The people who have said there is nothing new left to do in the world have been wrong every time. Don't let their lack of imagination hold you back.
I think this is the larger point, hovering in the background of of the article, at least from YC's standpoint: have we stuffed so much capital into Silicon Valley (and that mode of entrepreneurship) that we have exhausted it? Are we now cargo-culting?
I tend to think so, but then I'm that sort of person.
We've probably stuffed too much capital into ad-supported businesses, as Twitter stockholders are painfully aware. Very few of YC's current crop are ad-supported. Silicon Valley is moving back to making things for which customers pay money, and the paying customers have to be kept happy.
Right now, the ad-supported portion of the industry in the US is more than half Google and Facebook, and that fraction is increasing. Everybody else is being squeezed out.
I wonder if the day will come when people with backgrounds in ad-based companies will have trouble getting jobs. They'll be seen as not having a proper "the customer is always right" attitude.
> We've probably stuffed too much capital into ad-supported businesses
As someone that has recently been converted to the ad-blocking side (actually mostly tracker-blocking but that tends to kill ads too), there's no way I would want to invest in a new ad-supported business.
That's what is bothersome about this blog post. The insinuation is that there are only two types of people: brave entrepreneurs and small-minded hater trolls.
I don't know which I'd classify myself as. I've been part of several successful startups, but I'll still make negative comments about harebrained ideas or Silicon Valley's sense of self-importance and general overvaluation
That's fine and your perspective certainly has merit, but as an entrepreneur, is it really worthwhile to spend time reading 100 restatements of vague pessimism? Even if that view might be warranted, it doesn't help your odds (or your mood) to worry about such things when you could be putting your energy into solving concrete problems.
I think that's what Sam is getting at here--not that the comments are necessarily worthless or wrong, just that they aren't generally going to offer much that can actionably help you and could very well get you down.
There's no revolution without incremental innovation.
We don't see many innovative products nowadays but it's not like there is absolutely no innovation going on. As long as there's even a small bit of advancement in technology going on, someday it will all come together and change everything once it reaches critical point.
Also keep in mind many things don't look like they're revolutionary when you're a contemporary.
This is the biggest frustration I have with income disparity. Every dollar is a vote about what problems are worth solving and a claim on the skilled effort to solve it. If those dollars are distributed, then more effort gets spent solving the problems that the poor can directly identify.
I think this is the larger point, hovering in the background of of the article, at least from YC's standpoint: have we stuffed so much capital into Silicon Valley (and that mode of entrepreneurship) that we have exhausted it? Are we now cargo-culting?
I tend to think so, but then I'm that sort of person.