Startup data trends (which gets its data via AngelList's API) shows 18799 startups in total when you search on location "Earth" http://startupdatatrends.com/?tags=1643
It's reasonable to think that most of these startups created AngelList accounts in 2011 (given hornbaker's Alexa graph).
The irony is that Sahil's posts are increasingly about something other than leverage. They are becoming more about stating completely obvious startup/entrepreneur bait. "We love leverage", "pivoting is hard", "think small". We'd do better to actually exercise our leverage rather than continue to read his inane and obvious drivel.
Israel's rise as a tech hub has quite a few similarities to Silicon Valley's early history. Having good schools and a frontier spirit seem like key ingredients. Perhaps most important is the involvement of military spending in seeding research which leads to new technologies, which in turn spin off from their government-funded roots and form new private companies, which then seed other new companies, venture capitalists move in, more companies are seeded, the cycle continues. Another 50 years and continued military support from the US, and Israel will surely be an excellent complement to the valley.
My point on the company being PM-driven was not that PM-driven on its own is necessarily bad. The point was that the organization responsible for ideas and their execution (in Netflix's case, product management) combined with a culture of fear is a bad thing. It means that ideas are not challenged or questioned to the extent that they should. Apologies for not making that clear ... and no offense to product management as a discipline or career choice.
What's going on at Netflix? If you ask employees, they'll tell you that the culture - often praised for its high performance standards - is a culture of fear. It's a product management-driven organization where PMs aren't afraid to use the poor performance card to remove subordinates who don't go along with their ideas. The emperor has no clothes. In Netflix's case, the emperor is any product manager. It's no wonder there was little pushback internally on Qwikster - the name or the concept. Who has the guts to say no?
A company with a culture of fear is a company that is on a death spiral. Hopefully Mr. Hastings has the self-awareness to recognize this problem and the gumption to act on it.
Do startups actually need product managers? A few months back, a job posting for a designer at inDinero included a sidebar that asked this question. Jessica suggested that the answer was "No".
It seems that product managers are not required when a company is relatively small, and a co-founder has the bulk of his/her time to dedicate to product development. In such a case, a team need be made up of only engineers and designers.
Even when teams are larger, new-ish web application frameworks like Rails make deployment incredibly easy/fast and all of the "strategic thinking" that a PM might ordinarily contribute is done with live product. In these situations, all of the activities listed in Joseph's blog post - focus, vision, avoiding frankensteinism, customer-centricity - could be handled by a product designer or product-minded engineer.
Are product managers a thing of the past? Seems increasingly likely.
Why bother hacking AngelList? Isn't just as easy to email my pitch deck to people I know. Probably more effective too, since a reference from people I know is better than jumping in to a noisy group of startups, hoping someone will hear my pitch.
Boy, was he right. Not out of touch in the least.