It's true in the short term that social and mobile trend chasing will be detrimental to investment in other areas of tech, but markets and VC returns will correct this over the longer term.
Trend chasing and herding makes it harder to invest in the winners in a space at a reasonable valuation.
If VCs invest in 100 social/mobile start ups at $100 million valuation and only 10 reach $1 billion, then the VCs on aggregate are break even. Also, a VC has a 1 in 10 or 1 in 100 shot of getting that big hit because there are so many 'me toos' in the same space.
If a VC invests in the next spaceship, smartwatch (Pebble), or X less competitive field, there might be only 2 companies competing for that pie. So you have a 50% chance of picking the winner.
The economics are also more compelling for less crowded fields because customer acquisition costs, talent hiring costs and other costs are cheaper. They're not being driven up by the other 100 'social networking / Instagram' start ups competing for the same resources. Your market share of revenue is also higher because you are sharing it with 1 or 2 other players, instead of 100.
That makes the margins better for the the less crowded areas of technology.
If you started a social or mobile company in 2005-2008, your customer acquisition cost was close to zero and engineers were cheap so that made each VC dollar go very far. You also didn't have to compete against 10 other companies for mind share in your space.
That's not the case on social or mobile anymore.
Some smart VC firm will invest in a hardware, biotech or (insert non social / mobile) start up and make a ton of money. Then all the money will chase that area and the cycle will repeat. The VCs which invested in the 'me toos' will lose money and lose assets.
This is more likely to put mom & pop stores out of business than threaten the big players like Fastenal, Grainger, McMaster-Carr and MSC Direct.
Mom & pops focus more on retail / small business customers who are price sensitive, so this is going to hurt them.
But the big players mainly rely on their services because industrial and commercial customers care more about minimizing downtime and reliability than on price. The customer service at these companies is great and helps sort through 1 million+ skews, which is completely different from picking 1 out of 20 TVs at Best Buy.
Their customers are companies like Caterpillar who need projects to be on time and same day delivery. Fastenal even puts fasteners directly inside of bins on the assembly lines so that the customer doesn't have to haul a huge chunks of metal.
Amazon would have to seriously boost its service (ie, same day to location) delivery to gain the non-retail customer base as well as expand its sales staff expertise dramatically (which of the 1000 cutting tool bits do I need for X job, what angle does it have to be installed at etc?). What this will do is consolidate the industry with Amazon and the existing big players at the expense of the mom & pops which are over 80% of the market.
It's a $140-160bn a year market. Just goes to show how much opportunity there is in technology to expand outside of consumer-focused businesses.
GoDaddy is owned by private equity firms KKR and Silverlake. These firms aim for short term profits at the expense of creating long term value.
Silverlake was the firm behind the whole Skype compensation fiasco, which was basically a quick flip. KKR does dividend recaps where it issues debt and funnels money out of the company. The company, such as HCA or Dollar General, then has to fire people and raise prices on customers.
Do you think they'll do what's right for customers over the long term or try to extract every penny? That's why they'll flip flop on an issue like SOPA - no long term values. I moved my domains to namecheap a long time ago.
If start ups only refer to businesses where technological innovation drives competitive advantage, then New York will have a tough time. The future Googles, Intels, Apples etc fit in this category.
But if we include businesses which are technology enabled, then I think New York has a much better chance. Companies like Gilt Group, Kickstarter and Tumblr don't rely on technology to drive their competitive advantages.
If the technology component becomes commoditized due to ease of access (rails frameworks, Heroku, mobile frameworks etc), then competitive advantages will shift to community building, branding and design.
New York has the advantage of being a dense city (good for location-based mobile apps). It has a rich history of being the entrepreneurial home of fashion, media, retail and finance. New York based start ups will have an advantage in building communities around these industries.
I'm looking to start an e-learning start up. Been involved with some start ups on the business side and I can code enough to set up a web app / social app, but looking for a technical cofounder who has better chops than me.
Pretty sure the Beatles had a pretty big effect on society and the status quo. The power of art and music tends to be a second order effect: it inspires people.
Without the music of the 60's/70's, do you think Steve Jobs would have dropped acid, become a Zen Buddhist and built Apple's brand as a the challenger of the status quo?
Let's give them a taste of their own medicine. They grew off exploiting the Facebook feed and twitter.
I started #boycottZynga on twitter. Please retweet. If we get the message out and convince people to stop playing before IPO, we can hurt their valuation.
Then they'll realize they can't just bully normal people.
You're right - I wasn't referring to all mass produced things. But I do like it when someone buys (or makes) a gift that's unique, but cheap, rather than something generic but expensive.
For example, take toys. There's this store that sells hand made toys around the block from me: http://playing-mantis.com/wooden.htm. Does it make sense for a kid to have 3 plastic toys they'll use for a couple of months and throw away or to buy a handcrafted toy they could keep for life (and even pass on)?
When I talked to the store clerk at Playing Mantis, she said most of their toys don't come from the US but from Germany, Austria and Japan because the craftsmanship is good there.
It's not a pipe dream that this could change - companies like kickstarter and etsy are enabling this move towards story-driven, experiential consumption.
I hope the handmade movement really takes off. Maybe people could consume less but unique artifacts that have a real story behind them rather than accumulating mountains of mass produced, generic stuff that ends up in a trash heap a couple of years later.
tryruby had the in-browser coding before codecademy. I'm pretty sure codecademy uses the jq-console plug in which was around before: https://github.com/replit/jq-console
Badges have been around in video games and educational games for a while and Rails for Zombies already used them.
Good idea. A quiet place (with lost music) and anti-social media (with sharing buttons at the end). Hopefully, the irony is intentional.
Makes me wonder if the desire to optimize UI/UX and the viral loop will keep shortening our attention spans. It's a prisoner's dilemma where we're better off in the short run but worse off in the long run because we can no longer process longer form thoughts.
Example: if you have one, she hires 2, those 2 hire 2 each. You have 1+2+4 = 7 = 8 - 1 = 2^3 - 1