bed with my laptop right now, and if I could choose between
reading this on a pair of lightweight glasses or my laptop, I'm not sure what
the laptop has to offer. The big issue is touch typing; no (macro) gesture-
based virtual keyboard is ever going to be usable for professional workloads.
I sometimes wonder if some kind of one- or two-handed finger-chording input
could be as efficient as a qwerty keyboard. I would be willing to toss my
decades of qwerty experience if I could eventually get something as fast
without having to carry around a keyboard. I imagine something like this
device from Children of Men:
[https://youtu.be/sJO0n6kvPRU?t=2m4s](https://youtu.be/sJO0n6kvPRU?t=2m4s)
(1024 "keys" should be plenty, so it's technically possible).

Regarding direct brain-computer interfaces, I just don't see the technological
barriers going away any time soon. You'd either need some type of non-invasive
technology that could wirelessly stimulate the optic nerves (aside from light,
obviously), which I'm not sure exists even in theory, or such sophisticated
nano-machinery that it would be effectively invisible, like a neural lace. I
don't see either of these things happening for decades at least (I would love
to be proven wrong though!).

I don't know if the form factor that will finally trigger mass adoption will
resemble currently available headsets. The breakthrough might be retinal laser
projection or light field displays. I just think that if nothing else, the
ability to move our current workloads to a portable virtual display is such an
obvious improvement I can't imagine it not happening as soon as the technology
is good enough. Of course the same can be said for BCI but that doesn't even
work in the lab yet.

~~~
KGIII
I would absolutely love AR. It'd be fascinating to look at a bridge or
building and see who designed it, when it was built, how it was constructed,
who died while building it, the floor plan, utilization rates, etc... Ideally,
this would be done while not actually driving.

As for the direct methods, I think we may get there someday. We already enable
paralyzed people to interact, albeit on a minimal scale, with a computer using
nothing but their mind. There is even a DIY movement that has enabled this,
again on a minimal scale, for hackers at home.

No timeline, no estimates, but I think we may get there.

My thinking is that miniaturizing is a limited endeavor. We're very unlikely
to ever have things like AR by means of contact lenses. So, we're looking at
something people will wear.

It is my own personal view that I see no great benefit in consuming print
media by means of VR. For that, I have a tablet and a few ebook readers around
the house. I am not sure that I (expressing only my own thoughts) see any
great benefit in that.

------
lkrubner
The era of startups began to end in the 1970s:

"Where are all the startups? U.S. entrepreneurship near 40-year low"

[http://money.cnn.com/2016/09/08/news/economy/us-startups-
nea...](http://money.cnn.com/2016/09/08/news/economy/us-startups-near-40-year-
low/index.html)

In recent weeks, this issue has been discussed several times on Hacker News. I
recall someone recently wrote a comment and said, "We should distinguish
between new businesses, like a pizza shop, and real startups, that might
become big companies." But why exclude a little pizza shop that might become
the next PizzaHut or Dominos or Little Caesars? During the real startup era,
in the mid 20th century, there were hundreds of successful pizza startups that
turned into big companies. If we say "We won't count small pizza places
because they can not possibly become big companies that get listed on Wall
Street" then we are simply assuming our conclusions. If we exclude all of the
categories which were once hot, and which should be hot right now, and only
focus on the handful of sectors that still have some life in them, then we can
end up believing that the era of startups is still happening right now, but we
are blinding ourselves to reality.

When the economy is healthy, small businesses, with the right leadership, can
make the jump to the big time. It is from the frothy, primordial soup of
little mom and pop shops that new giants emerge. Two examples off the top of
my head: both McDonalds and Barnes & Noble were small family businesses, for
decades, before new management took over and found a way to turn them into
giants.

Focusing on the tech sector, and acting as if it is the only sector that
matters, allows us to ignore the sclerosis that has crept over the USA economy
since the end of the post-war boom, back in 1973. We should take a step back
and look at the long-term trend. The economy has been increasingly sick for 40
years now.

We should ask ourselves, where does this trend end? How large do the
monopolies grow? Will there ever be an era when the USA returns to creating
new businesses at a rate that would have been normal for most of the 20th
century?

------
karmakaze
Even ignoring "AI, drones, AR/VR, cryptocurrencies, self-driving cars, and
IoT" from the article, there are still two big areas still in its infancy:

1\. Rich web apps - We know Gmail, Gdocs, Salesforce, etc are/have taken over
from desktop apps. I'm continuously discovering more, e.g. Figma. Basically
anything that was a single-user desktop app can be made into a realtime
collaborative networked one.

2\. Mobile business apps - Yes we have mobile versions of business web apps
but these are typically as useful as responsive web apps which drop critical
features needing to resort to a poor [x] request desktop app experience. What
is needed is to create apps which make full use of what works on mobile.
Speech input, gestures, what have you. Just as PCs took over from centralized
computers, and web from OSes, future computing will be more mobile and
ubiquitous. Current apps are translations of desktop/web ideas. We have a long
way to go to making great mobile ones. The many significant discoveries and
inventions along the way will come from both large and smaller contributors.

~~~
intended
>single-user desktop app can be made into a realtime collaborative networked
one

Dear God, Why?

I would rather have MORE single desktop, single license products which I can
buy once and then forget about having to upgrade every year, and buy yet
another license for. (B2B)

------
gpsx
There definitely is a change in Silicon Valley from before. I don't think it
is a lack of things to be created by any means. The difference I see is that
before the thing to do was create startup. Now everyone wants to go work for
Google, Apple, Facebook or another large company. And why not, you can get a
huge salary there without the risk and hard work of a startup. With so many
more of the smart people are going to big companies rather than trying to make
something on there own, I definitely expect less innovation here in the US,
for now at least.

On the positive side, there are some things a big company can do that a small
company can't. This may contribute to why so many people are going to work at
big companies, and we may see some good results.

~~~
pault
The weirdos and hackers are still doing the same stuff they've always done.
What you are seeing is the influx of people who would have gone into law or
finance identifying tech as having the biggest payoff for the least amount of
effort. The Silicon Valley of before was a small fraction of its current size.

------
StillBored
This sounds suspiciously like the mid 1990's when everyone was bemoaning how
the big software companies had basically ended the at home software startup
shop. Then the web struck and all these big companies had to get nimble enough
to complete with the scrappy little web shops. This basically happened again
the mid 2000s with smartphone development.

I'm not sure if the machine learning revolution will favor the guy at home
with a GTX 1080, but until we go for a decade or more without any big
hardware/software companies starting up then I will believe it.

OTOH, I suspect that the US as lost the competitive advantage to china in this
regard. The "IOT" revolution probably isn't going to start in the US since all
the little board dev shops are in china where you can actually purchase all
the little parts you need without having to wait 6 weeks for a part or pay 10x
in shipping.

~~~
hfourm
Similarly, there is a big growth in the small scrappy startup space around
cryptocurrency and associated blockchain technologies.

Not to start a conversation over ponzi schemes, scams, and vaporware, but its
impossible to ignore the millions of dollars of investment moving around on a
monthly basis in this space.

------
ChuckMcM
Having lived through three "deaths" of silicon valley so far I will reserve
judgement until the price of housing goes down to the national median

------
skrebbel
NYC-based angel investor Jerry Neumann calls this the "deployment age" and has
a very nice, and somewhat prescient, write-up about it:

[http://reactionwheel.net/2015/10/the-deployment-
age.html](http://reactionwheel.net/2015/10/the-deployment-age.html)

~~~
Alex3917
He's just quoting Carlotta Perez. But he doesn't get it quite right, we're in
the installation phase for some technologies and the deployment phase for
others.

~~~
lioeters
Thanks for mentioning Carlotta Perez. I found a fairly recent (Aug 2017)
article by her and cohorts that discusses these "installation" and
"deployment" phases. It's a more optimistic article, so I created a separate
post:

Are We on the Verge of a New Golden Age?
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15531574](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15531574)

------
jtth
> Big businesses and executives, rather than startups and entrepreneurs, will
> own the next decade; today’s graduates are much more likely to work for Mark
> Zuckerberg than follow in his footsteps

This is a tautology and reflective of the mindset that produces articles like
this one. There is only one Zuckerberg. Unicorns are by definition rare, and
disrupting entrenched business interests is rare _because they are
entrenched._ That's what it means.

~~~
freehunter
Yeah this is another example of how SV exists in a bubble and can't see the
broader world. Today's graduates are more likely to work for Zuckerberg than
to follow him, as were yesterday's, as were the day before's and so on.

It only seems like everyone is a founder because that's how it was in SV. It
only seems like every stopped creating startups because that's how it is in
SV. But like everything else in the world, trends start at the coasts and work
their way inward, to the point where SV tech growth may be stagnating or
declining, but Midwest startups are booming. And if the Midwest is firing up,
African startups are virtually exploding.

Big businesses have always owned every decade of capitalism, and that's not
going to change. Economies of scale is too hard to turn away from. But
startups aren't dying, they're just taking on less sexy, harder problems that
don't impact SV. So of course SV thinks entrepreneurship is dying.

~~~
KGIII
I see other 'startups' that I think are missed by the SV folks. They aren't
tech, but may use tech in their startup. I see quite a few of them.

They are people starting their own business. A friend borrowed some money to
start a business where he drives a remote control vehicle down pipes to
examine them from the inside. The space didn't have much 'local' competition
and he was able to spot that, take advantage of it, and now has a dozen
employees, has repaid the money, and is seeking to expand his operations. A
similar experience was loaning my sibling some money so he could start a
plumbing company - except it is more niche and not residential. They use some
tech but they aren't tech companies.

It seems to me that the SV pundits see the tech startups while not seeing the
guy who does vehicle power washing on-site, the interior decorator that uses
3D modeling and VR, or the folks who opened a diner where they have automated
the food ordering process.

~~~
RepressedEmu
It seems like you have a lot of entrepreneurial energy and inspiration in your
personal network. SV pundits don't care about those people creating lifestyle
businesses, they just want "megascale" and big fancy exits.

------
dirtyaura
I think there is a constant shift towards different kind of startups, as one
field saturates and big players emerge. Currently the shift has been from
"easy" towards "harder". in the early 2010s there was a shift from viral
consumer services and apps towards b2b services and Uber-style marketplaces,
which both are arguably harder to make than most consumer apps, and now there
is a shift towards hard tech startups, which, again are harder to build.

But startups were more about hard tech in 80s, early 90s. It will take a while
that new big consumer tech platforms emerge, but when it happens, then again
there will be shift towards viral consumer services.

------
Animats
One killer for startups is the weakening of patents. After _eBay vs.
MercExchange_ , easy post-grant re-examination, and _Seagate_ [1], the worst-
case penalty for infringing a patent is only paying the royalties that would
have been paid if a license had been negotiated. So there's no incentive left
for big companies to buy technology; they can just steal it.

This is new. All those things changed in the last 15 years. The result is that
VCs have gone for market share, not technology. (Or they've gone for pharma,
where patents still work.) Until about 2000, Silicon Valley VCs wanted
startups to show that they had a strong intellectual property position. That
all changed in the first dot-com boom, when it started being about buying
market share.

This hurts innovation. Why work on a hard problem?

[1]
[http://www.fulcrum.com/punitive_damages_are_now/](http://www.fulcrum.com/punitive_damages_are_now/)

------
pfarnsworth
Meh, articles like this are neither new nor interesting. Journalists have been
writing articles like this for decades. At some point, one of the journalists
who writes these articles will be right, but I doubt this one will be. It's
the same with how the US dollar will get replaced as the reserve currency.
Maybe some time in the future, but definitely not now and not in 10 years.

There will always be cycles, but it's so easy to be a naysayer, just write a
medium post. People have been calling for the collapse of Silicon Valley since
the dotcom crash, and at some point they'll be right, but they've been wrong
so far.

Currently, I don't see any companies that are particularly interesting, but
I'm confident there's some young kid out there that will create something
great that will capture everyone's attention in the next couple of years, and
then a new land-grab will occur all over again. It always has happened, and
will always continue to happen.

------
bane
Why would this be the end of the startup era? That era has been going on for
decades it's just taken different forms. It's maybe the end of the overvalued
photo sharing mobile app company era (it can't come soon enough).

Even "old" startups like Palantir that claim valuations at $20 billion are
privately being revalued down significantly [1].

We're simply moving into a different era and the very public, very flash,
direct to consumer startup market appears to be well beyond saturated. The
money will go back to where it's always gone, quieter B2B type companies that
build boring technology that solves less glamorous, but more important,
problems.

1 -
[https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-10-17/palantir-...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-10-17/palantir-
will-struggle-to-hold-on-to-20-billion-valuation-report-says)

------
Invictus0
This isn't to say that you can't still build a successful startup, but it is
saying that you probably won't build the next Uber/Airbnb. The difference is a
few zeros but you'd still be wealthy either way.

------
bogomipz
>"Big businesses and executives, rather than startups and entrepreneurs, will
own the next decade; today’s graduates are much more likely to work for Mark
Zuckerberg than follow in his footsteps."

I disagree with this. I think the bloom is off the rose for these
companies(FB, Google, Amazon et al)in terms of an image as a "cool place" to
work. I they will increasingly be viewed for what they essentially are - just
other big corporations. Big corporations that only have their own best
interests at heart.

This nearly reads like a propaganda piece intended to discourage people from
doing their own thing.

------
dreamdu5t
If the smartphone boom was “2007-2016” it’s premature to claim nothing is
next. It’s too soon to say “there is no such revolution en route”, when we had
one practically yesterday!

------
vladislav
This article is using false assumptions about AI to back up its narrative.

"AI doesn’t just require top-tier talent; that talent is all but useless
without mountains of the right kind of data. And who has essentially all of
the best data? That’s right: the abovementioned Big Five, plus their Chinese
counterparts Tencent, Alibaba, and Baidu."

Making the next quantum leaps in AI is not a question of data advantages.

1) We have just seen the world's best Go-playing AI trained completely from
self-play, without access to any labeled data nor hand-engineering, trained on
a few machines. This happened at Google, but could have easily been done by a
small startup.

[https://thenextweb.com/artificial-
intelligence/2017/10/20/go...](https://thenextweb.com/artificial-
intelligence/2017/10/20/googles-deepmind-achieves-machine-learning-
breakthroughs-at-a-terrifying-pace/)

2) Even the pioneers of deep learning are now strongly pushing back on the
methodology that lots of labeled data is required to solve AI problems.

Geoffrey Hinton: "I don't think it's how the brain works. We clearly don't
need all the labeled data."

[https://www.axios.com/ai-pioneer-advocates-starting-
over-248...](https://www.axios.com/ai-pioneer-advocates-starting-
over-2485537027.html?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=twsocialshare&utm_campaign=organic)

In a nutshell, the biggest challenge of pushing AI forward is tackling
unsupervised learning, not having "better data".

~~~
computerex
1) That's false. AlphaGo did not just train by self-play. It trained on
millions of pre-played games, and the bot also uses hand-engineered features
for their MCTS hybrid (best) model. Refer to their paper for details.

2) Read the article that you are referencing please. What you are implying is
not the thesis of that article nor is it what Geoffrey Hinton is saying.

What Hinton is saying is, we should throw out deep learning. What he is saying
is that the current approaches to AI are fundamentally broken and aren't going
to result in artificial general intelligence.

Backpropagation is not just used in supervised learning, it is also used in
unsupervised learning. I happen to agree with Hinton, in that there is too
much hype around the current state and successes of AI, which has mainly been
in "narrow AI".

AI is a term that gets thrown around a lot these days. But there is a big
difference between technology that automates the tedious tasks of daily life,
and artificial general intelligence.

In the world of deep learning, data is king.

~~~
vladislav
Sorry, but you are incorrect on both accounts.

1) AlphaGo Zero was indeed trained in the way I mention.

2) As directly quoted from the article, Hinton believes that a better way of
learning doesn't require all that labeled data. If such a method is invented,
as is required to push AI forward, big corporations would not have a data
advantage, which is my original point.

~~~
computerex
AlphaGo, trained using supervised learning using games from KGS:

[https://storage.googleapis.com/deepmind-
media/alphago/AlphaG...](https://storage.googleapis.com/deepmind-
media/alphago/AlphaGoNaturePaper.pdf)

AlphaGo scratch:
[https://www.nature.com/articles/nature24270.epdf](https://www.nature.com/articles/nature24270.epdf)

I was specifically talking about AlphaGo, not AlphaGo scratch. Also, if you
read the paper about AlphaGo scratch, the key innovation driving the self-
learning is the use of MCTS as a policy improver, which couldn't have feasibly
been done without AlphaGo and the supervised learning.

And I think Hinton is saying that we need fundamental breakthroughs for AI,
and I don't think he is in favor of "traditional" modern neural network
architectures. Anything that requires SGD, he doesn't like.

------
thisisit
No one wants to be called the next Yahoo, so even a whiff of competition means
the startup gets acquired. This considering FAANG companies have so much cash
on their books, not to mention ease at which credit can be had.

------
rdl
This doesn't feel particularly true in the enterprise space. There still is
the constraint on IPO exits due to (unclear what exactly -- that's another
topic), but I don't see companies like HPE, IBM, Dell, etc. getting _more_
innovative, nimble, or effective.

It might just be that in the consumer space there are some exceptionally good
companies, where that hasn't really happened in enterprise, or it could be a
function of the technologies and markets. Amazon (AWS) and Google to some
extent compete in enterprise as well, but they're not as dominant relatively.

------
neya
Ironically, you have a giant media house (AOL), one of whose important revenue
streams is selling hopes of the startup world ("Startups, start here". [1])
through their Disrupt conferences, writing something like this.

My personal opinion - as long as there is a market demand and as long as
you're a business fulfilling that demand, startup or not, whether the tech is
accessible or not, it's all that matters.

[1] [https://techcrunch.com/event-info/disrupt-
berlin-2017/](https://techcrunch.com/event-info/disrupt-berlin-2017/)

~~~
mindhunters
Of course market demand and other factors matter but the point of this article
is that large tech companies are now a barrier on the way of small startups to
their success. We all see that now, most startups fail and even if some of
them gain some traction, they are being bought by big guys. And one of the
main causes of that is the outdated nature of large corporations. Nowadays,
one of the main platforms to promote your company is Google. However, google
advertising is good for those who pay more. Thus, companies with more cash
have a privilege over smaller companies even if the second ones do their job
better. And that's only one example with one large corporation. To conclude,
big guys, which were praised by the whole tech community all the time are now
a barrier on our road to progress.

------
onewaystreet
Weird that an article on the end of startups doesn't mention the likely next
big area for startups: Genetics.

~~~
maxwin
Genetics research is slow. It could be 10 , 20 or 50 years away.

------
strin
Most industries tend to consolidate over time with a few big players. For
technology it's particularly true given the winner takes all phenomenon.
Unless there is a fundamental new technology / hardware platform, there's
little chance small startups can go into existing ones.

However, I am more interested in seeing technology disrupting old heavy
industries. Please go outside the silicon valley and there are plenty of
those.

------
hluska
I try to be patient with Techcrunch, but seriously, phrases like this make me
see red:

> The market capitalization of Bitcoin vastly exceeds that of any Bitcoin-
> based startup. The same is true for Ethereum.

The market cap of the US dollar exceeds that of any financial institution.
What's the fucking point?

~~~
jayd16
The point is that the success of bitcoin does not mean a huge windfall to
bitcoin based startups. Reread the paragraph.

~~~
tyingq
I suppose it depends on how broadly you define startup. Surely some drug
dealers, online casinos, etc, are doing well. I believe Silkroad did $1B+ in
sales.

------
peter303
I remember the beginning of the startup era. When Bill Gate and Steve Jobs
started their companies in 1976, rhere were very few venture capital firms and
the stepped procedure of investment you see today. A company had to borrow
from more conventional banks and/or grow their own capital from revenues. A
big help was when President Carter lowered capital gains tax in 1977. That
stimulated investment firms.

------
jackcosgrove
Startups have also seemed to have morphed from ventures started by founders,
to vehicles for investors to make long plays for monopoly control of a market,
like Uber and Netflix. I am not sure of the laws regarding dumping and
artificially low prices, but when startups operate at a loss for years and
gobble up the entire market, that looks like what they're doing.

------
bobsil1
Clickbait.

ML won’t require mass amounts of data forever. One-shot learning will get
solved.

~~~
Eridrus
> One-shot learning will get solved.

This is nonsense. I would challenge you to show any few-shot learning work
that isn't basically some form of transfer learning in disguise.

Few-shot learning is super useful if you're in a position where you don't have
much data, but will never compete with huge stacks of data.

~~~
freehunter
The nice thing with digital models is they can get data from everywhere and
continue to improve slowly over time. It's the lean startup applied to ML:
there's nothing wrong with launching with a one-shot ML product to test a
hypothesis, and as time goes on keep adding to it. That's the core concept
there: start with a working but basic model and continue to extrapolate from
that as time goes on.

"I would challenge you to show proof of X" in ML is an empty challenge when
the technology is in its infancy. You might as well say "I challenge you to
stream HD video over the internet" in 1989. Theoretically possible but
technically impossible for the time. We proved it possible as tech improved,
though.

The problem with cynicism is it costs nothing but still makes you look like an
expert.

~~~
Eridrus
> That's the core concept there: start with a working but basic model and
> continue to extrapolate from that as time goes on.

This has literally nothing to do with few-shot learning though. You can always
make a crappy model with a small amount of data and then improve it as you get
more. And my point is that if you have a competitor with several orders of
magnitude more data, their models are almost certainly still going to be
better than yours.

Few-shot learning will probably be able to improve the baseline of what you
can do on certain tasks, but you're not magically going to learn a
sufficiently accurate cancer diagnosis algorithm from 5 radiology images.

The best case for few-shot learning is that you go from "worse than the
alternatives" to "good enough for some people to get value", which will
probably happen a few times, but is going to be a minor phenomenon.

------
EGreg
I call bullshit on this. The problem is centralization, but that hasn't
prevented startups. It just caused them to be bought by large companies like
Faceook (YouTube, WhatsApp and Instagram are some examples)

I write about this extensively here:
[https://qbix.com/blog/index.php/2017/08/centralization-
and-o...](https://qbix.com/blog/index.php/2017/08/centralization-and-open-
source/)

Decentralization of trust, power, energy generation, and much more is on the
way. This will lead to a lot more startup activity.

[https://www.ted.com/talks/clay_shirky_on_institutions_versus...](https://www.ted.com/talks/clay_shirky_on_institutions_versus_collaboration/up-
next)

------
jotm
Well, back to good old small business it is.

~~~
geetfun
That’s right. The small business SAAS biz in niches.

------
dudul
Not every startup needs to become the next Amazon or the next Uber. Startups
will still be around, some will still be successful, but yeah, maybe they
won't turn into mastodonte that easily.

------
placebo
I think this was a very sober presentation of things, however it seems that it
underestimates our inability to tell how the future will pan out, especially
when we're moving on an exponential function of technological progress and
creativity. Sure, the Internet window is closed and so is the mobile apps
window but no one saw either of them coming - likewise, I can't tell yet what
the next really big thing will be or when (unfortunately) but I wouldn't mourn
garage entrepreneurship just yet.

------
rpmcmurphy
The world does not need more Mark Zuckerbergs, it needs millions of small and
mid-size businesses working on the build out of low carbon energy sources.
Converting the world electricity supply to run off renewable sources will
require tens of trillions of dollars of investment over a period of decades.
It's not a small opportunity, but unlike the app economy, it's not a winner
take all market. This is mostly a good thing, although we won't see many
overnight billionaires from it.

~~~
caust1c
I agree the future is built on small businesses. But to have the most impact
on the environment we could all just stop eating so much meat.

~~~
cubano
Why would we do that when are bodies are specifically evolved for eating both
vegetables and meat?

I, for one at least, consider along the millions of years that evolution tried
a version of _homo sapiens_ that couldn't eat meat, and it was selected
against...why would we now attempt to overturn the apparent wisdom of that
selection?

~~~
majewsky
Quoting from the collective wisdom of HN here:

    
    
      Because it doesn't scale.

~~~
rdiddly
Oh crap, you summed up my long-ass comment in 4 words!

"I've been disrupted by a leaner competitor!"

------
gjmveloso
I don’t think it’s the end of the startup era at all. It might be the end of
startup hype ending on itself, with valuations not tight to reality and
companies without business.

------
notaboutdave
I get what he's saying. The internet used to be peaceful grassy plains. Now it
is loud bustling New York with bigger fish that are out to get you. This
doesn't mean you can't disrupt everything, but now you have to outrun this new
establishment that reinvests all its money into eating you more efficiently.
Companies like Facebook already have giant audiences, and copying your product
can be done virtually overnight.

------
forapurpose
> today’s new technologies are complicated, expensive, and favor organizations
> that have huge amounts of scale and capital already.

That is not a fact of life or act of nature, but to a great degree it is a
choice. Decades ago, engineers built many technologies that were conceptually
simple, elegant, open, free-as-in-liberty, and hackable - not by accident, but
to empower hackers and end-users. Those efforts created the environment,
platforms and tools that the startups thrived on. What are today's engineers
building for the next generation?

For example, I recently had to learn in-depth how computers boot these days -
down in the weeds with ME, TPM, UEFI, SEDs, PXEs, GPT, and more:

First, the complexity of that small step to starting your computer is beyond
an individual's comprehension; just one spec was 2,500 pages; many
technologies' roles overlap and it's not clear why there is redundancy or how
they integrate with each other. Perhaps there is someone who specializes in
this narrow field as a full-time job and actually grasps it all, or maybe if I
had a year to dedicate to it - but I can't imagine some new teenage hacker
mastering it.

Second, much of it is proprietary or at least not free. TPM and ME, for
example, are ultimately outside the user's control.

Compare that to the former system of POST - BIOS - MBR - boot loader. I'm not
saying change is bad and that we couldn't have improved on it, but clearly
nobody thought about making it hackable or empowering end-users.

I'll go a little further and say it reflects - I can't support a causal
connection - a broader loss of interest in the 'American Dream', equality of
opportunity (or at least an abundance of it for all), and empowering the
little guy and underdog. The U.S. also cuts back education and other programs
that give opportunity to less advantaged citizens, often with the idea that
the powerful should not be hindered by taxes or government. Polls show
interest in democracy is slipping, with the US government saying it's not
worth promoting abroad (the White House and State Dept both explicitly said
it) - democracy is political empowerment of the little guy; everyone gets a
vote and is equal. Some political groups even explicitly argue that their
group should dominate the others. I'm not starting a political debate; I'm
just pointing out that it's a much different outlook.

------
dba7dba
We don't need more humongous private firms like Google/Facebook/Apple. If they
were to be replaced by other firms, they will only be even bigger and more
powerful. Pretty sure most would say no to that.

What we need is more tech savvy populace that know how to put up their own
website (facebook replacement) and apps to share photos (instagram) with
family and friends.

------
gfiorav
The point has been proven: there’re some business models that can be jump
start with VC, and generate tons of cash flow. It will never go away.

What’s happening is that the world is learning no to invest hundreds of
millions in a ”bro app”. VCs learning = less investment in absurd enterprises
= less total number of startups

------
noddy1
The cryptocurrency space has brought multiple unicorns - they just mostly
don't come from silicon valley and don't follow the typical VC funding model.

Bitcoin Ethereum Ripple Bitcoincash Litecoin Dash NEM NEO Monero Iota

~~~
rifung
I admit I don't know too much about cryptocurrencies but how are those
unicorns? Aren't those all currencies and not companies?

------
tanilama
Current startups are jokes. Not really many of them have techs, let alone a
working business model. All they have is websites/apps, nothing more.

------
SFSandra
This article fails to take into account blockchain startups (esp for mobile)
and the trend toward decentralization.

------
CalChris
The champion of the dying cause is a trope going back (at least) to Greek poet
Pindar. It usually treats the titans of the near past as god-like and looks at
the future as one of inevitable decline. It ends with _Get Off My Lawn_.

I've already lost a few bets on the future. I didn't see Uber/Lyft although I
thoroughly hated taxis. What do I know?

------
pabl0rg
Interesting article, but if the big five really dominate all resources in
SF/SV, maybe other cities will become the next Silicon Valley.

------
analogic
robo machine startup end u

------
Hydraulix989
This just sounds like unwarranted negativity to me. There will always be
innovation.

~~~
quadrangle
I don't think the takeaway is that innovation will slow down. The point of the
article is that the large, powerful companies that we have now are on top of
the game, understand technology, networking, internet, and there's no big new
shift where they'll lose to startups.

Innovation will continue and Alphabet and Amazon etc. will remain dominant and
powerful, controlling and doing much of the innovation.

Startups had whole new markets to enter in the past where big corporations
were not prepared to go. Now, any potential new markets aren't wide open for
small startups and the big corporations are ready to jump in and dominate.
It's not the same.

End of widespread startup success ≠ end of innovation (but it will mean some
types of innovation are stifled or don't happen)

------
DennisP
I'm pretty heavily involved in the Ethereum ecosystem, and it's a great place
for startups.

~~~
logicallee
I have some questions as to why you would say that - could you reach out to me
at my email or add yours to your profile? Thanks.

~~~
eradicatethots
Why do you say thanks? They may not want to say any more than they’ve already
said, or they may be unfriendly to you.

~~~
DennisP
No worries, I'm not an unfriendly person.

------
Alex3917
> It is widely accepted that the next wave of important technologies consists
> of AI, drones, AR/VR, cryptocurrencies, self-driving cars, and the "Internet
> of Things."

While I agree with a lot of this analysis, the fact that the author seems not
to understand the difference between cryptocurrency and blockchain doesn't
exactly signal credibility in this domain.

~~~
chrisco255
I think each one of those platforms are growing rapidly. So what if they
haven't hit critical mass yet? Each one has that potential. What are we
looking at then, a few years before one or several of those become as big as
mobile?

