After the end of the startup era

[Haris]

After the end of the startup era

The web boom of ~1997-2006 brought us Amazon, Facebook, Google, Salesforce, Airbnb, etc., because the Internet was the new new thing, and a handful of kids in garages and dorm rooms could build a web site, raise a few million dollars, and scale to serve the whole world. The smartphone boom of ~2007-2016 brought us Uber, Lyft, Snap, WhatsApp, Instagram, Twitter, etc., because the same was true of smartphone apps.

Because we’ve all lived through back-to-back massive worldwide hardware revolutions — the growth of the Internet, and the adoption of smartphones — we erroneously assume another one is around the corner, and once again, a few kids in a garage can write a little software to take advantage of it.

But there is no such revolution en route. The web has been occupied and colonized by big business; everyone already has a smartphone, and big companies dominate the App Store; and, most of all, today’s new technologies are complicated, expensive, and favor organizations that have huge amounts of scale and capital already.

So where does all this leave tech startups? Struggling, and probably hoping to be acquired by a larger company, ideally one of the Big Five. While some breakout startups will still doubtless arise, they’ll be far rarer than they were during the boom years.

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Good read.

 

[Asfas1000]

Thank you, really good read.

 

[Kuffy]

There is always a new thing on the way. One new trend that appears to be gaining momentum is alternative news and searching. With the controls and demonitisation that is going on in Youtube, Google and the "major" news channels, there is a massive opportunity for sites that are supported by surfers, rather than controlled by the deep state. Dtube and DuckDuckGo are two new arrivals. Then of course there s Bitcoin and the blockchain.