The Two Types of Companies in Silicon Valley

Sigh, generally I don't click through to Forbes articles, I should know better. This one did not disappoint, I stopped reading right here:

"Look at Facebook. The company didn’t invent anything. Instead, it just picked a better demographic—18 to 35-than LinkedIn or MySpace."

Now look at a comparison of the market performance of FB and LNKD [1].

[1] http://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&chdd=1&chds=1&...

Surprised that there are no comments here in favor of his premise: I for one am getting sick of constantly hearing about the next "social local mobile app that helps you rate the experiences of friend's of friend's cousins" getting funded.

I know I am not the only one: the Founder's Fund's tagline goes something like "We asked for flying cars, we got 140 characters."

Yes there is value in Facebook and Youtube etc., but he makes a good point that most of these companies got the formula just a bit more right than many other competitors with similar ideas. It is often just as easy for them to get the next iteration wrong and lose the consumer. Instagram was the perfect example.

There isn't anything necessarily wrong with this, I take a somewhat agnostic view of it all, if you can make money doing it it is obviously valuable to someone. And perhaps it's easier. But the companies who are doing something more concrete and valuable should be getting more attention in my opinion, and the investors should be focusing on them more.

The author is too extreme in his framing of business models and is missing the middle ground that can be argued to be the place where a lot of true and real businesses are.

For example, Apple did not invent the personal computer or the smartphone, they just made these products actually useful for the masses. Microsoft's OSes were not that good for the first twenty years, and Microsoft Office was in no way a technological breakthrough, but MSDos/MSWindows + MSOffice did bring a PC revolution and a PC on (almost) every desk.

To summarize: a company is genetically either an innovating "Breakthrough"(Intel, Texas Instruments, Google) or a sexy and shallow "Best-Of-Show" (Zynga, Facebook, YouTube).

As others have pointed out, false dichotomy is false on several levels.

1) Even Breakthrough companies go through cycles of stagnation and innovation, especially in the tech industry. Best-Of-Show Apple in the 90s compared to Breakthrough Apple in the 21st century. Breakthrough HP in the middle of the 20th century versus Best-of-Show HP today. The list goes on and on.

2) Best-Of-Show companies often are innovating within their own domain. Facebook today is simply in a different ballpark than 2003 Myspace with sharing, groups, pages, etc.

3) Best-Of-Show companies can cause massive disruption in adjacent verticles. Try finding a news station (online or offline) that will not reference discussions on Facebook/Twitter.

The author repeatedly claims he is not making "a moral judgment", but that is exactly what he is doing. His opinion is that innovation in hardware/algorithms is more important than innovation in social/games. I am not sure why he is afraid of speaking directly, but hiding arguments in false dichotomies isn't helping anyone.

Nope, sorry, there is no such line to be drawn. The level of innovation of a company is a continuum. The height of the barrier to entry that they create is an orthogonal continuum.