When It’s Darkest Men See the Stars
steveblank.com
steveblank.com
http://www.amazon.com/Great-Reset-Working-Post-Crash-Prosper...
Florida offers compelling evidence that the 1930s were the most innovative decade of the 20th century. Many new business practices were invented at this time. And this is when Hewlett Packard got going, and with it, what later came to be called "Silicon Valley".
The 1930s were also, at the same time, the worst economic disaster in the history of the USA. So an era can be both disastrous and very innovative. Those are not opposites. To say (as Steve Blank does) that we are at the beginning of an entrepreneurial revolution is inspiring. But he should be able to see that we can have both an entrepreneurial revolution and an economic disaster. Both are possible at the time.
This can be shown with a very simple graph. I will post that later.
Well.. no.
You wouldn't know it from the current political dialog, but deficit budgets aren't uncommon.
The most common way to get rid of them isn't to raise taxes or print money - instead it's to grow the economy(!) The increased tax base leads to increased tax receipts which pays the deficit.
(This isn't an argument for cutting tax, though - especially the way most tax cuts are structured at the moment. They are - IMHO - stupid policy on both economic and social grounds)
http://www.smashcompany.com/business/if-the-usa-is-the-most-...
I offer this as a simple model to show how a country can be both extremely innovative, yet also face dramatic long-term economic decline.
The graphs show the real picture. You don't need to look at the numbers.
Here is a key quote from his post:
Revolutions are not obvious when they happen. When James Watt started the industrial revolution with the steam engine in 1775 no one said, “This is the day everything changes.” When Karl Benz drove around Mannheim in 1885 no one said, “They’ll be 500 million of these driving around in a century.” And certainly in 1958 when Noyce and Kilby invented the Integrated Circuit the idea of a quintillion (10 to the 18th) transistors being produced each year seemed ludicrous.
Why will the internet be any different?
Signed, Someone who used to be an idealist about that.
There's a generation rising up that largely sees privacy as disposable rather than precious.
Groups of what I'd call the wilfully ignorant -- hate groups, cults -- are thriving out in the information age; most of them growing far faster than they would have been able to previously.
Decades ago, society's malcontents may have organised, marched, and changed things. Today: they can organise, march, and be ignored due to our society-wide ADD and the incredible media sophistication wielded by the powerful.
Or, more often, they can do none of that, vent on the net, and still be ignored.
Then there's the huge, undeniable, centralisation going on. Even without evil being actively done within organisations like Facebook or Google, it creates huge vulnerabilities for abuse, as we've already seen.
There are all of the extremely bright people who ought to be contributing to the next technological revolution(s), instead looking to reinvent online marketing.
In short.... I do see change. I don't see much change for the better -- not when it comes to "reshaping the face of society" kind of change, in any case.
How's that for your daily dose of cynicism?
Edit: One more thing... I think the end-game here is perfect competition, and I don't think that will be good for anyone.
I think the problem is that so long as this new wave of entrepreneurship is limited to web-startups, we're going to see diminishing returns. There are only so many ideas that can reshape the way we do communicate and do business while remaining within the confines of a webapp. Future startups will presumably have to chase smaller and more niche problems in order to remain relevant.
In this scenario, people would be motivated to do it because it's either the only thing they know how to do, or their true passion and more important to them than anything else. Either way, while the consumer wins, the entrepreneur loses in terms of cash (but maybe not in terms of personal fulfilment).
I'm not sure the "be your own boss" scheme is what everybody's looking for.
I however agree with the author that the West will not collapse if, we've seen worst in the past (well at least in Europe we have).
It's not about a transition to 100% entrepreneurship. It's about a big enough rise in quantity that it becomes a qualitative change, where working at a "startup" no longer raises eyebrows, where the social system adjusts to accommodate this instead of considering it an exception (universal healthcare if you're leftward inclined, breaking health insurance away from employers and moving it back to individuals if you're rightward inclined), and so on.
- US national debt at 13 Trillion.
- US debt held by foreigners at 4 Trillion.
- US total debt at 54 Trillion. Unfunded social security and medicare liabilities.
- a costly army stationed at 150 countries around the world
- an aging baby boomer generation, which will reduce their consumer spending (70% of the US economy is consumer spend)
- U6 unemployment rate at 17%
Not to mention in this economy, the web startups face
- closed platform dominance from facebook/google/zynga/apple. if you build something they want, they will duplicate the functionality quickly
- too many other 'me-too' startups. all the seed camp startups are starting to look alike.
- lack of monetizing opportunities, as most people still don't like to pay for things online.
Makes debt and social security obligations smaller by paying the dollar amounts, but with less expensive dollars.
Force boomers to work well into retirement which is set based on a shorter life expectancy anyway.
Reduce our debt to china.
There are plenty of bad effects, but it seems the easiest thing to put over on the people, because all the other hard decisions would be politically unpalatable. Aside from this, the current course seems to make it inevitable.
http://www.businessinsider.com/qe2-and-chinese-food-prices-2...
http://www.ssa.gov/cola/2011/factsheet.htm
I think some form of limited default on our sovereign debt (restructuring) is more likely in the long run, combined with a further increase in the Social Security retirement age and a cut in benefits.
I keep seeing this number, always without any kind of citation. What's really interesting is that there are only between 150 and 200 countries in the world. But wait--the US has an embassy in every country it has diplomatic relations with, and each embassy has a detachment of Marines. There are 125 of these detachments (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marine_Security_Guard). 125 and 150 are within the standard rounding error of urban legends, but there's probably another 25 countries you could add to the list if you count military advisors, peacekeeping/humanitarian missions, and even a handful of actual foreign deployments.
It's pretty disingenuous to count 1,000 Marines distributed over 125 embassies as stationing the US military around the world, if that's indeed what the people who came up with this number are doing. I'd really like to see a breakdown of this "150 countries" business.
We obviously have major detachments in Germany, Japan, and Korea. Plus the countries supporting the war in Iraq and Afghanistan (I'm sure those two will join my first list in 20 years). Then there are a lot of logistics bases around the world. Does that really count? If we want to be able to project our navy to the other side of the world, you need a refueling stop in Guam. So unless we are talking about cutting the military down to a tenth of what it is now, the # of bases is not what is driving US costs.
# of and cost of weapon systems drives it all.
Switzerland, maybe?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_military_deployme...
Air force: Afghanistan, Australia, Bulgaria, Germany, Greenland, Guam, Italy, Japan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, South Korea, Kyrgyzstan, Taiwan, The Netherlands, Philippines, Portugal, Spain, Turkey, United Kingdom,
Army: Bulgaria, Germany, Iraq, Italy, Japan, Kuwait, Kosovo/Serbia, South Korea, Israel
Marines: Afghanistan, Germany, Japan, Kuwait
Navy: Diego Garcia, Brazil, Cuba, Spain, Japan, Guam, Bahrain, Italy, Greece, South Korea
20 or 30, the number of countries isn't 150. Which was the main point.
Because of the cost of medicare. Which is basically a combination of demographics and the cost of medical care, with the cost of medical care being the driving factor. Doesn't that sound like an arena ripe for disruption by startups?
The energy crisis that will inevitably come, doesn't that sound like an arena well suited for startups?
There seems to be a tetonic shift right now that a lot of people have a big stake in ignoring.
VCs are meant to provide capital to entrepreneurs who need capital. Web apps don't really need capital in the initial stage, everyone knows how easy it is to boostrap your web app these days. That's why angels are growing in prominence - becuase they fit the funding level a lot better.
The VC's should be giving their attention to companies that require greater investment - my two examples are healthcare and energy but they are just 2. Solutions to billion and trillion dollar problems yield large returns on a few hundred million dollars. Can you see that coming out of the web sphere?
But your average software VC can't really pivot over to those fields, they have expertise in this area, and don't have the skills to evaluate bio-medical and energy startups. So instead of realizing this and packing it up and going home (or at least hiring some new people to evaluate deals) they are just strip mining the web app space until there is nothing left.
The guys in those fields don't necessarily have the entrepreneur mentality of a lot of software guys, so they aren't seeking the VCs the same way hackers are.
Honestly, not particularly to me. As far as I can tell, this is a largely social issue. The idea that we might not give the best care possible to someone, that we might let someone die when we could keep them alive, that we might put a dollar figure on a person's life is an anathema to many people. I'm not really sure how a startup is going to disrupt that.
Well one way would be to convert the dollar amount to something else: show how many lives could be saved if the money were spent differently.
No.
Energy is an area where the "unit" is measured in billions of dollars, and it doesn't make much sense to play with fractional units.
Startups and VC funding haven't worked at that scale. Maybe Kleiner can pull it off, but they haven't yet.
Facebook: founded 2004 Google: founded 1998 Zynga (!): founded 2007 Apple: founded 1976, but current resurgence began perhaps with the introduction of the iPhone in 2007.
I think it's pretty difficult to argue that it's a problem if a company formed in 2007 is now dominant enough that you list it instead of traditional heavyweights like Microsoft or IBM.
lack of monetizing opportunities, as most people still don't like to pay for things online.
Facebook, Google and Zynga all seem to have made it work...