
What Happened to the Future? - clay
http://www.foundersfund.com/the-future
======
thinkcomp
It's a good essay. The only problem is that it's Peter Thiel behind it.

The problem isn't just that "we got 140 characters." The problem is that Peter
Thiel asked for it by investing in and therefore promulgating Mark
Zuckerberg's vision of ubiquitous irrelevance. I think he's right that VC is
destroying itself by investing in what I have often referred to as trivial
nonsense, but he and his firm are part of the problem, not the solution. Just
look at the portfolio companies: Winster? Quid? Slide? Path? GoWalla? And of
course, Facebook? None of these companies improve my life or the lives of
anyone I care about. Founders Fund has 22 consumer internet companies in its
portfolio and one or two in the other categories listed on the web site.

Furthermore Thiel has stated that he wouldn't bother doing PayPal again if he
knew what he knows about the payments industry today. This is of course the
space that I'm working in. Bold words, Peter. If only there were more VCs
willing to run and hide.

Frankly I'm sick of venture capital firms writing self-serving slogans, or in
this case, entire essays. Actions speak louder than words. I'm doing serious
work and my company has been rejected by sixty (that's six-zero) VC firms in
the past five years. It's going to take more than a manifesto to convince me
that any investor is serious about the future.

~~~
sahillavingia
I actually disagree. Facebook has improved my life by a _ton_.

~~~
scott_s
The internet-cynical, tech-savvy thing to say is how much of a waste of time
Facebook is, but I think it changes communication in the same way that every
house having a telephone did. Yes, email and IM existed before Facebook, but
Facebook is a different model of communication.

~~~
discreteevent
Facebook Vs (email + IM) = Telephone Vs (post + telegraph). Really? You think
that these two jumps in technology are equivalent in the difference they have
made to peoples lives? I don't use facebook but I would not be able to work
without telephone and the internet.

~~~
temphn
Yes, probably so. Facebook means that you can keep up with people (who's
getting married, who moved, who had children) without emailing them.

If you have 500 friends, each with a feed with 50 posts, you are talking about
25000 possible emails. Those emails would never be sent, because they are
usually individually way below the importance threshold for an email.

So, by this calculation at least, it's at least a 1-2 order of magnitude
reduction in the work required to maintain contact with old friends. That's
valuable.

~~~
ericd
That's assuming that knowing the minutiae of the lives of people who you don't
talk to frequently is important. I'd say that that's actually a huge waste of
time, and distracts from actual socializing by making you feel like you're
keeping up with people without actually doing so.

~~~
jamesteow
Hear hear.

When G+ came out I dropped my Facebook account.

Due to the low activity on G+, I resorted to... doing stuff with other people
in real life, such as volunteering and going to meetups.com meetups. And my
real friends not near me kept in touch via e-mail and IM.

------
natch
What happened to HTML? If this were formatted with web standards, I could
resize the fonts, scroll with my browser's built-in preferred scrolling
mechanisms that aren't chunky, laggy, and painful, and I could actually read
it. I'm not the only one to comment on this, but apparently whoever did this
page is dense enough about web standards that the point needs to be repeated.
How do you run a VC and not get this? My opinion of Founders Fund has gone
down.

~~~
athom
No kidding! The best part is, it's all so unnecessary! When I saw the blank
page, I decided to have a peek at the source, an lo and behold, there's the
essay! Copy it to a text editor, turn on dynamic word wrap, and... enjoy?

~~~
dredmorbius
Firefox: view -> style -> No style

Disabling CSS dumps the unstructured page. You can also pay it a visit in a
console-mode browser.

I'm (sadly) finding this to be increasingly necessary to view web pages (as an
aggressive user of NoScript).

------
david927
When you're traveling at 60km/hr and going faster, it's thrilling. You imagine
what will come next.

When you're traveling at 260km/hr and going faster, it's horrifying. You think
of how you can hold on.

If you go to Disneyland's Tomorrowland you'll see that we ended dreaming about
the future in the 60's and 70's. It was polished metal; a stone's throw from
what we had, but within dreaming limits.

Now we don't know where we're going, but we know we've never been there
before. It makes no sense to dream about "today plus twenty years". It won't
be that and we're aware now that it won't. The innovation will happen with or
without us as individuals. And it will keep going, hurtling faster into an
oblivion which we can only guess at.

~~~
jamesbritt
TV's Max Headroom intro was prescient in that regard.

"20 minutes into the future ..."

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rM9BOkcG9M0&feature=playe...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rM9BOkcG9M0&feature=player_embedded#at=67)

------
zb
> Not all technology is created equal: there is a difference between Pong and
> the Concorde

Yes, Pong was simply a clever design making use of existing technology that
made shirtloads of money for a bunch of people and spawned entire industries.
Whereas Concorde - a "real technological development" - was a giant money pit
fed from government slush funds for decades, punctuated only by occasional
lethal consequences for its passengers and bystanders. (Not to mention that it
was a technological cul-de-sac.)

Remind me, which one was it they want to be investing in? Because it sure
_sounds_ like they're saying Concorde. Am I misinterpreting?

~~~
temphn
Technological cul de sac and subsidized investment, yes.

But looks like the Air France Concorde crash was due to debris on the runway
rather than the plane itself. Or were you thinking of something else?

[https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Air_France_Fl...](https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Air_France_Flight_4590)

A Continental Airlines DC-10 departing for Newark, New Jersey, lost a titanium
alloy strip, 435 millimetres (17.1 in) long and about 29 millimetres (1.1 in)
to 34 millimetres (1.3 in) wide, during takeoff from the same runway.

During the Concorde's subsequent take-off run, this piece of debris, still
lying on the runway, cut a tyre causing rupture and tyre debris to be hurled
by centrifugal force. A large chunk of this debris (4.5 kilograms or 9.9
pounds) struck the underside of the aircraft's wing structure at an estimated
speed of 500 kilometres per hour (310 mph). Although it did not directly
puncture any of the fuel tanks, it sent out a pressure shockwave that
eventually ruptured the number five fuel tank at the weakest point, just above
the landing gear.

~~~
jberryman
> But looks like the Air France Concorde crash was due to debris on the runway
> rather than the plane itself. Or were you thinking of something else?

I know nothing about the Concorde, etc. but that the crash was triggered by
debris does not really refute that it was a poorly designed or dangerous
aircraft, as that should be a design consideration of any aircraft (I assume).

~~~
zb
Exactly. If a blown tyre is enough to kill everyone on board, it's not an
especially safe design. Note that tyres had burst on at least 4 previous
occasions, so that was not exactly unforeseeable.

------
moultano
One important aspect of these problems is that they aren't going to be solved
by people who know _only_ how to code. These are opportunities for mechanical
engineers, biologists, statisticians, materials scientists, physicists ...

For many of them the research would have to be so speculative that it would be
hard to imagine them occurring outside of an academic research lab. For a
startup to tackle one of these, the bones of the technology would have to
already be there.

------
evmar
It's clear whoever put this together put a lot of effort into making the page
fancy and there are some nice effects there, but it ultimately harms the
message.

Here is some concrete feedback:

\- WebKit lets you make custom scrollbars if that's important to you:
<http://www.webkit.org/blog/363/styling-scrollbars/> . Using a real scrollbar
means that shortcuts I'm familiar with (e.g. shift-space to page up -- wow, I
had no idea how frequently I used this until this page broke it) won't break.

\- Whitespace is nice, but the double-spaced-feeling line-height combined with
the "back to founders fund" heading at the top combine to make it feel
uncomfortably cramped vertically -- not enough information density per page.

\- Similarly, the lines are so wide they are uncomfortable to read. (I
actually use a user stylesheet that limits lines to 50em, which makes many
sites including HN more readable.)

I'm sorry I don't have any feedback on the content, I was too distracted to
start reading it yet.

~~~
argv_empty
And then there's the fact that it requires javascript to just display some
simple text.

------
jfoutz
Is this a joke?

I have a 3d printer in my basement.

Poor little VC, go play with your social networks. The grownups a busy making
the future.

~~~
minikomi
Mid-portfolio crisis, perhaps?

------
cbr

        over the past thirty years, there have been
        no radical advances in transportation technology
    

Containerization.

~~~
dredmorbius
That actually dates to the 1950s and is based on concepts up to a century
older than that. Break-bulk has been recognized as a bottleneck in freight
transport for ages.

It's evolved and become dominant with standardization of container sizes and
fittings (by 1970) and with the deregulation of the US shipping industry and
introduction of double-stack rail transports (both in 1984).

I suspect more significant recent advancements have been in inventory and
logistics management (though bar-coding of rail cars was already happening in
the 1980s) and overnight air and other rapid freight. Not quite as visible as
containers, but vital to keeping the boats, trains, and trucks moving, and
with JIT delivery probably accounts for much of the success of big box stores,
and now Internet-based retail and shipping.

------
h34t
Ways FF should improve the reading experience:

\- Support normal scroll behaviour (swiping my trackpad scrolls but only very
slowly; I can't press spacebar to page down; clicking underneath the scroller
should advance a single page, not jump ahead to another part of the document)

\- Show diagrams by default (no reason to require a click)

\- Add a place for comments

\- Narrower line length

------
VladRussian
the human race will get the flying car and the fusion when it is ready for it
( technologically these innovations, at the level of successful prototypes
have existed for last 50 years). What would we do with such technology if it
was in widespread use today? Flying car - sprawl development even further.
Fusion - com'n, are we ready for a wide availability of a high flux high
energy neutron generating devices? We are still can't control ourselves when
it comes to the dynamite and the similar levels of energy, and it becomes
hysterical paroxysm when the fission levels of energy come into play.

The primitive steam based engine was discovered by ancient Greeks and
technologically they could improve upon it further. Their slave based society
wasn't ready for it.

Like Greeks and steam power, today we have the primitive access to space - and
surprise!, instead of actively working upon improving it, pouring all our
resources into it, we're still discussing whether it has economical reasons,
and like in case of Greeks, we can't find much of such economical reasons for
it.

~~~
fractallyte
'If human thought is a growth, like all other growths, its logic is without
foundation of its own, and is only the adjusting constructiveness of all other
growing things. A tree cannot find out, as it were, how to blossom, until
comes blossom-time. A social growth cannot find out the use of steam engines,
until comes steam-engine-time.' - Charles Fort, Lo!

------
protomyth
What happened to the future: Advertising as a primary revenue source and
Financial Markets trying to be a place unto themselves with rules and customs
that actually don't make much long term sence. In the US, throw in a
generation that really didn't seem to care to make a better place for the next
generation and you got a lot of problems. The now killed the later.

------
chrismealy
Enough with the flying cars! That was never a good idea.

~~~
william42
Agreed. I'm not a big fan of Twitter, but flying cars don't exist for a
reason. Now self-driving cars, those are interesting. Guess who's working on
_them_? Google.

~~~
DannoHung
Self-flying cars?

------
fuzzythinker
Is the use of the "presentation enhancer" to deter people from actually
reading it? Because that's it did to me. The font is illegible, scrolling must
be done via the bar (otherwise it crawls at ~1px/sec), and turns my cpu fan
way up. Is it really still "cool" to misuse technology nowadays?

------
jayzee
People knock Webvan around but the founder (Mick Mountz), 10 years after that
debacle, founded <http://www.kivasystems.com/> where instead of conveyor belts
(Webvan) they use robots for managing a warehouse. Seriously cool robotics.
Check out the videos on their site.

Kiva Systems has gone from strength to strength and is now used by Zappos,
Wallgreens and others (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiva_Systems>)

------
pedalpete
I had heard of Founder Fund before, but I can't say I had any strong
conviction as to what made them a special VC, or if they were.

Their manifesto makes me question if my current project is thinking big enough
(I think it is).

I think the problem entrepreneurs who would apply to Founders Fund might have
is how to present their idea as being big and bold. Often the big and bold are
not understood in common terms, so we dumb them down to something that is
achievable in the short term, and seems realistic, while having a long-term
goal which only makes sense if the shorter term goals can be accomplished.

Facebook would be a perfect example here. They couldn't be discussed as 'world
changing' in the early days as they were just another social network. Nothing
seemed insurmountable, nothing seemed challenging, even the idea of this
'social graph' probably wouldn't have made much sense until tens of millions
of people were using it.

------
speby
PDF button for the article doesn't work and I couldn't find a link in the
source or the JS. Annoying. Anyone stumble across the PDF version? Printing
the page to PDF from the browser works to no avail either.

------
cleaver
its;dr (interface too shitty; didn't read)

~~~
btcoal
Well then you may have done yourself a disservice because:

a. the quality of presentation of content is independent of the quality of the
information of content; and

b. text that is harder to read may be easier to remember:
<http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-11573666>

------
mitultiwari
Nicely written essay. I would say future is hard to predict. People in 1960s
predicted about space travel but did not predict mobile devices like iphones
that have so much compute power with so many apps with location, touch,
social, communication features.

140 characters may not have great technology but can be attributed to bring
social revolution in so many places.

Ultimately, need is mother of most of innovations. Need leads to demand, which
leads to building new solutions.

------
rbanffy
For now, I'd settle for an ordinary, standard scroll bar...

------
robryan
Is their really much a technical problem preventing flying cars? I think it's
similar to space in that it isn't overly energy efficient as I'd assume withut
completely redesigning our cities you would need vertical takeoff. Then there
is a lot of safety considerations, I think self driving cars would need to be
accepted well before anything could happen with flying cars.

------
seats
Flying cars do exist and can be bought (pre-order) today.

<http://www.terrafugia.com/>

Unrelated, except to the sub-title. I also posted deeper in the comments, but
I think it's a pretty cool project and thought it's worth trying to repost in
a more visible spot. The price tag is a few 100k and you only need the lowest
level pilot's license to fly it.

------
BIackSwan
The most powerful minds are the ones that can be changed.

I should add ...can be changed after much deliberation.

------
nick_urban
Thank you for this essay. I understand that it's not, as some have already
pointed out, particularly disinterested, but it set me to thinking, which is
enough for me.

This essay calls for a return to hard problems. The "problem" with hard
problems isn't that they're hard. That's actually exactly what we need about
them. It the unyielding character of hard problems which makes them worth
dedicating ourselves to. The greatest difficulty is not solving the problem
(which isn't even strictly necessary to benefit from the investigation), but
rather, in giving ourselves to the problem in the first place. How can we
choose a problem when there are so many possibilities and we have so little
foresight?

If we lived in a vacuum, the choice would be impossible or arbitrary. Luckily,
our lives are not vacuums. The "real problems" (the things that matter to us,
which come into our lives whether we like it or not, and generate actual
experiences of significance) provide a point of departure. Real problems
aren't technological in nature, but that doesn't mean they don't lead the way
towards challenging technical projects. The space race didn't start as an
engineering problem. It was the result of the longing of a people, of their
hope and anxiety for the future. But as a result of that longing, of that fear
and excitement, a lot of smart people dedicated themselves to hard technical
problems and produced a huge array of breakthroughs. The trick, then, is to
remain attentive to the problems around us, rather than giving into the
temptation to ignore or adapt to them.

In order to refocus ourselves on the hard problems, it helps to acknowledge
that they are what we want -- that we aren't really satisfied with a day's
salary and that we want to push forward towards a life's work. Wouldn't
everyone prefer to work on something substantial, on a 'hard problem' for the
sake of a 'real problem'? I think so, but we often don't know where to start.

Can technology help us get started? I don't think "a Facebook" or "a
Wikipedia" for hard problems is the answer, although either might help. In
order to maintain the kind of excitement and reciprocal encouragement
necessary to sustain a culture of hard-problem-solving, you need to put smart
people who respect each other into the same physical space. You need to make
hard- and real-problem-solving a lifestyle in order to overcome the creeping
inertia of the trivial. This is why universities retain their relevance.
They're a concentrated mix of intelligence, experience, and youthful idealism.
They contain lots of people who think about "hard problems" (science,
engineering) and "real problems" (philosophy, history, social thought).
Universities have their own issues, of course. They suffer from institutional
pressures that have more in common with the banalities of commerce and
politics than with any dedicated enthusiasm. Historically they have been very
successful, but it may be that the next wave of innovation will come from a
less traditional source, perhaps from the real-life communities that sprout up
around virtual groups like this one.

------
Cushman
Since the PDF link doesn't work, and the article is annoying enough to read
that people _aren't_ , I'll just paste the first couple of paragraphs here to
give you an idea what it's about. If this seems interesting, you can suffer
through it.

FOUNDERS FUND

WHAT HAPPENED TO THE FUTURE?

A.INTRODUCTION

We invest in smart people solving difficult problems, often difficult
scientific or engineering problems. Here’s why:

 _The Problem_

We have two primary and related interests:

1\. Finding ways to support technological development (technology is the
fundamental driver of growth in the industrialized world).

2\. Earning outstanding returns for our investors.

From the 1960s through the 1990s, venture capital was an excellent way to
pursue these twin interests. From 1999 through the present, the industry has
posted negative mean and median returns, with only a handful of funds having
done very well. What happened?

 _VC’s Long Nightmare_

To understand why VC has done so poorly, it helps to approach the future
through the lens of VC portfolios during the industry’s heyday, comparing past
portfolios to portfolios as they exist today. In the 1960s, venture closely
associated with the emerging semiconductor industry (Intel, e.g., was one of
the first – and is still one of the greatest – VC investments). In the 1970s,
computer hardware and software companies received funding; the 1980s brought
the first waves of biotech, mobility, and networking companies; and the 1990s
added the Internet in its various guises. Although success now makes these
investments seem blandly sensible, even obvious, the industries and companies
backed by venture were actually extraordinarily ambitious for their eras.
Although all seemed at least possible, there was no guarantee that any of
these technologies could be developed successfully or turned into highly
profitable businesses. When H-P developed the pocket calculator in 1967, even
H-P itself had serious doubts about the product’s commercial viability and
only intervention by the founders saved the calculator. Later, when the heads
of major computing corporations (IBM, DEC) openly questioned whether any
individual would ever want or need a computer – or even that computers
themselves would be smaller than a VW – investment in companies like Microsoft
and Apple in the mid-1970s seemed fairly bold. In 1976, when Genentech
launched, the field of recombinant DNA technology was less than five years old
and no established player expected that insulin or human growth hormone could
be cloned or commercially manufactured, much less by a start-up. But VCs
backed all these enterprises, in the hope of profiting from a wildly more
advanced future. And in exchange for that hope of profit, VC took genuine
risks on technological development.

In the late 1990s, venture portfolios began to reflect a different sort of
future. Some firms still supported transformational technologies (e.g.,
search, mobility), but venture investing shifted away from funding
transformational companies and toward companies that solved incremental
problems or even fake problems (e.g., having Kozmo.com messenger Kit-Kats to
the office). This model worked for a brief period, thanks to an enormous stock
market bubble. Indeed, it was even economically rational for VCs to fund these
ultimately worthless companies because they produced extraordinary returns –
in fact, the best returns in the industry’s history. And there have been
subsequent bubbles – acquisition bubbles, the secondary market, etc. – which
have continued to generate excellent returns for VCs lucky enough to tap into
them. But these bubbles are narrower and the general market more demanding, so
VCs who continue the practices of the late 1990s (a surprising number) tend to
produce very weak returns. Along the way, VC has ceased to be the funder of
the future, and instead has become a funder of features, widgets,
irrelevances. In large part, it also ceased making money, as the bottom half
of venture produced flat to negative return for the past decade. [2]

We believe that the shift away from backing transformational technologies and
toward more cynical, incrementalist investments broke venture capital.
Excusing venture’s nightmare decade as a product of adverse economic
conditions ignores the industry’s long history of strong, acyclical returns
for its first forty years, as well as the consistently strong performance of
the top 20% of the industry. What venture backed changed and that is why
returns changed as well.

 _Not Everything With A Plug Is Technology_

... et cetera

~~~
dstein
That's a very long winded way of saying nothing.

~~~
Cushman
Yeah, I was going to mention something to the effect of how dumb it is to hide
your content behind a crummy text-scrolling interface when your users already
have one they probably like _pretty OK_ , but in this case I'm actually not
too bent out of shape about it :P

~~~
dstein
I finally managed to get the page to load on my tablet, and yeah "et cetera"
sums it up pretty nicely.

~~~
siavosh
There was also a fair bit of typos and bad grammar which are never a good
sign.

------
njharman
The answer is largely contained within their goal #2.

------
drm237
Someone forgot to set their Google Analytics ID. Requirement one to inventing
the future: be able to follow instructions.

------
chailatte
A world that is aging, where half the young are unemployed and the old demands
to be paid to live to 98

A world lead by visionless, spineless leaders, employed by multinationals to
kill anything that threatens their existence

A world that is feminized, where men are taught to grovel for a women's
affection, and to earn their attention with gucci and prada, paid by their
mcjob

A world ruled by bankers, where the mindless middle class are the
sharecroppers. Bankers don't dream about flying cars. They dream about the
rent paid next month.

A world brainwashed by advertising, training its citizens to love sequels and
brands. Transformers 15. Call of duty 14. Starbucks everyday.

A world that no longer needs you, the passionate, explorative, imaginative,
thinking you.

~~~
dualogy
"Starbucks everyday." ... said the guy named chailatte :D

"A world that no longer needs you, the passionate, explorative, imaginative,
thinking you." AS IF any passionate, imaginative, thinking blob ever cared
about how much "the world" (wth is that supposed to mean) needs her/him or
not...

~~~
airlabam
It's one thing to be cynical, it's another thing to reflect that into a
normative statement about how a broad group of talented people act. Awfully
contentious, that. I suppose Martin Luther King did what he did for the sheer
rush of it all, yes?

