The Startup Backlash | Hacker News Reader

The Startup Backlash

medium.com

43 pointsakristofcak42 comments

I can't leave any comments on the actual blog so I'll just leave it here:

This is some bullshit written by a very entitled young man that is apparently aimed at very entitled young people. To wit:

"You didn’t even need to be a finance major to get aggressively courted by the bulge bracket firms. Goldman Sachs, in particular, seemed to have an obsession with taking the most liberal-arty kid"

Maybe if you are one of those kids that went to an Ivy, but this is so not true for the vast majority of college graduates in the US as to make the rest of this post really ridiculously meaningless.

It's not a backlash against "startups," it's a backlash against the same sort of douchebags that brought us CDOs now flocking to the tech industry cause it's a "hot scene."

I know I'll get voted down for this but everything about this guy and what he's writing about is exactly what's wrong with this country.

Startups are just small companies trying to grow fast.

Some are good, some are bad; but there are systemic reasons why there are a lot of douchebags becoming founders (hint: they have the social contacts to raise money on ideas alone and tap into the private welfare system called "acq-hires") and we need to address the problem, have the conversation in a no-holds-barred format where no solution is off the table, and drive the fuckers back where they came from.

The problem isn't "startups". There are great startups out there. It's this horrible ecosystem that has become a devastating talent graveyard and the latest mechanism through which an entrenched elite can mine the brains of their intellectual superiors for extreme profit.

I agree with most of what you've written, though I don't agree with the part about "intellectual superiors." Certainly it seems like a flashy rich kid can walk into a room and have a lot of success selling a pretty silly idea built with some hard work by some smart folks just because of his connections and advantages and that really bites, but I think sometimes engineers and scientists can fall into an ego trap as well when we get bitter about the weirdness of that same situation.

My main issue is when I talk to people and they tell me they're "in tech," and they're a marketer or sales person or biz dev and they could be doing the same thing in some other vertical for all they care. (the "for all they care" is the important part too)

I would rather they just go back to Hollywood or the Media/PR world or wherever they generally come from and leave the tech industry to focus on creating cool tech in a more sensible fashion than the way it seems now.

I don't want to sound jealous either, because I've been fortunate to learn a lot from incredibly smart people, work on some challenging and fun projects, and pay my bills.

My only caveat is what does "in tech" mean nowadays? > Enterprise software/SaaS Companies have very often been started by sales oriented founders (Siebel, Benioff come to mind). > Ecommerce/marketplaces have very rarely been started by CS majors/engineers.

So sure, you can have very engineering focused Companies like New Relic, Heroku or Dropbox, and that's great, but if you send all business people to Hollywood, I am not sure how you could actually have a tech industry in Silicon Valley.

Ecommerce/marketplaces have very rarely been started by CS majors/engineers.

Except for, you know, the biggest and most successful ones: Amazon, eBay, and Craigslist.

Who were you thinking of?

You are partially true. Omidyar had a business co-founder. Airbnb founders were front end/design folks, Vente-privee in Europe was started by people who came from the liquidation industry. If you look at the last 10 years, many successful eCommerce sites (Fab, Modcloth, One Kings Lane, Gilt) or marketplaces have not been started by CS majors.

Sure, some e-commerce sites have been started by people who didn't major in CS--particularly the ones that have started recently. No one is arguing that all e-commerce sites have been started by CS majors.

But it was inaccurate to say that e-commerce sites are rarely started by CS majors, when three of the largest and most well-known ones were all started by CS majors.

Also, three of the companies he mentioned have CS majors as co-founders.

Fair enough.

My main point was not that one though, as I am sure you have understood. My main point was to say that the tech industry is an industry and such, it requires people with different backgrounds to grow and thrive.

And don't worry, I hate as much as the other guy the "wantpreneurs" and gold diggers/acquihire-seekers that one can find by the boatloads between San Francisco and San Jose.

My sentiments run towards agreeing with the first comment in this thread. I'm not going to begrudge anyone for using their talent in any way they see fit, but the article on Medium seems to not only be written for approval of HN, but glosses over the fact that there are a lot of pointless startups. There are some amazing startups out there that are changing the world, working on problems that the world outside of the tech bubble needs solving - clean water, higher education, transportation that doesn't chew up fossil fuels - but for every one of those, there are indeed 50 startups that focus on trivial things (to-do apps, mail apps, photo apps, weather apps, really? Really?). I know everyone can't work on curing cancer or world peace, but if there is a backlash from within, it stems from founders who act as apologists for the more banal of startup ideas.

I want to add an addendum that I shouldn't have necessarily included the author when I said "what's wrong with this country." He may be a thoughtful guy after I considered the ending to the article. I also think anyone who really loves technology should have a seat at the table. It just seemed tone-deaf in many ways to the reality that most people in this world face, let alone most Americans his age.

Thanks for this addendum.

Yes, the premise was built on some generalization. Not "everyone" was courted by Wall Street 10 years ago, just as not "everyone" is trying to get into tech these days (though I would argue that from certain points of view both feel that way).

I am aware that these narratives don't represent the typical American experience and should have made that clearer.

Thanks for reading and responding.

It seems that folks get upset at these types of narratives about SV because they're convinced that it's an attack on tech entrepreneurship. It's not: it's an assault on the Series A -> writing checks to Lamborghini lifestyle, and the poor allocation of resources that world rewards.

Real businesses that use tech as a lever are steps of progress that moves the world forward. You don't have to cure HIV, but you shouldn't receive a seven-figure check to pursue your dream of predictive music based on the color of cats you upvote on Reddit either. Anything that destroys the fallacy that working in this industry requires you to live in a tiny region in a certain state in a certain nation is good, and in a very small way, pushes humanity closer to the egalitarian ideal of the Internet.

Build a SaaS app that improves a dentists relationships with their patients from the middle of Minot, ND. Hell, take some kids in a village in the middle of Africa, teach them to code. Let them launch something using little more than a circa 2000 class laptop with a 3G connection, in a hut with a generator. $300,000 a year in revenue. Total. That totally changes the game for things like world hunger. That kind of business will revolutionize the world far more than 10-figure exits for photo-sharing apps ever will.

"The same way that VCs invests in 50 shitty startups and expect to make maybe one phenomenal exit, it’s unreasonable to expect every or even many startups to make something truly revolutionary and socially impactful."

I might agree with this, but if it's the case, then some folks need to stop pretending each and every hot internet startup is Disruptive, Revolutionary and Socially Impactful. And the weight given to What SV Entrepreneurs Think should probably be reduced if most of them are just building better ways to order a pizza.

There's nothing wrong with coming up with a better way to order a pizza. But it doesn't make you a noble visionary of things to come.

Absolutely agreed! Some of the language being thrown around many companies can be nauseating.

I didn't write about this possibility in the article, but there's also a universe of apps/tools/companies which do seemingly trivial things that don't transform anything on the face value and eventually end up being rather impactful. Take Twitter: for the first X years, many people dismissed it as that stupid thing where you write about what you had for breakfast.

Now it's basically a media company. Granted, no lives saved, but a major player in the landscape.

Point being: you can end up doing something truly revolutionary in the end by doing something trivial and useful at first. A better way to order pizza could become a better way to do [something that doesn't sound as banal].

(I would also posit that this kind of serendipity doesn't necessarily make you a visionary.)

I certainly think it is possible to be doing something "ordinary" and end up having it be something revolutionary at the end. It happens with some degree of frequency.

I just don't think a given location and a few keywords let you claim the revolutionary bit beforehand :)

I actually think there were people who got Twitter from the early days. Mostly people who had studied social network and online communities in the early '00, when everyone was making them. It just wasn't necessarily interesting from a technical or business perspective until much later.

> Even if the vast majority of engineers and designers today are obsessing about...car rides

There's a lot I don't like about Uber, but that doesn't change the fact that it has changed the way I interact with transportation. I hate the word, but it is disruptive.

I would love to see every startup cause as much of a shitstorm as AirBnB and Uber have managed to do. At the very least, the public conversations they force us to have are incredibly useful.

Despite the fact that it flamed out spectacularly, think about how different the music industry would be today had Napster never existed.

Uber is disruptive because it caters toward the SV/SF crowd (20 something professionals living in a crowded city with bad infrastructure but have quite a bit of disposable cash) better than the traditional public transportation can. Sure it's useful, but these days so many starts are no longer aiming to solve even first world problems now, they are aiming to solve the unique "silicon valley problems" that most people in this country can't even dream about.

Then investors throw millions at those companies and media put them under a glorified spotlight while the rest of the country is going through a rough recovery from one of the worst recessions in most people's memories, and that's when there is a backslash.

Again, not saying companies like Uber don't provide value, but how much capital in the form of money, talent, time and effort need to be poured into solving Silicon Valley problems for 20 something single professionals making six figures?

Am I the only one getting a 'sign in to read' prompt?

I got it as well. It's never happened when reading a Medium article before.

I did not get it.

A/B testing content-gating? Well, Medium has to make money somehow...

All you need to do is sign in with a Twitter account. As far as I know, that doesn't cost you money.

I'm really glad that this is happening, because I think the character of "tech" has gone to shit in the past few years as assholes who care only about their gaudy, disgusting parties-- but don't actually love technology or want to improve the world for real-- have come into the game.

This elite isn't ready to rule. They won't even run companies that are decent to the people who build and maintain them. It's easy to take the Silicon Valley perspective and say that the old legacy elites are full of idiots (and that's true) but "our" "elite" is just as full of useless, garbage humanity that should not be trusted to manage a bag of rock salt. Let's start with the brogrammers, douchey VCs exactly like the caricature in that Tesla video, hipster turds who become managerial favorites because their mancrushing did-their-20s-wrong bosses live vicariously through them, sloppy coders who think they're "rockstars", horrible management at all levels and in most firms, and companies using "fast failure" as an excuse to unapologetically do the wrong thing, because it's somehow OK if you're the Next Steve Jobs.

I am really glad that VC-istan has, over the past year, developed a tropical wave of a morale problem that threatens to become a Category 5 showstopper, and I'm really proud of the part that I played in that. There are a lot of brilliant, innovative people out there in this country and I can't wait to see what they come up with once they start falling for cheap lies.

Nerds are such horrible judges of character that we tend to throw obscene amounts of effort when some smooth-talking ex-IBDer (fired because he was too unethical even to sell subprime) gives us the time of day and manages to convince us (by pure assertion) that his half-baked idea will "change the world". But I'm starting to work on that problem by exposing painful truths, and maybe we can change it in some timeframe like two-thirds of a generation.

I'm very happy that my world view in SV is so vastly different than yours Michael. I appreciate reading your viewpoint though, I just can't connect with the experiences you portray.

"I find it difficult to distinguish what tech is doing to the valley and SF from what Wall Street has been doing to New York and London for decades."

I couldn't have said it better myself. And sadly the author doesn't see anything wrong with the statement while for many of us - this sums up EVERYTHING that is wrong.

Wall Street money made NYC a lot nicer and safer. The tech industry hasn't done the same to SF.

That's a misunderstanding: I am not saying there's nothing wrong with what is happening (and my personal beliefs are very much to the contrary). My point is rather than much of the criticism of tech seems to be a criticism of capitalism. So if you want to have a debate about inner cities, poverty, etc, by all means, let's have it, but it's not a tech phenomenon.

Many of us in SF would like to PREVENT this city from turning into a place like NYC. Yes... there is a problem with capitalism (or, more accurately, with unfettered "market driven" capitalism). But there are two other problems which you ignore. First - in the Bay Area the problem isn't just capitalism, it's also the behaviors of those working in startups. These behaviors make startups in particular (and tech in general) a very (VERY) easy target. Second - do we want homogeneity in our lives? Do we want SF to be just like NYC? Is there something different and special about SF that deserves preservation?

The New Yorker article link is broken (it goes to Pocket). Here's the actual link: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2013/05/27/130527fa_fact_...

Thanks, fixed it

It's a fantastic article that offers a critical yet mostly objective take on the mild insanity we all live in here in SV.

Maybe if companies like google and yahoo stops forking over billions for acqui-hire, the madness will slow.

There is some truth in this article, and lots of great advice: read more, don't take shitty offers etc. But SV is changing the world, and some of other the articles listed here are, though maybe just for effect, superficial. Facebook and AirBnB have changed the world and are super valuable. Keeping in touch and creating new opportunities - Facebook has done both for me. AirBnB - I'm staying at someone's house in a small prefecture in Tokyo - this is money coming into the economy. This is change - the worldly kind. Yes there are tons of shitty ideas and shady deals in the Valley, and we should work more efficiently not just more, and dedicate more time to our families and friends. But the point is, as with free speech, that nobody knows ahead of time what will be good and what will be waste - that's the whole point of startups. My invitation to the authors who mention Facebook as a useless tool - will you close your FB account and never use it again? Didn't think so.

Is this anything new? Hubris is woven into the fabric of human history. The world-wise won't take long to recognize a smoke blower. To the rest, good luck.

"many of these companies are tools of secret government surveillance" ... mutter mutter revolving door mutter mutter ...

Wow. What a non sequitur at the end:

> That is, until the NSA scandal broke. Nothing made the purported libertarianism of Silicon Valley more laughable and aggregious than the fact that many of these companies are tools of secret government surveillance. This is why I had to include Paul Carr’s article about Silicon Valley’s participation in our security state infrastructure.

This is not even a complete thought, never mind a pretty blithe treatment of the actual issues involved. And also, the companies most under fire, particularly Google and Microsoft, are not "startups"

Yep. This wasn't exactly an essay, just some thoughts around a "trend" I picked up on (ie the backlash). I could write a whole separate article about the NSA but I let Carr's article speak for itself. The reason for including it was that the NSA disclosures put a different light on the tech vs society question. But yea, it could have been more developed.

It just seemed like a lazy attempt to somehow slur those kooky libertarians, god bless 'em!

Guilt by a vague association:

* Some libertarians live in the Bay Area

* Some people in the Bay Area worked on projects, companies and systems being exploited by the NSA

* Therefore ... wait, huh?

If you read the Carr article, you might see that these associations are much less tenuous than you suggest.

Follow the money… or the self-image and self-interest.

The startup boosterism is a lie that everyone wants to believe: the VCs want it to be true (and they want other people to believe it), the new startup kids want it to be true (riches, fame), the older tech guard want it to be true (hey this thing we've been doing forever is finally cool). Sigh.

Apropos of this… I wrote an essay about startups called "Fuck Glory." http://unicornfree.com/2011/fuck-glory-startups-are-one-long...

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