Disruption? Not if you are making the same people rich | Hacker News Reader

Disruption? Not if you are making the same people rich

thenextweb.com

66 pointssgy21 comments

I agree, and disagree.

Agree: 'Disruption' (as often so-called in start-ups) through 'innovation' (as often so-called in larger corp internal policies) is about change. But that change is often incremental, not huge bounds forward (e.g. AT&T in their halycon days, or HP pre-electronics, examples of huge bounds made by incumbant firms)

Disagree: Incremental change (one less click to do X, or $5 dollars off purchase of Y) _is_ important, as when multiplied across multiple product types in multiple industries, such 'disruption', 'innovation' or 'change' can have effects that not only have a small effect, but sometimes hit tipping points. Toyota / pull-based scheduling / LEAN as a big-corp type example.

This view comes from the motivation to embark on a small project right now. Production (of a physical product) enriches those that have the economies of scale to produce it (manufacturer) that I am not seeking to 'disrupt' (or, continue to make the same people rich as the title puts it), but to create search, delivery and cost savings for the customer. This is unlikely to 'change the world' in the sense of developing AI could, but will lead to savings that are valuable to thousands of individuals, and hopefully more.

'Disruption' or 'innovation' seems to be an easy target to attack, as it encompasses a multitude of ideas.

Side note: I have a strong opinion that 'innovation' for many large corps is a deliberately mis-used term with multiple goals - two principal ones being a motivational tool to motivate systematically disenfranchised employees, and to substitute the word 'change' (often viewed negatively) for 'improvement' (which often lacks).

Spare me.

We hear a constant litany of people complaining about being disrupted. You can't also claim no disruption is happening.

Examples: giant taxi strikes and regulatory fights, the "Google bus" protests in the bay area, cities fighting against AirBnB, a restaurant suing Google for putting them out of business, France passing another law to try to stop Amazon's growth there, proposed laws against drones.

Of course there are lots of silly little startups like "Yo", but that's just noise. You only hear about them because they're easy fodder for the media. Everybody in startup land knows that 99% of them amount to nothing. That doesn't mean the other 1% won't change everything.

You're totally right, Google, airbnb, Uber and a lot more are disruptive. The article is not attacking anything nor claiming that no disruption is happening. It's more of an advice for how real innovation and true disruption is made; "beyond helping yourself and your investors, you win by helping society, not creating at the expense of it."

It's a call for everyone in the startup land to redirect money and resources toward something substantial.

> "Of course there are lots of silly little startups like "Yo", but that's just noise."

I disagree. For every Uber you have 100 Yo's. For every Google you have 1000 ad-tech analytics startups that kind of all do the same thing in slightly different ways.

We have the opposite view on this: you seem to think that the bulk of what the startup scene does is disruptive, with a few idiotic startups giving the rest a bad name. I believe the balance is in fact the opposite: a few truly disruptive companies and boatloads of "silly little startups like 'Yo'".

> "Everybody in startup land knows that 99% of them amount to nothing."

So... why are the 99% working on things they know will amount to nothing? I think this is the central thesis of the article. Yeah, there are a tiny number of disruptive companies out there, so what the hell is everyone else doing?

It's not as if most of these are startups that aimed high and failed, these are startups where the core idea was never disruptive to begin with. These are startups purpose-built for the exit, not for the impact of its products.

That is the precise thesis the author is offering: that there are a tiny number of people in our industry working on real, disruptive change, while others try to squeeze easy money out of the system while aggrandizing themselves as innovators.

   > So... why are the 99% working on things they know will 
   > amount to nothing? I think this is the central thesis of 
   > the article. Yeah, there are a tiny number of disruptive 
   > companies out there, so what the hell is everyone else 
   > doing?

That is the question that, at some point, I think the author may have started with, or they may have run through a bunch of tropes and the question sort of emerged. Had they had a decent editor somewhere, that editor would have kicked the whole rambling thing back and said, "This is your thesis question, re structure this pile of nonsense to answer that question." But alas, that did not happen.

The reasons why people go to work every day vary, but my experience is that there are some generalizations which can be applied reasonably safely. One is that some folks work just for a paycheck so that they can get on with the rest of their life, and some work toward an end goal, some end effect. I have run into far fewer people who were working to a goal than I have working for a paycheck.

Sometimes the goal directed folks are aligned with humanitarian causes (like clean drinking water for Africa) and sometimes the goal is directed purely at acquiring wealth.

The interesting question for me, is that ratio 1%? Are only 1% of the people out seeking to make some significant change? If so it would account for 99% working on random things, but if not it would suggest that there are some folks who want to make a change but for some reason have been unable yet to put that into action. I make a hobby of looking for such people, its one of the things that I see in a lot of YC founder pitches, people who want to make a change but haven't yet mastered the recipe for turning that into results. And for me at least it is kind of why founders are founders, here are people willing to give up all of their earnings and take a chance at losing 2 - 5 years of their productive lifetime, to try to make a dent in the world.

> We have the opposite view on this: you seem to think that the bulk of what the startup scene does is disruptive, with a few idiotic startups giving the rest a bad name. I believe the balance is in fact the opposite: a few truly disruptive companies and boatloads of "silly little startups like 'Yo'".

If you count "bulk" by "number of companies", sure. But that's not really a relevant metric.

There's a power law here: the bulk of what actually gets done is mostly done by a tiny slice of companies at the biggest end of the spectrum.

> So... why are the 99% working on things they know will amount to nothing?

Because we can only tell which 1% is good in retrospect. Almost all the good ideas also sounded idiotic to many people at their earliest stage.

> So... why are the 99% working on things they know will amount to nothing? I think this is the central thesis of the article. Yeah, there are a tiny number of disruptive companies out there, so what the hell is everyone else doing?

We don't know. We go and we pour our hearts into something, knowing that the probability of failure is 100 to 1, but honestly not knowing if this is the time that you'll not only succeed but actually change the world.

That's my belief anyways.

before you read it - this article has nothing to do with "disruption" ala disruption theory found in clayton christensen's work. afaik, disruption theory isn't concerned with who is getting richer or if its he same people.

That was exactly my thought before reading this. I assume that the same people are getting richer because they're well diversified and, as such, can benefit both from the status quo and from disruption. Then I read the article and realized it's just someone complaining about VC backed startups.

You won't find a startup topic that Paul Graham didn't talk about (http://www.paulgraham.com/good.html)

Ugh I really hate articles like this.

For one it asserts that we should have an issue with others getting rich. Even if the net gain for society is 0, what is the problem with other people getting rich? Does it impoverish you in any way? Maybe you could make a case for price rises hurting the poor - but the author doesn't mention it and I don't think that's his/her angle.

There's also an incredible elitism about what a company "should" be.

> Are our kids going to say we boldly explored the range of human possibility by putting a million dollars into a mobile app that sends a pointless text message saying “Yo”?

Guess what? People like emojis and filters and flappy bird. The author doesn't have a problem with the "startup scene", he/she has a problem with humanity.

The author doesn't have any problems. He just simply believes in Social Entrepreneurship and is expressing his point of view, which doesn't have to be "right".

If we gave everyone a billion dollars except you, does it impoverish you in anyway? I think so.

I wrote this article because the tech scene is so disconnected from where it started.

Does every startup have to be immediately beneficial to the consumer? What if someone like Procter & Gamble has a bigger R&D budget to dedicate to some miracle spray like Febreze only after they've switched to something like cloud-based vendor billing, which allowed them to save a lot?

Is cloud-based vendor billing society-changing? Probably not. Do they help out older companies and new startups entering the field by taking care of something nobody wanted to focus on? Probably yes.

How so, exactly? By having less money than others? Millionaires are impoverished if you equate it with inequality.

This is actually one of those catch 22's of wealth: if you're in the 50% you probably feel better about your money than you do if you're in the 2% or -- even worse -- the bottom of the 1%. The reason is that the 49% is almost exactly like you. They make a few bucks more than you do but it's not meaningful (i.e. you both have exactly the same standard of living). Now, if you belong to the 2%, you are an order of magnitude "poorer" than the 1%. If you just made it to the 1%, you are a couple of orders of magnitude "poorer" than the 0.1%. And, those differences are meaningful.

It's really one of the sadder aspects of human nature. No one can just enjoy how good they have it. We always have to grade ourselves on a curve. Shit, if I compare my life to Rockefeller or JP Morgan, I have it so much better in so many ways. But, no one over feels bad for Rockefeller because that sucker lived before the internet.

Inflation.

It all started with Shockly (sp?) & Co. building better bombs. The first disruption was putting the transistor in something as stupid as a radio. Seems to me that society's always been more interested in the stupid consumer application of impressive technology.

Radios are "stupid"?

I can assure you that people who lived in remote areas found radios that could run off batteries for extended periods very useful indeed (for that matter, people who live in remote areas now find them useful).

Yes, through inflation. But your article never mentions that.

If you mentioned inflation, someone would point that inflation has been very low for the past few years.

I don't see that the author has an issue with other people getting rich, rather the repeated enriching by cynical projects that exist purely for the exit. It's the philosophical divide between the US and EU, which seem to be butting heads more often and louder.

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