No, I'm Not Interested In Your Startup
clouddbs.blogspot.com
clouddbs.blogspot.com
Not everyone in the world can cure cancer. Not everyone can build rockets. Not everyone can do brain surgery.
Some of us do more mediocre things like create art or entertainment. Or just keep the world functioning.
It is possible to improve the world a little at a time, by saving people time and/or money, and enable everyone to do greater things. Or even just give them a new or better way to relax after a long hard day at work.
Not everything has to be miracle achievements.
I -am- interested in startups.
> Not everyone in the world can cure cancer. Not everyone can build rockets. Not everyone can do brain surgery.
Yes, but many people pretend that stupid apps are the next best thing, even matching cancer / rockets / brain surgery.
It's Wikipedia that's the wonder of the Internet, not Facebook; a communication medium with a lot of potential that's already overrun with spam and pointless messages, the only thing saving my account being pictures of close friends being posted there, although it also does nothing for encouraging me to give them a call / see them face to face.
don't also take the dignity away from people making an actual difference in the world. Leave them with that
Although he cites grand achievements at first, this applies equally to teachers, nurses, or unseen infrastructure-maintainers. I.e. people making an incremental difference.
There's a whole pyramid of unsexy jobs required so that a few of us can have the spare cycles to try trivial things (some of which will end up being non-trivial).
I suspect that what really bothers the author is not startups, per se, but rather all the "Rah, rah, we're changing the world" attitude in the startup community.
Personally, I think you can't separate the two. It's a throw-stuff against the wall and see what sticks system that created a lot of the grand achievements he praises.
If it means I need to listen to a lot of semi-annoying young'ins going on about their retarded projects, then so be it. Some of them will be important.
Just because a technology seems silly and annoying at first doesn't mean it's useless. Facebook is a prime example of this. Allowing people to play Farmville and post about their drunken antics isn't inherently valuable, but under all that noise, there's actually something hugely valuable going on. People are creating and sharing content with people they already know, strengthening bonds that already exist in the real world. This is a major weakness in the Internet -- at the outset, it enabled information sharing in the large. Facebook allows for information sharing in the small. Just because most of that information is inane doesn't mean it's any less fundamental than ARPA's internet vision or other major informational ideas (e.g., assembly lines).
You can make similar information-sharing arguments about YouTube and Twitter -- YouTube spreads ideas that can't be captured in words, Twitter allows for personal broadcast. The signal/noise is miserable, but the absolute impact is huge.
It's easy to look at the garbage produced by informational technologies (which most web startups basically are) and condemn them as silly, annoying, and useless, but that misses the point. Each new successful startup trains another subset of people to expect more from their tech, enabling the truly visionary among them to forget about whatever problem that software solves and concentrate on their own work.
Building a tool that allows anybody who uses it to actually push the boundaries of human knowledge is not silly and annoying. Be careful not to miss the forest for the trees.
Most world-changing information technologies go through a very long life cycle. Somewhere in the middle during mass usage, commercialization takes over and the technology is slowly strangulated by advertising until it's eclipsed by the "next big thing". It's slowly happening to radio, TV, newspapers, books, newsgroups, etc.
Unfortunately, somehow massive social networks have skipped years of usefulness and have jumped straight to the end where they're 80% advertising and dreck. This is how I feel about Facebook. Every time I use it, it's a chore to mentally filter out all the noise about who likes what or what fucking digital gewgaw someone is trying to ply me with. Sadly, I can't see Facebook recovering from this pathetic state of chirping triviality. I yearn the day some real competitors get in there and can apply the social networking concept to my life in a productive way.
Most people just aren't going to be building rocket ships. They have normal lives and want to keep up on what their friends, relatives, and loved ones are doing.
Keeping in touch with your friends after college is a real service, and one we take for granted now thanks to Facebook.
I don't want to get into Facebook specifics, but I offer this general observation.
If my other half and I want to spend a relaxing evening catching up on general gossip about how our friends are getting on, we invite 20 people over. We get party snacks and plenty of cheap 'n' cheerful drinks.
If we want to spend a rewarding evening learning new things and having deep discussions and thoughtful debate, we invite 2-4 people over. We make a nice dinner and get a good bottle of wine or two.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that even with exactly the same individuals, the way you interact can be very different depending on the situation. Social networking sites of the kind we see today take casual interaction to the extreme, where people are more concerned with broadcasting than actually interacting, and the content is mostly trivial.
I've internally rolled my eyes are the enthusiasm of an entrepreneur's pitch for their product before--- but who the heck am I to shoot them down? I salute that they are doing something they're passionate about.