In which I stomp on some of our glorious “green shoots” | Hacker News Reader

In which I stomp on some of our glorious “green shoots”

scottlocklin.wordpress.com

73 pointsdsplittgerber44 comments

It's from Business Week. 'Nuff said. Business Week is to business journalism what Mariah Carey is to business journalism.

Slightly offtopic, Bloomberg just bought Business Week for a song: roughly 2-5 million. It will be interesting to see what changes happen at the magazine.

http://www.businessweek.com/innovate/FineOnMedia/archives/20...

Personally, I always found BW too bland, compared to Forbes.

entrepreneur == someone who makes money by running their own business

entrepreneur != someone who invents something revolutionary

The vast vast majority of the people in the world will never invent anything new.

This is a list of people who found a less-than-common way of making money.

This is NOT a list of people with revolutionary ideas.

Whilst I agree with your logic, I think there is still a difference between being an entrepreneur and running a fairly standard business. Your definition would say that someone who buys a franchise or setups up a basic shop is an entrepreneur - I think few people would see it that way. An entrepreneur need not be trying to be revolutionary but they should be shooting for the stars and trying to at least improve on the way the competition does business

One of these people designs logos etc for medical practices, employs 5 people and has revenues of $225,000. By my calculations that is an average of $25/hour per person in revenue. That is not pushing the boundaries in revenue or ideas - that is just another person who has a small business. I'm not criticising that person in the slightest, that is great for them, but if they are making a list of top entrepreneurs under 25 then that is pretty sad.

As I think someone else pointed out this is probably more just a case of very poor journalism.

The dictionary definition of entrepreneur is simply "a person who organizes, operates, and assumes the risk for a business venture." So innovation can be helpful, especially in achieving a competitive advantage, it is not necessary (and certainly not sufficient) for successful entrepreneurship.

If, however, you do exactly what your competition is doing, the only risk you are taking is the one derived from being less competent than them.

The article's point is that if average is the best this generation can offer then it's doomed.

I think Scott (and you) are confusing average with boring. It's true that you can't be better without being different. But you can be different (and even be better) without being (at least overtly) innovative. You might just, for example, provide better customer service than the competition. Or lower prices. Or greater selection. My point is that to succeed, all you have to be is better. Being cool is not a requirement. (And being too focused on being cool can therefore actually be detrimental to success.)

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=881032

"Your definition would say that someone who buys a franchise or setups up a basic shop is an entrepreneur"

Absolutely. Only in the "startup" scene are people so conceited as to think otherwise. Those pesky people running "normal" businesses with their pesky "profits", they aren't ENTREPRENEURS! Entrepreneurs are only the people wasting other people's money chasing new ideas that probably won't work out!

I think there is still a difference between being an entrepreneur and running a fairly standard business. Your definition would say that someone who buys a franchise or setups up a basic shop is an entrepreneur - I think few people would see it that way.

I have to disagree here. This is a VC/Angel-inspired echo-chamber mindset. I can certainly see a difference between growth businesses and small shops, but it's really a disservice to attempt to devalue the latter by yanking the word entrepreneur out from under it even though:

  * It took no less courage for those business owners to start
  * They may well have taken much more personal risk in the form of a small 
  business loan
  * Those businesses far outnumber the growth business, especially the successful
  growth businesses
  * Those businesses tend to provide things people really need and have solid 
  revenue whereas a lot of "growth" businesses are pursuing the founders 
  fetishistic ideas that turn out to have no value whatsoever
  * Almost any business can be grown and/or extended laterally.  It proves a lot
  more if you can take a business from 0 to $250,000 revenue by yourself than it
  does that you burned $5,000,000 to get a 1,000,000 users and you're still not
  cash flow positive because you can't figure out how to get anybody to pay for
  your brilliant "invention" which actually just consists of a semi-novel way of
  shuffling user data around.

Anyway, I don't disagree that the top entrepreneurs should be more impressive. But I just had to speak up against your devaluation of the the world's full entrepreneurial class. An entrepreneur is someone who starts a business, period.

In business and technical circles the word 'entrepreneur' means doing something fundamentally new. There is no value judgment implied; entrepreneurs aren't necessarily superior to small-business owners. It's simply a matter of definitions.

Peter F. Drucker has a good explanation of this difference in his classic book "Innovation and Entrepreneurship". http://www.harpercollins.com/books/9780060851132/Innovation_...

example- zappos.com sells shoes- nothing revolutionary about that! Still grew to a great business

This same sort of linguistic game was done to the word "professional", by encouraging customers to conflate the word with "skilled", etc. (Don't remodel your own house, have a "pro" do it!") Except, in this case, it's not being done to market a trade but rather to define an elite class.

The most amusing part of this, to me, is that there just wasn't enough nuance already built into a French word. That might be a first.

Seriously, he needs to get rid of that "snapshots" tooltip. Why do people put those things on their sites?

i don't see those, because i long ago edited my hosts file to get rid of them. lines for your own hosts file:

  127.0.0.1       spa.snap.com
  127.0.0.1       shots.snap.com
  127.0.0.1       snap.com
  127.0.0.1       i.ixnp.com

It has been a few years since my blog was on *.wordpress.com, but my recollection is that they opted me in when they introduced the feature and it took me a while to figure out how to turn it off. (Settings -> General, as I recall.)

Appearance -> Extras -> Enable mShots site previews

I am on wordpress now, and just turned mShots off a few minutes ago. I had no idea this feature was causing anyone problems. Open in new tab still worked fine for me.

It's more of an annoyance when you use your cursor to indicate where in the text you are while reading. Or when you just park the cursor somewhere and it happens to be on a link. Quite annoying on articles with a lot of links like this one.

While I agree that most of the entrepreneurs don't have brilliant ideas, I thought there were two clear standouts:

1) The guy that developed carbon nanotube probes for microscopy applications (www.cnprobes.com)

2) The guy that hacked away in his basement and created new higher performance heavy duty machine lubricants (www.greasewarehouse.com)

Your post is flawed because it assumes that this is some sort of an authoritative list that took into account all entrepreneurs across America. Untrue.

May be you should attack the magazine that created the list instead of the entrepreneurs? Better yet, create your anti-list of guys you think should be there but never will be because they are too busy doing too many important stuff. Simply cherry picking flaws in a bunch of businesses is very easy--even if I agree with many of your assessments about individual ones.

Yes, this critique suffers from a quite typical problem: Sample bias in the press. Some business plans require PR in order to work, so those are the businesses you'll hear about. The businesses that don't thrive on PR are effectively invisible.

I'm particularly amused by this guy's citation of Philo Farnsworth as the sort of entrepreneur we should all aspire to be. There are plenty of Philo Farnsworths in America today. You've just never heard of them. Just as nobody in America has heard of Philo Farnsworth, except for entrepreneurs who are looking for bedtime stories to tell their kids.

Farnsworth did his best work in obscurity, in a tiny startup consisting mostly of himself and his immediate family. He then managed to secure a patent, which enabled him to get a piece of the action when RCA turned his invention into a household word. If he had been a little less stubborn and independent RCA would have succeeded in buying him out completely; if he had been a little less of a romantic figure (the Idaho farmboy turned electronics genius!) only historians would know his name.

It's easy to meet people who are as smart and inventive as Farnsworth. They're designing graphics processors or creating MEMS devices or building robots or developing vaccines. They're designing the tiny components that make the iPhone possible. If you run into them on the street in Silicon Valley, they look just like everyone else. And none of them are famous, because they're not trying to be famous. Their business doesn't depend on that.

Also, none of them are entrepreneurs and none of his examples are examples of entrepreneurship -- they're examples of inventors inventing things.

[Edit: to be clear, Gates is an entrepreneur, but "writing BASIC at 20" doesn't make him an entrepreneur, it makes him an inventor. Starting a company around that invention and organizing the capital to get it off the ground makes him an entrepreneur.]

And that is great. Maybe there's something intelligent to say about how we need fewer entrepreneurs and more inventors, or what the difference is, or why hardly anybody knows two of those three inventors.

Instead he went for the easy article and decided to piss all over everyone. Gratifying, to be sure, and there's going to be a coterie of people saying, "Yes, right on. Here are other ways in which all these people suck," but I think everyone is a little worse off for having an article like this written.

It was mean and no less venal than the entrepreneurs he is criticizing.

need fewer entrepreneurs and more inventors

You are making a similar mistake. How do you know how many inventors there are? How do you know there aren't people writing stuff like BASIC? I am guessing it is because you don't see their faces splashed or hear much about them. But just visit most COMP SCI programs and you'll find very technically brights folks working on new things.

This ends up with the boring conclusion that may be we need both inventors + entrepreneurs. But just because it's boring doesn't mean it isn't accurate.

Huh? I'm not saying anything about inventors or entrepreneurs; I'm saying something about the author's article and why it was unnecessary and unproductive, particularly if it was meant to be a critique of BusinessWeek as well as the entrepreneurs it highlighted.

I have no idea how many entrepreneurs or inventors there are, what the appropriate balance between the two is (if that even matters), whether the world needs more or less of either, etc.

Gates wrote BASIC at 20 and founded Microsoft in the same year. I thought everyone knew that.

I gladly accede to "mean and venal." However, I also make stuff people use, so I feel perfectly entitled to piss all over ... for example ... yet another webpage design company. I have a half dozen friends who design webpages for money; some of them even do fancy software type things. Why was some random webpage design company featured in business week? There was nothing exceptional about her business model or returns.

He wrote a version of BASIC for the Altair. Apple had their own version, too, for example, and there's a funny story about Woz not wanting to implement floating-point arithmetic in their version and Apple having to license that technology from Microsoft.

So, it wasn't "Bill Gates wrote BASIC" it was "Bill Gates and Paul Allen wrote a BASIC interpreter for the Altair."

I can imagine you writing a snarky sentence about that. Oh, blah blah, a version of a toy computer language on a toy computer.

I agree that a lot of the other companies featured were more interesting. I think we'd agree on a lot.

I guess one thing we don't agree on is the most productive way to respond to an article like this. I agree the article isn't helpful and that, perhaps, it puts on a pedestal people who don't deserve to be there. Or, in any case, that there are other people doing more interesting things who deserve to be featured instead.

Those people, however, don't deserve to be pissed on just because BusinessWeek decided to write the piece.

My question is this: what was the goal of your article?

From my perspective you went for the cheap shot, the easy laugh, the fart joke. It's ego-gratifying and will get you all over HN, Reddit, and the other usual places, but I'd expect an article exhorting entrepreneurs to do more (or, really, mocking them for not doing enough) to live up to its own standards and bring something new to the table.

For example, I would have been interested in reading a series of articles that goes through company-by-company, outlining their market, their challenges, and two or three things you think they could be doing better.

An article about the "The Top Under-25 Entrepreneurs BusinessWeek Should Have Listed" would have been interesting, too.

Finally, what if you reached out to the entrepreneurs on the list you DID think were interesting and conducted interviews with them? That would have been great!

I realize all of those would have taken a lot of time, effort, and research, but doesn't everything worthwhile?

I'm sorry, dude: it is not at all easy to meet people as inventive as Farnsworth. Television... compared to making another kind of MEMS accelerometer? And what do these modern inventors do for an encore that compares to inventing what is still the most promising technique in nuclear fusion? Farnsworth was a living god of invention; do not take his name in vain, and compare him to dopes slinging VHDL or whatever.

I agree that inventors labor best in obscurity ... however, these guys were all nominated and carefully selected by Business Week. Some of the top 25 were impressive inventive types, as I realized later: they simply were not mentioned at all in the main article.

Jesus what a nay-sayer. I wonder if in early 1999 he would have dismissed Google saying, "A website to search the Internet? Why? I can just go directly to what I want!". Sheesh.

Thanks to the participatory nature of technology these days, its become fiendishly difficult to predict what's going to produce wealth[1].

It used to be easy, wealth was made by growing something and eating it or digging something up and banging it into a shape. It got a bit more subtle when people realized that dragging stuff places (where said stuff was likely eaten or banged into a shape) could create wealth too.

It got even harder when information became wealth. Mostly at first by letting people know the best places to drag stuff and the best shapes to bang stuff into.

Now we are at the place where the idea itself can attract wealth when it goes viral and millions of people suddenly contribute to it. Facebook, wikipedia, twitter etc. It might actually be a clue that these are hard to "monetize" yet are seismic forces in peoples' lives. Wealth and money might finally be starting to go their separate ways.

I think maybe the author might have a little bit of dig stuff up and bang it into a shape bias, but I understand how it might be difficult to spot the wealth creation potential in some of these "new fangled" ventures.

[1] Wealth in the "bettering all human kind" sense, not the "pile of government printed paper" sense.

Wealth and money have always gone in slightly different ways. Every positive externality is wealth by your definition, but I unless its internalized I don't get paid for it. (And negative externality are basically stealing or looting.)

To give less abstract examples: I don't get paid for being a good citizen, voting, reading the newspaper to be informed. And I do not pay for being angry, putting a lot of strange gases in the atmosphere with my care (yet), congesting the streets. Or putting systemic risk on the financial world.

There is something to be said for connecting externalities with incentives. Giving the right incentives makes people's choices more compatible with the outcomes.

Well, I would have preferred to upmod and comment on a better-written post that expressed that sentiment, but this works.

I mean, I agree with some of his specific critiques and I certainly agree with the feeling -- that new startups should focus more on things that create wealth, and not just the short-term "people will invest in this" kind that can vanish overnight. (Let's leave aside, for the moment, that this was in reaction to an article about the "Best" Entrepreneurs, not the companies with the brightest futures).

But, obviously, it takes a lot of foresight and a deep knowledge of the company in question to know whether or not it's doing that.

You mentioned Google. I'd use his own example, to illustrate A) the grandpa factor, and B) the foresight problem.

He uses the example of Bill Gates. "At 20, Bill Gates had started his own company and written ... A BASIC INTERPRETER."

Grandpa factor: lots of us write interpreters; some of us even mess around with interpreters written in asm on old-timey hardware; it wasn't even rare at the time. There were TONS of nerds who wrote and write interpreters, and I'd be very surprised if a majority of the companies he mentions didn't have someone on staff who'd climbed that particular molehill. So, Grandpa Factor -- the things that a lot of these startups are doing are probably as impressive as anything Gates started out doing. And I don't think even Gates would argue that it was easier to set your sights on "BASIC Interpreter" than "carbon nanotubes in my dorm room."

Second, foresight. Given that all startups look like crap in their early stage (and we're now shining the light of journalism into startups at TREMENDOUSLY early stages, 'just another hobbyist implementing a standard basic interpreter'), etc, how do you know which crap will turn out to be valuable?

Anyone could probably have told, from his education and personality, that Gates was an ambitious, intelligent young man. Okay. That's a long way from "The umpteenth young gun writing an interpreter for frikkin BASIC is going to take over the world of personal computing."

This article is noise. You need to know why Twitter is valuable before you could honestly critique Tumblr or any number of these other social/real-time media services. You need to know just how bad Gates, Google et al all seemed at first before you can have credibility when you trash a wide swath of early-stage companies as a total waste of time.

( I have reservations that are similar in nature to his own, actually -- but I know enough not to confidently assert that, say, Tumblr will leave no trace on the tech landscape. And, of course, this is a Best Young Entrepreneurs article, not at all a Best Companies Started By Young Entrepreneurs -- you can argue that there shouldn't be a difference, but then you're arguing that Business Week should have better taste, and who cares?)

He forgot a few:

1. A guy who threw daddy's money at the ridiculous idea that people would buy books without seeing or touching them first.

2. Two college nerds who thought people would use a TV screen instead of the yellow pages.

3. Two more college nerds who thought people would come to their web-site solely for the purpose of going to someone else's website.

4. Another college nerd who thought people could be friends without actually being together.

5. Some people who thought other people wouldn't mind storing their electronic mail on someone else's computer.

6. Some guy pussy-whipped by his girlfriend to trade her beanie babies on the interwebs.

7. Some guys who thought people would be willing to send money over the internet.

8. A guy who built a place for people to give away their published writings for free.

9. A guy who thought people could meet their next SO on the computer in his apartment.

10. A guy who thought people could actually communicate something in only 140 characters.

Yep, those are all grounds for interesting ideas that one could discuss over coffee for a good while. The entrepreneurs identified in the article that is being criticized however seem to have very bland businesses (coffee intern placement doesn't really capture the imagination).

Actually internships are quite eye-opening stuff when done at the right place. So i'd say the internship website was a brilliant idea.

pretty funny until i got to #6. your use of "pussy-whipped" in this case is demeaning to both the man and the woman, and didn't fit with the rest of the comment's tone.

You're right, sorry. I was having so much fun I got carried away. I'd edit it, but it's too late now.

re #6, that's actually a PR myth:

According to one myth, the site came into being because Mr Omidyar's fiancee, Pam Wesley, wanted to contact other people who shared her hobby of trading Pez sweet dispensers.

That story was a product of public relations - but it is true that the first item sold was Mr Omidyar's own broken laser pointer, which went for $14 despite being essentially worthless."

Source: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/low/business/4207510.stm

I think you have to distinguish between nay-saying as a stylistic means and arguing with his point. I think there is a valid philosophical point to be made that young entrepreneurs are not daring enough. Aside from the fact that it's really, really hard not to settle for "easy" execution, society would probably indeed be better off if people dared to go for more daunting tasks. I guess you can say: If you want to glorify some people - like BW does -, select mostly those who try (and most certainly will fail in doing so) the truly groundbreaking stuff. Those are the ones that society needs to succeed. But it's all philosophical.

Aagh, why is there Javascript on the site that breaks "open in new tab"?

Quite a bit of vitriol in there, but it seems it would more appropriately be directed at lousy journalism rather than bemoaning the state of entrepreneurship. While the BusinessWeek article claims to evaluate on "potential for growth," the projected revenue figures sound like PR fluff. I was left wondering which of the 10 were selected just so they have a nice round number for their list.

I think this illustrates why fluffy press-release-transcribing journalism is so prevalent these days better than a whole collection of BusinessWeek ever could:

http://twitpic.com/ds64u

A service where some woman (who isn’t under 25 or very well dressed herself) plays “queer eye” for a dude over webcam and demeans him into buying her choice of clothes.

At first I thought this referred to one of those "financial domination" sites where you pay to be humiliated and ignored by some girl over the internet. Now that's entrepreneurship, American style!

"Dear America: you can’t have an economy based on narcissism, good intentions, marketing, catering to rich bored people, really excellent webpages, and selling underpants on the internet."

Quite a statement coming from someone working on "problems in quantitative finance." Not sure which adds less value, high frequency trading or (insert any activity on earth here).

The only difference between this and a strawman argument is that Business Week provided the strawman.

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