We can't possibly have run out of consumer app ideas in a decade or two, right?
And those are just off the top of my head
- Slack: 2013
- Zoom: 2011
- TikTok: 2016
Based on "Initial Release" on Wikipedia.
For every small startup trying to build innovative robotics to solve a healthcare or agriculture problem, there's 10 startups getting 100x funding because they figured out how to put jpegs on the blockchain and the last guys that figured out how to do that had a nice exit...
I forgot what the economists call this but it's the characterization of housing market. The value of your current house is determined by the last few local sales and little else. All of the startups using the current in Vogue technology feel like that...
Microsoft fumbled Skype and nobody was putting together convenient apis on top of IRC...
That’s all it is. That’s part of why Silicon Valley is so clout chasing and cargo culty. It’s entirely due to investor pressure to get immediate returns. Immediate returns mean you have to follow whatever the current hype is.
Is it IoT, crypto, nft, Uber for X, self driving, etc. etc.? That’s what you do. You follow whatever the hype is and bail after you get your desired return.
There’s no desire for a sustainable business. There’s a desire for other investors to be a sucker that holds the bag at the end.
How much easier is it to manage and operate technology in 2025 than it was in 2005 or 2015? I have three core tech teams with 12-18 people. I’d need 500+ to do what I do today in 2005, assuming the tech could do it.
Breakthrough B2C products don’t appear annually. But everything is better. Apple Maps can estimate my travel time for a 300 mile drive with 5 minutes. I bought a last minute flight to Rome last summer knowing nothing about Rome or speaking any Italian and I did fine, thanks to iPhone and the mobile app ecosystem.
I think about it quite often and there is a LOT of apps out there, and really, humans don't need that much to be happy.
> There’s a desire for other investors to be a sucker that holds the bag at the end.
I agree with everything you said except for these two sentences. If you take VC funding to build a sustainable business frankly you’re doomed from the get go. That’s not what a VC wants and it won’t get you funded. There are other routes to that.
What VCs want is if 99 of those startups fail, to be holding the Airbnb, uber, Anthropic at the end. Because holding that from the beginning will make you more money than any other option.
Most VCs doing 99 investments for the 1 big are akin to YC. They’re not doing series C for $100m and expecting 99 of those to fail. They’re expecting to get a return somewhat shortly back.
Holding the stock isn’t helpful for a VC unless they’re going to be using some financial mechanism for leverage - which means they’ve given it up for the other institution who now essentially owns it. A lot of these stocks aren’t giving you meaningful dividends. You have to sell or give up some form of control on them to be a successful VC. How else would you continue to invest?
There’s more music out there than there’s ever been. More tv shows and movies than I could possibly watch, but I still find new things to watch and listen to.
But tech? Maybe other than my Robot vacuum, I don’t think there’s anything in the last 5 years I’ve seen that I’ve felt is going to make my life easier or better. Which seems odd because the pace that technology seems to be improving only seems to be accelerating. We can do more than we ever could before, but it feels like the appetite to improve things is no longer there.
But there were companies shipping DVDs before Netflix, and also companies streaming movies online before them. So really a marketing / operations / distribution revolution.
It’s popular because they figured out and unbelievably low-friction method to get users into the ecosystem. Being able to do everything online without installing anything was huge at the time. You had an account in like 2 clicks. THAT was a thing of beauty.
Google was initially revolutionary just because their search engine actually worked incredibly well back before people started trying to game their rankings