...so instead of small and lean businesses (and why not employee-owned too if we're at it), that integrate well with both existing technology and economic landscape, that provide nice integration points both at the business level (partnerships etc.) and technical (APIs made for more than just consumption etc.), let's build startups that fueled by VC money evolve into monolithic monsters that ferociously guard their walled gardens and do their best to entrap customers in them, because ..."nice, polished and integrated and user-friendly experiences"?<p>Let's at least be frank about it: <i>it's because... PROFIT! ...and OWN the (l)users! ...and to rule the world!</i><p>Am I the only one that instead of this, dreams of an utopical business landscape created in the image of the "UNIX philosophy": swarms of small, targeted, few-persons businesses that each solve specific problems and integrate well with one another? And of <i>teaching the customers</i> about the benefits of integrating the best solutions from a large number of boutique providers, all able to provide bespoke solutions for <i>their</i> needs, and all highly motivated to provided the best services because each small customer is <i>really important</i> for them?<p>Please, <i>stop trying to be "full stack"</i>, do what you're best at and learn to <i>integrate with others</i> (yes, integration is <i>really really hard</i>, sometimes even harder than delivering a great product/service, but it's better than forcing the customer to accept a crappy service/product at one level of the stack just because he needs to use the "star product/service" at some other level of your stack). We don't need more Apple-like companies! A few of them are great for setting some quality and "quality of integration" and "polish" standards, but more of them are bad for all!
Unpacking this a bit, I think that the reason full-stack startups are becoming popular is because many of the new technologies are disruptive innovations that honestly aren't that useful to <i>existing customers</i> of industries. That's the definition of a disruptive innovation, right?<p>Take Uber for example. Their core strength is logistics; they connect instantaneous demand for transportation with surplus supply. They could try to sell this as a service to the existing taxicab/limo industry, but their incentives are seriously misaligned. Taxis and limos have an industry structure that remains profitable because they own a supply-restricted monopoly on transportation (through medallions & branding) that lets each driver charge premium prices. Adopting Uber's technology doesn't let them serve more customers (they're limited by driving time), nor does it let them charge more (it would probably <i>drop</i> the price through higher availability), and so there's no incentive for them to buy it. However, if Uber targets a <i>different</i> population of drivers - say, those who are unemployed or underemployed and have free time on their hands - then <i>those</i> folks all have an incentive to adopt the technology so they could get customers where none were before. And because the supply of Uber drivers is greater than the supply of taxicabs, this lowers prices for customers, creating wealth and a fair amount of Teamster opposition.<p>Or consider Tesla. Their core strength is branding - they appeal to the eco-friendly, style-conscious customer who wants everyone to know they care about the environment. If Tesla just sold batteries and a powertrain to Detroit, it wouldn't fix the public perception of American cars as gas-guzzling clunkers at all. This is why the public is nowhere near as excited about the Chevy Volt as about the Tesla Roadster or S.<p>I think that companies that pursue these strategies are effectively attacking longstanding structural efficiencies in the way the U.S. economy works, things that have been institutionalized because that's the way it's always been. And we're going to see more of them in the near future, because this reliance on branding, oligopolies, and regulatory barriers to entry has been in place since the 50s, and technology has changed significantly in that time period. There will also likely be a lot of social upheaval as well, as people get used to the emergence of new institutions.
Ughh, all these buzz words and everyone seems to have a different view on what they mean!<p>I thought 'full stack' was a developer who could turn their hand to any aspects of the project?<p>Another term I hate is 'growth hacking' - why does everything need a fancy new name?
> My guess is we are still at the very beginning of the full stack movement<p>It's all been tried before. In the 1940's, the US courts even had to stop movie studios from owning the cinema chains, see <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Paramount_Pictures,_Inc" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Paramount_Pict...</a>.<p>When some technology further <i>up</i> the stack tries to strong-arm control of technology lower <i>down</i> the stack and unilaterally change it for their own sole benefit, it can cause great dissatifaction with other users of the more fundamental technology.
Here's my take - Hackers have simply become more business-savvy. Let me explain...<p>"Full Stack Startup" is clearly not a new idea, as tptacek mentioned in his comment; just a modern application of an age-old business concept. Rather, I think hackers as a whole have simply become much more business-savvy since the Dot-com bubble, which was obviously a low point in collective business wisdom. As a result, they are increasingly choosing smarter, more sophisticated business models (i.e. vertical integration) and distribution strategies when building their companies.<p>It also shows that the "disruption" of the MBA is now more or less complete. Business principles and fundamentals will never change (just like human nature doesn't change), but the practice and application of those principles has changed drastically as a result of the Internet, and I doubt MBA curriculums have been able to catch up, simply because most of the people involved don't understand the core technologies driving these changes as well as hackers do.<p>On the other hand, we've seen the rapid growth in the number, size, and influence of hacker-friendly institutions like Y Combinator, which for all intents and purposes is basically "Business School for Hackers" (let's be honest). YC brings together people who already have a deep knowledge of technology, and helps them make better business decisions while building a strong professional network in the process (the latter of which is cited as the main/only benefit of an MBA). The same goes for hacker-friendly business methodologies like The Lean Startup.<p>The reason terms like "Growth Hacking" and "Full Stack Startups" become a thing in the first place is probably because they started off as "hacker dialect" for traditional business terms and concepts (Marketing and Vertical Integration, respectively). "Marketing" has for a long time been considered the exclusive realm of MBAs, but obviously that's not the case anymore, and using a term like "growth hacking" was probably a way for hackers to "take back" the concept and make it their own so to speak, though obviously that term has since become severely overused and bastardized.
Interesting view. Essentially a vertically integrated firm from the days of yore plus a new integrated customer experience.<p>I like how he's thinking not about supply chain integration and customer experience in isolation. Plus, I totally agree with his comment about how this is difficult, but if mastered, provides a hard to replicate competitive advantage.
In other words, these are NOT technology companies. They are regular product / service companies whose founders use their technology know-how to disrupt the marketplace.
Doesn't this type of vertical integration lead to user lock-in after they've displaced the incumbents? And as the companies rise and fall, the broad range of things they had to get good at ends up being reinvented and stove-piped by other companies.<p>Is this an issue for the industry at large?
You might think of this as the opposite of outsourcing, except these companies <i>do</i> outsource. However, they choose partners with relatively less negotiating power. Uber is an obvious example, but large companies like Apple, Amazon, and Walmart do the same at much larger scale; they can partner with large suppliers as long as they're relatively smaller.<p>This lets them control the user experience better and, not coincidentally, their own profit margins as well.<p>(I'm reminded of Gailbraith's theory of countervailing power, that large retailers arose because they had more buying power than consumers when negotiating with suppliers.)
Full stack means better integration between hardware and software and hence a better final product. Apple has been showing us this for years. Their product set has always felt very polished and cohesive.<p>Plus, technology and programming languages have become very cross-stack friendly. For example: if you know JS you can (with some work) program a server in Node, your Db with Mongo, and client side with straight JS. Yes, there are some complexities but the basics are all the same. Furthermore, development costs for this are way lower than legacy systems that have never heard of aajax or a MVC.
Partly this is driven by the full stack (if you want to call it that) being cheap and easy now. It's becoming commoditized by Amazon, FedEx, etc. Whatever your product is, you can make it globally available (to the developed world at least) with minimal staff and infrastructure.