Uber and Airbnb Alumni Fuel Tech’s Next Wave

&gt; The start-up world projects a meritocratic image, but in reality, it is a small, tightknit club where success typically hinges on whom you know.<p>This is...so not true. My co-founder and I had hardly any network in SV. We applied to YC through the website, raised seed money after demo day. We ran on seed + revenue up to about 60 employees and we recently did a series A.<p>If you don’t have a network, don’t be dissuaded. Silicon Valley is the least credentialist, most open community I’ve ever been a part of.

I have a hard time verbalizing it but something about Uber creating all these millionaires sickens me.<p>In no order:<p>* The business is fundamentally based on ignoring the law.<p>* They&#x27;ve done nothing but lose money, more than any private company ever.<p>* The money keeping them afloat is very dirty (mostly from Saudi Arabia)<p>* The culture is well-known to be awful.<p>* The drivers are completely exploited, working long days with no security and taking huge financial and physical risk.<p>* Their headquarters is at one of the most awful corners in the city, which they&#x27;ve done nothing to improve.<p>And in the end they&#x27;ll have to start making money. Which means either increasing their prices or increasing their cut. When that day comes we&#x27;ll realize what we&#x27;ve lost.<p>But yet, all the people who signed up and coded the app will be millionaires.<p>Smells like society misallocating value.

This is the cycle of Silicon Valley at play, and an example why despite the Exodus of many entrepreneurs and engineers SV is still the leader in software based start ups.<p>Take the &quot;PayPal mafia&quot; for instance, out of one successful company spawned others -- SpaceX, LinkedIn, Facebook (via investment cash). These companies will spawn others, so on and so forth.<p>It&#x27;s a cycle that feeds upon itself and has been a successful model, but it does have major flaws due to &quot;hardcoded&quot; pattern recognition.

The people who were willing to work for a risky startup with a vast vision are willing to work for another risky startup with a vast vision again.<p>The reverse causation seems like a compelling explanation: innovators built Uber and AirBnB, rather than Uber and AirBnB built innovators (as the title implies).

It&#x27;s interesting to see a credential effect here similar to universities.<p>Which credentials are the most valuable then? Which company as a new grad is most similar to Stanford, MIT?

Airbnb or Uber are not really tech companies. They are business companies with a WebApp required as part of the execution. They didn&#x27;t invent anything on the technical level, they brought some business ideas to existing tech (I mean Airbnb is literally a website with a DB)<p>In the same way that United is not a tech company, but they have a website that accepts reservation.<p>Tech companies create new Tech as part of their lifecycle: Intel, AMD, Google, etc etc. They create new Tech that didn&#x27;t exist before, and this is core to their product.<p>I get that Silicon Valley shifted from Real tech 20 years ago to Futile WebApps that deliver pizzas faster, but it makes me sad that the new definition of tech shifted so much to pure business.

Times were different during PayPal mafia. I don&#x27;t see how just working at Airbnb or Uber makes one any different than the rest in 2019 to start a successful startup. Bias maybe ?

I started losing the grab of the term &#x27;Tech&#x27;

Perfectly encapsulated in this tweet:<p>18: Go to Harvard or Stanford for CS.<p>22: Work at FAANG companies.<p>25: Quit and raise millions for your startup.<p>26: Sell your company to a FAANG company&#x2F;IPO<p>28: Join a VC firm, invest in people like you, and make predictions on Twitter all day.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;TheLexTimes&#x2F;status&#x2F;1105131411411886081" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;TheLexTimes&#x2F;status&#x2F;1105131411411886081</a>

Ah yes, &quot;innovation&quot; in skirting regulations as AirBnb does. Harming local communities and extracting wealth in the name of &quot;tech disruption&quot;.