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This post seems to be in response to the recent Mighty app.

To me, the main problem lies in what VCs think pass as 'tech'. The mighty app website made it sound it like it was some novel revolutionary app.

I was hoping it was really something clever like what the Cloudflare people or even game streaming companies do. But nope.

It's significantly worse: it's literally slapping together existing tech and calling it novel. And worse, simple security/privacy seem to have taken a backseat as if there is some innovative performance-oriented solution being prioritized here.

There doesn't seem to be any tech. But reading through the website, one might be mistakenly led to believe it is something of a hard problem to solve. In fact the person running the show admits to how they pivoted from a Windows VM company to running just Chrome. This is reality distortion at best. Running an Electron app to stream a live Chrome VM session seems like a CS401 style project.

This is similar to Uber or AirBNB: the value add is in slapping together some quick existing tech with the main 'innovation' being the funding system or creatively working around regulatory/legal hurdles.

I find it amusing and sad that there isn't any new tech nor even a sound financial plan for a lot of these companies (nor even a so-called moat beyond just siloing their first mover advantage behind legal paperwork).

It seems as though the 90s VCs funded actual technically sound, innovative, "pushing the envelope yet making money" companies.

These days it's a popularity and ego matching competition among VCs and founders. This isn't tech. This is throwing money at a problem inefficiently and seeing what sticks. The people that work in this space are rather uninspiring, technically demotivated but financially motivated group.

I hate to think that this is the new 'tech' world that was promised. I don't even want to start on Jonathan/Casey comments as they are obviously right but that's besides the point here.

Makes me wonder if Mighty or Clubhouse (or even Lambda school/Coinbase) are the stellar examples a budding CS student is going to look up to: which is sad and makes me really wish for the 90s VCs to come back and fund more technically/financially sound and inspiring companies.

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The best way to envision what happened is to imagine a pond with a crust of ice on top. Initially the only way from the bottom to the surface is around the edges. But as the ice crust weakens, you start to be able to punch right through the middle. The edges of the pond were pure tech: companies that actually described themselves as being in the electronics or software business. When you used the word "startup" in 1990, that was what you meant. But now startups are punching right through the middle of the ice crust and displacing incumbents like retailers and TV networks and car companies.