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Comment by Fomite | Hacker News Reader

"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.

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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.

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