This post seems to be in response to the recent Mighty app.
To me, the main problem lies in what VCs think pass as 'tech'. The mighty app website made it sound it like it was some novel revolutionary app.
I was hoping it was really something clever like what the Cloudflare people or even game streaming companies do. But nope.
It's significantly worse: it's literally slapping together existing tech and calling it novel. And worse, simple security/privacy seem to have taken a backseat as if there is some innovative performance-oriented solution being prioritized here.
There doesn't seem to be any tech. But reading through the website, one might be mistakenly led to believe it is something of a hard problem to solve. In fact the person running the show admits to how they pivoted from a Windows VM company to running just Chrome. This is reality distortion at best. Running an Electron app to stream a live Chrome VM session seems like a CS401 style project.
This is similar to Uber or AirBNB: the value add is in slapping together some quick existing tech with the main 'innovation' being the funding system or creatively working around regulatory/legal hurdles.
I find it amusing and sad that there isn't any new tech nor even a sound financial plan for a lot of these companies (nor even a so-called moat beyond just siloing their first mover advantage behind legal paperwork).
It seems as though the 90s VCs funded actual technically sound, innovative, "pushing the envelope yet making money" companies.
These days it's a popularity and ego matching competition among VCs and founders. This isn't tech. This is throwing money at a problem inefficiently and seeing what sticks. The people that work in this space are rather uninspiring, technically demotivated but financially motivated group.
I hate to think that this is the new 'tech' world that was promised. I don't even want to start on Jonathan/Casey comments as they are obviously right but that's besides the point here.
Makes me wonder if Mighty or Clubhouse (or even Lambda school/Coinbase) are the stellar examples a budding CS student is going to look up to: which is sad and makes me really wish for the 90s VCs to come back and fund more technically/financially sound and inspiring companies.
Unpopular opinion: the use of "tech" or "high tech" to describe many of today's tech companies is a misnomer.
For me, a tech company is a company that leverages advances in applied sciences and mathematics (computer science included) to create new, innovative solutions.
While there are certainly companies that are innovating in fundamental technologies and making that a cornerstone of their businesses, the vast majority of tech companies are little more than conventional businesses with some digital business automation plumbing. Innovative business models are still innovation - don't get me wrong - but they're not technology innovation.
It made sense to call e-business "tech" companies when the web was fresh and new and everyone was innovating, but these days, very few are pushing the envelope on the technology side. It's pretty well accepted that any business needs electronic technologies to work now: at what point do we stop calling every company that builds an app tied to a database a "tech" company and just call them an "[insert vertical here] business"?
I definitely agree, but with one exception: a fair amount of these companies have reached such a scale that they actually have to invent or at least develop new tech in order to run their business. Facebook and Twitter, for example, aren't primarily "tech" companies, but because they operate at such an insane scale, they regularly develop new tech that allows them to continue and grow. So the tech part is more or less vertical integration - not their primary business, but also definitely not negligible in terms of innovation.
I guess the question is: how close does technology R&D need to be to the core business to be a "tech" company? I don't have a good answer. Major automakers dump tons of money into R&D, but we'd never call them tech companies.
The VCs are just following the money. We're at the tail end of the economic boom brought on by computers. Until we have another paradigm-shifting scientific discovery, computers will be used to more efficiently match up existing assets (AirBnB) while serving ads and content that decays our social bonds/infrastructure (Facebook).
If there was less money in the system a lot of these quasi-innovative companies would die, or not even get off the ground. But there is tons and it is leading to the misallocation of a great amount of time, energy, and intelligence - at the cost of future generation's standard of living.
Paul Graham addressed this in his previous essay "How People Get Rich Now":
The best way to envision what happened is to imagine a pond with a crust of ice on top. Initially the only way from the bottom to the surface is around the edges. But as the ice crust weakens, you start to be able to punch right through the middle.
The edges of the pond were pure tech: companies that actually described themselves as being in the electronics or software business. When you used the word "startup" in 1990, that was what you meant. But now startups are punching right through the middle of the ice crust and displacing incumbents like retailers and TV networks and car companies.
That "pond" metaphor only works if anyone and everyone getting rich anywhere in the world all happen to be doing so at the companies that are popular topics of conversation within the Valley bubble.
Otherwise, what the fuck is he even going on about?
Wait, Mighty App is just a remote server running Chrome and then sending it to an on-device app? Correct me if I'm wrong, but that sounds so dumb. I thought it was at least some recompiled version of chrome optimized for performance.
To me, the main problem lies in what VCs think pass as 'tech'. The mighty app website made it sound it like it was some novel revolutionary app.
I was hoping it was really something clever like what the Cloudflare people or even game streaming companies do. But nope.
It's significantly worse: it's literally slapping together existing tech and calling it novel. And worse, simple security/privacy seem to have taken a backseat as if there is some innovative performance-oriented solution being prioritized here.
There doesn't seem to be any tech. But reading through the website, one might be mistakenly led to believe it is something of a hard problem to solve. In fact the person running the show admits to how they pivoted from a Windows VM company to running just Chrome. This is reality distortion at best. Running an Electron app to stream a live Chrome VM session seems like a CS401 style project.
This is similar to Uber or AirBNB: the value add is in slapping together some quick existing tech with the main 'innovation' being the funding system or creatively working around regulatory/legal hurdles.
I find it amusing and sad that there isn't any new tech nor even a sound financial plan for a lot of these companies (nor even a so-called moat beyond just siloing their first mover advantage behind legal paperwork).
It seems as though the 90s VCs funded actual technically sound, innovative, "pushing the envelope yet making money" companies.
These days it's a popularity and ego matching competition among VCs and founders. This isn't tech. This is throwing money at a problem inefficiently and seeing what sticks. The people that work in this space are rather uninspiring, technically demotivated but financially motivated group.
I hate to think that this is the new 'tech' world that was promised. I don't even want to start on Jonathan/Casey comments as they are obviously right but that's besides the point here.
Makes me wonder if Mighty or Clubhouse (or even Lambda school/Coinbase) are the stellar examples a budding CS student is going to look up to: which is sad and makes me really wish for the 90s VCs to come back and fund more technically/financially sound and inspiring companies.