What Happened to the Future?

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

I have a 3d printer in my basement.

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

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

- 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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.