Regardless of whether its wise to bet on where technology is heading, the point I got from this was that more thought should be going in to what technologies should be focused on as a matter of principle, regardless of "what sells to the masses at the moment."
We've seen where demand (Wall Street) driven acute focus on the short term has brought many companies today, ie, over-reliance on what was once popular but quickly hit the dust the second something slightly more trendy came along.
Of course, making so many rapid platform adjustments drives people into borrowing ... from Wall Street. But companies were told over and over by a barage of management consulting gurus that things were so fast and blurry, they couldn't afford to not keep borrowing more and more money to pump out more and more crap to keep up with the almost instantly changing trends.
On the other hand, look at apple - just over a decade ago they were considering bankruptcy, and instead of giving in to the urge to "do what would sell at the moment" they decided to ignore "expert advice" and instead invest in a simple but well-thought out development plan (iPad seems new but is really just a long-held fantasy of Newton II) and chart their own long-term course of doing what they wanted at a time when it wasn't certain there was going to be a long term for them.
Now of course everybody praises them for their determination to do what they wanted rather than catering to the fickle whims of the market.
Now look where they are. They define the market. They don't make what you want - they tell you what you want and make sure you get the hint that they know what you want even better than you do. And more and more people seem to agree.
I think that's what this article highlights - what will the world be like 5 years from now (more of the same) if facebook keeps getting more and more money to hire more talented people so they can figure out clever new ways to help people keep each other up to date on useless banalities that do nothing to advance anything other than their intimate familiarity with useless and ephemeral trivia about their sometimes friends but mostly loose associates.
The world is facing more and more problems ... exponential inter-relationships between these problems will at some point overwhelm us ... and smart people are figuring out how to steal money from grandparents on wall street or how to better allow you to tell everyone you ever bumped into in life that you got a new refridgerator.
Path dependency is very real and we may come to a point where we can't solve the important problems anymore even if we want to or need to.
I'd agree with you on most of this except the oil part; the reason the government doesn't invest in alternative energy is because reliance on oil is necessary to make the petro-dollar framework work - if alternative energy existed, nobody would buy dollar-based oil units from the middle east, and therefore nobody would need to negotiate from a position of weakness with the U.S. in business transactions because their nations needed dollars to buy oil. No need for oil = no need for dollars = dollars backed by nada = America's primary industry (dollar production) = instantly useless = we're suddenly very, very poor and weak. In other words, your frustrations are valid but it's done on purpose until the people who tell the government what to do and how to do it can figure out "the next big thing" in keeping the world under control via financial frameworks. Right now it's still the petro-dollar, so alternative energy will at best be unsupported, if not suppressed via regulation, buyouts, patent-blocks, etc.
As for the magazine bit, have you tried the economist? It really is a misnomer ... it has more to do with the issues you want to focus on.
>> One of the memes constantly reinforced here at hn is pushing the envelope.
edw519, this is not by any means a personal attack on you and I admire your appreciation for the general value that this place gives you. But I gotta call this one out - sorry.
Reinforced. Really? How is this reinforced? In my experience pushing the envelope is barely tolerated, and then only if done superficially or regarding trivial issues.
For example, as another incarnation (yamada) I countered one of pg's "go forth and conquer, there's no risk" assertions back in I think april/may 07 with a simple post that a variety of macro variables were purposely allowed to develop in such a way by the powers that be that would result in a not-too-distant economic malaise that would be not only much larger than any recession any HN'rs had ever experienced, but also of a fundamentally different nature and so not lending itself to the standard and known (and thus immediately applicable) cures.
I even went out on a limb and said there was a very real possibility that the next 10 years or so for the U.S., once the S#$% hit the fan, may resemble Japan's lost decade (plus) since it fell apart in the 90s.
I put forth some verifiable things that would not take a rocket science intellect to connect into a likely scenario.
I got close to 100 karma points within hours (that being my first ever post) back when karma point accumulation algorithms didn't exist yet, only to watch all my karma magically disappear in tandem with pg issuing one-liner retorts to EACH and EVERY single comment I had made on any topic whatsoever on any day on any subject. They all disappeared.
Pushing the envelope? Seriously?
Seems obvious now, in retrospect.
But keep in mind I put this all out there in spring of 2007 before anyone here even heard of mortgage backed securities or credit default swaps or what have you.
I'd say that was pushing the envelope back in 07. You know, ahead of it actually happening.
What was reinforced for me? Nothing - my account was deleted. All because I held conflicting (and eventually to be proven correct) economic views of the near future.
Oh ... btw ... I won't name names but to the two gentlemen who referred to me as a "paranoid lunatic with baseless reasoning" and ... let's see ... what was it, a "quasi-logical conspiracy bot" ... how's the economy doing these days? Not so good? The government/industry rallying around to fix it? Ha! Told you so! Nya nya nya nya nya nya! Epic nya nya for me! Global, internationally-spanning nya nya for me! Worth more than all the karma points on HN combined!
Thank you! Your rare sense of humor more than counterbalances the dime-a-dozen downvotes that have yet again stripped me of run at a 100 karma points on this, my ... 8th(?) YC account!
Yes. They are running scared of the growing threat of the Ylluminati. But since they have 100% of all the deals, they also seem to co-invest(?!?).
These anxious (yet all-powerful) group of angels and this unstoppable new seed-stage prominence. They form a closed loop. A loop closed off to venture capitalists and angels not at that meeting ... which is basically everybody.
Except Michael. He got away with his life intact and lived to warn us all.
Actually, I don't know what's scarier - the supposed collusion or the subtle dread that Y Combinator is supposed to evoke in my mind as I ponder the possibility of this event being true.
If it is true - maybe we should be side with these poor angels and help them before it's too late.
To paraphrase Woodrow Wilson, "Since I entered (angel investing), I have chiefly had (angel investor's) views confided to me privately. Some of the biggest men in the (Valley), in the Field of (IT) and (Venture Capital), are afraid of something. They know that there is a power somewhere so organized, so subtle, so watchful, so interlocked, so complete, so pervasive, that they better not speak above their breath when they speak in condemnation of it."
That something ... is Y Combinator.
Um ... no. The dark side doesn't suit you, Y Combinator.
Please stop.
I'm sorry. Maybe I've had too many beers tonight. But this is the kind of scenario that only comes out of the mind of a silicon valley PR firm.
(please don't downvote me too much ... I'd like to get above 100 karma points just once for a change! Noooo!)
Well, that depends. If they have nothing to do with YC, then you may be correct. But then again it would be unlikely that they would only single out YC by name at such a meeting. Or any meeting. If, on the other hand they are co-investors with YC, which they must be since according to this scenario between them they see "100%" of the deals, then their "collusion" against YC would be a rather amateurish attempt to close the loop between them and a newly-prominent YC, made all the more so now that this "leaked" news item highlights just how much of a player YC is, as per the envy of all these angels.
I don't know. Maybe it happened, maybe it didn't. But I find it unlikely that such a group, if they had to name one institution by name at such a risky meeting, would name YC and not, say, KPCB.
If I have an investing club and we come to define an investment approach, say, what stocks we like and what we think they should be valued at, are we colluding to price fix the market? If I think a company is over priced and I am in charge of executing trades for my investing club, whose members unanimously agreed not to buy the stock in question until it fell down say, $20 more in price - are we colluding? Yes. Colluding to price fix? No. We're simply colluding not to participate in the buy side. That may or may not lead to sellers slowly changing their asking price. But that's a two-way street. I don't see the illegality according to anti-trust. Now if every major instututional house/hedge/mutual/pension fund that owned that stock got together and colluded to refuse to SELL us any stock until we agreed to their higher price, that I understand is illegal. They are fixing the price literally. But I don't see how us refusing to participate in a transaction on the buy side is illegal whether we have 5 members or 5 million.
Saying that the angels are colluding to price fix buys into Michael's assertion that "together, the men in that room account for nearly 100% of all angel deals". That means that their "deals" are the commodity in question, and they are free to do as they wish. If it's their money, then it's hard to make the claim that their money is the market. There's certainly more money in the world than theirs.
IANAL(E), but this scenario would seem to be more of a concern if startups in Silicon valley got together over dinner to deny deals that didn't offer similar terms and prices in dollars for securities of all startups represented at said dinner simultaneously.
As for angels fixing the "price of their money" I don't understand how antitrust applies to this anymore than it would to, say, how LIBOR is determined.
If antitrust applies to colluding on the dollar amount to be paid OUT instead of price asked for money coming in, then if I start a boycott of something (colluding to pay $0) am I guilty of violating antitrust laws?
As I understand it (not much, I admit), antitrust applies to goods and services, not cost of money. If antitrust applied to cost of money, the Federal Reserve would not exist since it's basically an extension of the member banks that make up its institutional board of directors (not board of governers). All they do is get together and fix the price of money to be printed and lent out to member banks.
Also, this whole "I stumbled in on a secret meeting of powerful men conspiring to start a revolution" thing is somewhat suspect; throughout history this gambit, if it actually happened that way, is usually either desperate grab at 15 minutes of fame (which seems unlikely given Michael's popularity), an attempt to gain instant credibility on some esoteric but useful new subject ("I was the only outsider privvy to what happened there, so you can trust me") or, unfortunately, a cynical move feigned by the men in the room to inspire hasty and possibly faulty reactionary stances by the supposed target of their "envy".
I could be wrong though. I just can't believe guys who are careful enough to get to such a position in life would all simultaneously get so careless. On the same day. In the same place.
I find this somewhat dubious; I wasn't there, but if I was one of those guys, I'm not sure I'd continue the "evil meeting" after Michael stumbled in uninvited. If he came after the meeting ended, why weren't they all "just about to leave."
Having said that, I'm sorry if my confusion gives a way my ignorance of the subject, but are these angels selling anything to a marketplace? I thought angels invested their money. If that's the case, aren't they colluding to the terms of their buying, as a group? Or at least to loosely manage the terms of buying? If that is illegal, why does it apply to angel investing but not, say, Groupon? What I don't understand is what is their "price" that they are colluding to "fix"? I thought antitrust was for the collusion for the price asked, not price willing to pay.
Anybody else disturbed by the increasing array of technological options to de-evolve into a passive herd-cow, contributing nothing much more than a moo-tweet here and a moo-facebook update there?
Sure ... some will be quick to say it's optional ... but is it really when everyone from VCs to job-seekers feel obsessively-compulsively compelled to keep every-single-freakin' petty detail of every moment of every day "up-to-date", lest they be seen as "inactive" and therefore, to the superficial-yet-blessed-with-power types that seem to rule the lives of those of us who haven't as yet achieved total financial freedom, "irrelevant?"
I don't know ... I think some public display is necessary to highlight the dangers of this trend, if allowed to continue.
Can something like fb/twitter be hacked in the original sense of the word and played around with for a day, say, parodied?
Can the world log on to facebook for a day and see, say, a picture of a people doing something at a park with a message like, "Stop updating everybody and go out and do something with them before your lives pass you by!"?
I know meetup and stuff exist ... but I feel like the dark side of the mindless internet brain is sucking us all in and reducing us to simple binary micro processors of the "I liked the latest whatever/I didn't like it." type.
Nice. Now go to http://www.culturedcode.com, get a demo of "Things" and piggy back their award-winning design layout and make a web-based version of it. A good start is to one-up them and make sub-tasks within tasks or task notes, something they refuse to do for some reason.
But that's the point - since a potential poster of "I agree" would be adding no value whatsoever to the discussion, and may perhaps be the kind of person who posts "I agree" on multiple posts just to get points, every time he/she posts "I agree" they would lose out.
If you only had 50 words a day, posting "I agree" just cost you 4% of your daily ration of words. So chances are you wouldn't post "I agree" 10x just to try to increase your points.
Because YOU NEVER KNOW when a REALLY interesting post that you really, really want to comment on may come along and now you don't have enough words left to make the comment you wanted.
Which may inspire some sort of word-ration trading economy aspect to HN, ie, more "involved" people with many points may wish to "trade" points for word "credits" with newbies, thus balancing out the point spread a bit.
This would decrease the value of points associated with identities, but increase the value of words, thus making short, brief comments all the more valuable.
Maybe. I don't know. It would be a nice experiment I think.
So it would seem that creativity trumps the massive budgets and state of the art technology that are the hallmarks of just about all modern day SciFi flicks; hmmm ... wonder if that principle is somehow applicable to the startup scene?
We've seen where demand (Wall Street) driven acute focus on the short term has brought many companies today, ie, over-reliance on what was once popular but quickly hit the dust the second something slightly more trendy came along.
Of course, making so many rapid platform adjustments drives people into borrowing ... from Wall Street. But companies were told over and over by a barage of management consulting gurus that things were so fast and blurry, they couldn't afford to not keep borrowing more and more money to pump out more and more crap to keep up with the almost instantly changing trends.
On the other hand, look at apple - just over a decade ago they were considering bankruptcy, and instead of giving in to the urge to "do what would sell at the moment" they decided to ignore "expert advice" and instead invest in a simple but well-thought out development plan (iPad seems new but is really just a long-held fantasy of Newton II) and chart their own long-term course of doing what they wanted at a time when it wasn't certain there was going to be a long term for them.
Now of course everybody praises them for their determination to do what they wanted rather than catering to the fickle whims of the market.
Now look where they are. They define the market. They don't make what you want - they tell you what you want and make sure you get the hint that they know what you want even better than you do. And more and more people seem to agree.
I think that's what this article highlights - what will the world be like 5 years from now (more of the same) if facebook keeps getting more and more money to hire more talented people so they can figure out clever new ways to help people keep each other up to date on useless banalities that do nothing to advance anything other than their intimate familiarity with useless and ephemeral trivia about their sometimes friends but mostly loose associates.
The world is facing more and more problems ... exponential inter-relationships between these problems will at some point overwhelm us ... and smart people are figuring out how to steal money from grandparents on wall street or how to better allow you to tell everyone you ever bumped into in life that you got a new refridgerator.
Path dependency is very real and we may come to a point where we can't solve the important problems anymore even if we want to or need to.