After the Gold Rush

There is truth here, but remember that the age of the intelligent networked machine is just beginning.<p>Look at the YC classes. They are very different from 2005. You can&#x27;t get rich making a site like reddit today. YC is going international, with X for Y country businesses.<p>I was talking to a friend with a startup in Indonesia. In Asia its like 1998.<p>I think we are just at the end of the easy social&#x2F;mobile revolution in the West and on the cusp of the next robotics&#x2F;AI&#x2F;IoT revolution.<p>And the same process that created cheap and easy tools for software, the same process that dropped the cost of starting a SaaS business 10x will happen for robotics&#x2F;ai&#x2F;IoT.<p>Its already relatively cheap and easy to prototype and fabricate things like low power bluetooth wearables.<p>Computers have just gotten tiny, low power, wireless and cheap enough to be disposable. These devices are about to be everywhere.<p>This is not the end of the tech startup gold rush. It&#x27;s time to learn AI and hardware prototyping.

As someone who has worked at Google for a few years, I can&#x27;t agree with the author&#x27;s characterization of tech behemoths. While they have embraced the start-up mode of doing things for some new projects and are very free with their investing, their core business is everything you&#x27;d expect from a big business.<p>I&#x27;m not sure it&#x27;s possible to grow as large as Google, Apple or Facebook and remain agile. The product and organization gains too much inertia on its own. Even if you have a brilliant idea for improving the product there are hundreds of people you need to convince, months worth of meetings and reams of design docs required.<p>The big companies may be innovating on the edges, but their established products are all ripe for disruption.<p>Of course, if you look too disruptive they&#x27;ll probably just buy you with their mountain of cash.

TechCrunch, the over confident tabloid reporters of hype who only a few weeks ago were all breathless about &#x27;unicorns&#x27;, are now swinging the pendulum to the other extreme. I&#x27;m in the bay area and there is a new realism for sure, but the idea that low buck entrepreneurialism is &#x27;over&#x27; is absurd.<p>Most of the current wave of tech&#x27;s origins are in the Web 2.0 &#x27;read&#x2F;write&#x27; web that came after the dot com pump and dump funding fiasco...twitter et al grew out of the ashes of the last vc and wall street debacle. we are a similar inflection point IMO, where honest innovation will be more important than megabuck funding fests...

It&#x27;s somewhat clear that were headed for a bit of a downturn, but this article reeks of the &quot;everything that could be invented has been invented&quot; fallacy.

Oh no you have to do something new to get rich.<p>There&#x27;s still plenty of money, talent, and success out there for new, good ideas. It being hard to fund the same old thing again and again is more of a feature than a bug.<p>And the argument about the last few YC classes - it takes years to see who the stars are. I remember seeing one of the founders of Stripe speak when they were in YC. It wasn&#x27;t clear they were going anywhere. What they were doing was cool, but there wasn&#x27;t exactly lots of hype about it. Their success only looks obvious in hindsight.

It&#x27;s not startups that are losing their luster, it&#x27;s tech-for-tech&#x27;s-sake companies. Now that we pretty much have everything we need to be connected, we have to look beyond technology and to the strongest fulcrum of society: culture.<p>Culture companies are the future. When you can get anything anywhere, the brand matters far more than the product. Anyone can make a burger or a pizza, so why are McDonalds and Pizza Hut crushing it across the globe, especially in China?<p>We&#x27;re already seeing this with news. Traditional media companies are struggling to adapt while media outlets with personality like Vice (and Slate, and Quartz) are doing better than ever.<p>When all the gold is mined, when all the tech is made, the only thing that&#x27;s left is to sell yourself.

He said: &quot;Today’s tech behemoths aren’t the lumbering giants of yesteryear. They are leaner and meaner and more competitive precisely because they have co-opted the same technologies startups used to attack them.&quot;<p>But this is far from true with the huge entrenched healthcare tech companies. Many of them haven&#x27;t even begun to employ the newer software technologies. I&#x27;m down the street from the largest medical center in the world and numerous doctors and nurses encourage me all the time with their complaints about the major tech players in the industry. SV has barely scratched the surface of what could be improved and I look forward to seeing many more entrepreneurs join us in this $3 trillion industry.

I like to scan these articles for numbers before reading. If I don&#x27;t see any, I exit out.<p>If you&#x27;re going to talk about financial&#x2F;economic phenomena please at least conduct a modicum of quantitative research and give us some concrete data to discuss, not just opinions in a void.

Maybe the &quot;gold rush&quot; is over. But there&#x27;s still a heck of a lot of gold to mine. We&#x27;re not even <i>close</i> to the point where there is no more valuable software to be written (and sold).

No the <i>social</i> gold rush is gone. Everybody who wishes to get online is online already with <i>something</i> and you have displace that.<p>And &quot;gold rush&quot; is a good term--&quot;land grab&quot; might be better. The fact that the &quot;disruptive&quot; companies are all now skirting or outright flouting the law shows that the easy land is taken.<p>If it&#x27;s highly profitable, it&#x27;s either illegal or difficult. Easy and profitable means that, even if you&#x27;re first, the horde is inbound.<p>Those of us with real products that can&#x27;t simply be done with 4 20-year-olds and a dog in Ukraine? We&#x27;re chugging along, thanks.<p>Yeah, raising money is getting <i>really</i> annoying, but, if we can&#x27;t, we&#x27;ll bootstrap. Funny that, bootstrapping is an option when people pay you money.<p>And, do remember, the people who made all the money in the gold rush weren&#x27;t the miners, it was the people who sold shovels and alcohol.

Then[1] and Now[2]<p>[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;2008&#x2F;04&#x2F;09&#x2F;technology&#x2F;09silicon.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;2008&#x2F;04&#x2F;09&#x2F;technology&#x2F;09silicon.html</a><p>[2] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;2016&#x2F;02&#x2F;22&#x2F;technology&#x2F;caution-rebuffed-unicorns-and-other-start-ups-fixate-on-rainbows.html?_r=0" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;2016&#x2F;02&#x2F;22&#x2F;technology&#x2F;caution-rebuffe...</a>

Interesting article but I think it has a critical flaw — not all startups are in the consumer space. Of course, there’s not going to be another Facebook for the next couple years at least, but another Stripe — maybe?

It&#x27;s funny because the means through which big business tech companies have &quot;co-opted the same technologies startups used to attack them&quot; is through buying said startups. So no, I don&#x27;t think it&#x27;s all over.<p>You can&#x27;t type on a keyboard and make an automobile factory that can compete with the big car companies, but in software, you pretty much can. It&#x27;s a pretty chaotic market for this reason even if there are big dogs.

So, tl;dr version: The dark ages of the tech industry are finally over. Everyone, rejoice, it&#x27;s a brand new day.<p>Stop working on your social network. Stop trying to simultaneously pick the lowest hanging fruit while going after the biggest pile of cash.<p>Go after problems that matter, rather than gizmos that might get a lot of users, or &quot;eyeballs&quot;.

All of these claims are true in any market, but we ignore them during booms because fundraising is easier (and de-risks our startup involvement). The only novelty in this article is a return to honesty.

&quot;If you are building something which is genuinely extraordinary, that’s always the right answer.&quot;<p>The gold rush is never over for extraordinary companies.

I agree with this article overall, especially re: Google, but I do not agree about Facebook. Most American users 13-25 do not use Facebook anymore.<p>Facebook will either have to work out a business model that makes it profitable to frequently buy WhatsApps&#x2F;Instagrams and then Snapchats&#x2F;Telegrams&#x2F;etc or they will end too.

I&#x27;ve gotta say as someone who is not actively developing full time, most of the comments in here read like people in denial. It doesn&#x27;t really matter what anyone&#x27;s opinion is, or what any of us say though - the future will bring what it brings. That said I hedged my bets a couple years ago against the tech world&#x27;s macro economic future and culture.

&gt; Over in The Information, the Lessins argue that “the period where tech startups can readily disrupt larger tech companies is ending for a simple reason: Today’s tech behemoths aren’t the lumbering giants of yesteryear. They are leaner and meaner and more competitive precisely because they have co-opted the same technologies startups used to attack them”<p>I disagree. I am reminded of the comparison of the prisoner and the warden, where the warden [behemoth] has his whole life to think about whereas the prisoner [startup] is only thinking of escape [way to get a leg up on the behemoth]. The difference is that many people see the behemoth with no <i>obvious</i> weaknesses and give up; but if they had the same weaknesses they exploited, that would be too easy wouldn&#x27;t it?

&gt; Over in The Information, the Lessins argue that “the period where tech startups can readily disrupt larger tech companies is ending for a simple reason: Today’s tech behemoths aren’t the lumbering giants of yesteryear. They are leaner and meaner and more competitive precisely because they have co-opted the same technologies startups used to attack them” and so “until there is another fundamental technology disruption, the window of opportunity for startups is limited to more traditional markets with less competitive players.”<p>Oh, come on. Where there are BigCos, there is inherent bureaucracy slowing them down. Creating a startup gives founder engineers the opportunity to massively create wealth in a way that BigCo simply does not incentivize.

After the technopolies will come the decentralized technologies like the block chain etc. Then we will eventually get a common platform built on things like an AST format (e.g. web assembly) with a semantic module registry allowing for creating interfaces across programming languages to integrate and evolve the decentralized tech. Then we will get into competing smart contracts and localized systems that limit company size and regulate social interaction via the technology. Then we will have superintelligent hybrid systems with features we can&#x27;t anticipate now.

Consumer may be entering a trough but the industrial internet is rising. Social and enterprise SaaS are highly saturated, but these become tools for the next generation of companies. The next wave of technology is characterized by technology that senses and interacts with its environment and this will drive tremendous innovation in the industrial internet (agtech, manufacturing, construction, etc). As these technologies mature, become less expensive and more ubiquitous, we&#x27;ll see startups start diffusing back into the consumer space and the cycle will repeat again.

Ctrl-f, thiel, not found. Why the slug?

I&#x27;m glad I built a profitable business before taking any investment. Seems like I&#x27;ll have a little better leverage going forward.

I bet you he&#x27;s wrong and I intend to prove it.

Now that TC announced it, it&#x27;s official people! Time to close shop, pack your bags and leave.<p>Startup gold-rush is anything but over. Tell me this: if not into startups, where will the money go to find possible returns? Negative interest rates, oil price can&#x27;t find the bottom and stocks aren&#x27;t really going anywhere either. So where will this money go?

This is mostly true but it sounds a bit too gloomy.

I disagree with the authors premise that there can only be 2-3 behemoths. Has he not been paying attention to how kids use mobile apps these days? No one is locked in to a single ecosystem like they used to be.<p>People use gchat, Facebook, Instagram, snapchat, whatsapp, and iMessage simultaneously, for distinct purposes. And all of their friends do too.<p>As long as the app present value, kids these days have no problems switching back and forth between apps, meaning they can get hundreds of millions or billions of users too.

The gold rush is over because everyone who wants a PC has a PC. -2005ish