Things Overheard at TechCrunch Disrupt | Hacker News Reader

Things Overheard at TechCrunch Disrupt

nymag.com

66 pointscbryan18 comments

I love that this article was written by Kevin Roose :). Had to do a double-take to make sure I wasn't reading an Onion knockoff.

On a more serious note, this article highlights what is a big annoyance of the startup community. Namely that people are focused on building a startup for short term profit rather than (genuinely) trying to change the world in a big way. It's in some ways analogous to the short-term mindset of the finance industry. Instead of thinking 1,2, or 3 decades out, people are thinking "How can I get $40m on this company in a couple years?" I would be much more excited by a community that consisted of people trying to build long term businesses, not acqui-hires, solutions to mundane problems, or another social app.

Don't get me wrong, if people want to flip companies for several million dollars over a couple years, they are will within their right to do so, and I wouldn't blame them. It's just depressing that our best minds are focused on making quick flips instead of sustainable truly game-changing businesses. I look up to people like Steve Jobs (obviously), Elon Musk, Larry Ellison, and Reed Hastings. These are all people who have transformed industries, and were not chasing some cheap hack to get a couple million dollars. They built real products, not sitting in front of their computer, but by going out and meeting customers, building real solutions to real problems, undertaking genuinely difficult technical challenges.

I would suggest that a lot of people think somewhere along the lines of "if I can make a few million ASAP I can focus on the world changing ideas later". Unfortunately, this approach leads to a lot of "me too" type ideas.

The other side of it is that it's very hard to go out and change the world with your first project when you're unknown. Lots of famous entrepreneurs have had many failures and minor successes before being able to command the backing, respect and trust required for changing the world via business.

Taken together, insofar as they are markers of and contributors to phenomena including a shift from employment to entrepreneurship, and the positive face of the shift away from lifetime employment and more towards individual control of one's own relationship with the market, startups of all kinds are changing the world in a big way.

People are following the money - it's VERY hard to find backing for a 'change the world in 20 years' kind of company, but relatively easy to find it for a 'make $40m in 5 years' type of company.

I completely agree. I think people are following the path of least resistance to getting money, and this is the crux of what annoys me about the startup community. The goal is not transform an industry, at whatever cost, regardless of what anyone says, but get $40m as quickly as possible. Very few people have genuine convictions that they are hell bent on achieving, or at least it doesn't show.

Optimizing for a goal less likely to fail sounds like a good idea for young entrepreneurs that don't have any significant net worth or previous successes.

After they are financially setup for life, more seem to gravitate towards the really big, risky, transformative ideas.

Mostly the usual jargon, though "plat-ag" is pretty annoying.

What's up with the wikipedia entry from Collaborative Consumption? There's a npov problem there. "Collaborative Consumption is disrupting outdated modes of business", for example. The whole thing reads like it was written by a Growth Hacker (tm). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collaborative_consumption

It was written by a shill for http://www.collaborativeconsumption.com/ as shown in the cite. Yeah, it is a self-promo article

Ug. I'm going to defend them despite the easy ability to mock.

Each industry has it's jargon of puff words to convey complex things. In my field of physics, for example, we'll often use a short-hand word to cover a very complicated idea, with the understanding that everyone should know what your talking about... and if they don't they should go learn more about it. Entanglement, emergence, wavefunction.

The problem is when you don't actually understand the complexities of the idea just mimic (or make up) the language.

That said, "let's talk about disrupting the disruptors" is always eye-roll worthy.

That's true in general, but some of those quotes are just gibberish. "Swimming in the social stream"...

I think it's worth distinguishing jargon from corporate speak. "Swimming in the social-stream," for example, isn't jargon. It's cringeworthy business talk.

Which could have been said in jest, to be fair.

Required posting of Startup Guys vid: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LMmdl4VltD4

Thank you for that. I had not seen!

http://vooza.com/introduction.html

My goal is to make millions quickly with a nifty but superficial startup idea and then create a giant research lab focusing on science I find interesting (superconductivity, md simulations, neutrino research, etc...)

Well, that's the plan anyway. Real-life will probably be a lot different.

"Disrupting the disruptors."

Not sure what the speaker meant but in my view that could mean upstaging these hollow throw-together startups with some sound engineering. No hype solutions to the same "problems" that "Just work better" (because they are designed better) and cost less.

Reminds me of why I got out of startups.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com