There's something important in the latter half of this: understanding that this isn't useful as a guide, but as a warning.<p>No-one realistically sets out to create "a Google". People set out to solve a problem. Sometimes that problem turns out to fuel vast business, sometimes not. You can guess at the size, but sometimes you're going to be wrong (hello Twitter).<p>You can aim to replace a business, but it's near impossible to do it because you know what the future of that thing will be (hello Windows Mobile). Even ARM didn't know smartphones were going to be a thing, at the scale they are. ARM ate Intel's lunch, not by going after smartphones, but by making processors designed to work with virtually no power. Smartphones just happened to come along and need that.<p>You can't intend to be disruptive. You can aim to become a big business, but that's out-competing, not disrupting, and they're not the same (hello Snapchat). The market tells you you were disruptive after the fact.
Although I agree that having a business plan that's based on nothing more than a concept of "being disruptive" is not much of a plan at all, I feel that in some parts, he's picking a strawman and arguing against that.<p>He claims that "I’m sure what the presenter of the slide was getting at was Clayton Christensen’s definition of disruption from his classic book The Innovator’s Dilemma. ".<p>He then goes on to say (talking about Square and Uber) that "neither of these companies were disruptive in The Innovator’s Dilemma sense". However, I'd be surprised if the presenter wasn't thinking precisely of people like Uber and the type of "disruption" they've brought to the taxi industry.<p>So, if they are thinking of Uber, and if Uber's disruption isn't the sort being talked about in the Innovators dilemma, then I suspect they weren't thinking of Christensen’s definition at all.<p>I'm not sure why disruption has to be less functional - it just needs to be tackling the root problem (and often redefining what that root problem is) in a different way to the incumbent.
<i>Christensen’s theory is descriptive, not prescriptive. It names a process but does not tell you how to generate that process</i><p>Something similar has been said of Marxism, in that it's an interesting way to think about what has come before, but has no grounding when it tries to talk about what should happen in the future.
Disruption is not something you set out to do, but it can be a result of what you are doing.<p>Clayton Christensens "innovators dilemma" isn't a book about how to disrupt, but how disruption happens.<p>The problem with a large part of the newspeak in the startup community is that it has become too formulaic.<p>10 things, how you, why you, how to.<p>I avoid these articles like the plague as they have nothing to do with running a startup.
Interesting perspective, color my beliefs altered. So far as tech goes I think that disruption could still be an <i>outcome</i> that you aim for (certainly not in medicine). Even then you may not plan for the eventuality, merely by serendipity absolutely know that you are sitting on a disruptive idea.<p>It's a great thing to have and maybe something that you can't plan for.