Stop Building Apps and Start Disrupting Industries
mikekarnj.com
mikekarnj.com
Once upon a time, VCs didn't insist on taking baby steps, and would fund people who wanted to "revolutionize the grocery industry." That led to disasters like Webvan, and the first dotcom crash. For a good history of how Webvan bit off more than it could chew, see Four Steps to the Epiphany. For some online overviews, see:
http://articles.sfgate.com/2001-07-12/technology/17606161_1_...
http://www.beyondvc.com/2010/10/dont-build-an-empire-overnig...
Today, you're still allowed to dream big. But you're expected to start small, and build from there.
Maybe he's watched one too many Oliver Stone movies, but I don't think he understands the importance of investment banking. While SV VC's provide capital to startups on a comparatively small scale, investment banks provide capital to businesses on a much larger scale. Love 'em or hate 'em, they do provide a much needed service to our economy.
So raising your hand and offering to build the tech is not the hard part. The hard part is finding those insiders who know every detail of the industry, but do not buy into the status quo.
To others, it's creating something like Paypal or Square.
To another, it's Kiva.
Lastly, as another commenter said, you need money and time. You can buy time with more money, so let's say you just need money. Apps can be used to get that money.
FaceCash disrupts the credit card companies and banks. Not a single VC has offered a term sheet to date. (I'm not necessarily upset about this, but it's an interesting fact.) Students would generally rather work for Facebook or Google where they can make more money in a summer. Industry conferences don't want to hear from the people working on the hardest problems; they want to hear from the people who have made the most money.
There are some real systemic problems here that, if they don't eventually get worked out, will end up keeping us locked into a steadily declining system in a number of industries.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_4h68mrzuwc
I hope it will help you and you will take my comment as constructive criticism.
Unfortunately, what it doesn't explain is the hidden cost that such an approach has, when repeated indefinitely, on the greater context of the Valley's infrastructure and incentive structure. Investors today simply are not rewarding risk.
E.g. I would be very interested to know if you had been blacklisted or black-sheeped at least, given your history and vocal public statements on matters.
Personally, I am rooting for your success - I jsut really want to know what back-room whispers may be saying about you, and people like you, who dont blindly worship the facebook.
Real engineers build things like bridges and websites. Bankers build dreams and leverage the shit out of it to put the whole country in debt.
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-great-american...
Without banking you can't have infrastructure: no financing, no cement, no salaries, one can't acquire land.
Shorter: you can't boot strap a bridge.
The OP is not deserving of a reply on the basis of this post. It is uninformed tripe that belongs on the reddit/r/teabaggers forum or some such lowly place.
How this kind of trash gets 24 points is beyond me. Who are the people upvoting this?
I will also add that the account which submitted this is only 2 hours old, obviously created just to submit this piece of crap.
Smells like spam to me.
The stock statement in question is the dismissal of an enormous and critical industry as "value-less".
You link to a Rolling Stones article (by Matt Taibbi, who is a controversial journalist, who panders to the pseudo-libertarian crowds on reddit) which attacks Goldman Sachs for manipulating the US Fed (a fair point), and you use that as a justification for condemning investment banking as a whole.
Investment banking is a huge collection of professions which generally assists with one primary purposes: helping companies raise money. To dismiss that as valueless is clearly wrong. Surely, if anyone understands the value of being able to raise money, it must be startup founders. Investment banking exists to enable large corporations to raise money.
Some other purposes of investment banking include: hedging against risks (via derivates, for example, which you also dismiss), providing more advanced financial instruments (fyi, options, which you use to pay your employees, are derivatives too - and they wouldn't exist if investment bankers hadn't thought them up), market research (which has provided dubious value in the past, but that is an indictment of the global mega-banks, not of the research function, which is essential), market making (essential to provide a fluid, liquid market where people can actually exit), and many others.
When I first loaded up your site, it displayed with no CSS template, and looked like a craigslist post (I did not initially check the URL), and I checked the poster, and it was created 2 hours ago for the clear purpose of submitting this story, and it had a disproportionate number of upvotes for the weak point it was making, and it also made the above generalisation which, in my mind, categorised you directly as a reddit-style "omg banking is evil" type.
That led me (wrongly) to lump you in with the "idiots". Again, I apologise for that, it was an incorrect and rash overreaction - but some of the points above still stand. Hopefully now you understand my thinking better, though.
Yes, I wrote such a broad generalization, which I will definitely not include in future posts. So, thanks for the clarification. Learn something new everyday.
Will look into the CSS. Have no idea why it didn't load for you?
Have had a couple of posts get upvoted before so this isn't the first one: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2503064 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2250554
I agree with you on the quality of the article and the simplistic reasoning by the author in reply to your comment, but at least he is showing some civility, as per HN's guidelines, which cannot be said of your comments in this thread.