While I agree with the spirit of the post, I think that there are better and worse times to start something new, and in retrospect 2014 seems like it was one of those worse times. The period from 2014--2024 was an era where the sheer gravity of the big tech platforms crushed out innovative startups left and right. People with an extreme focus on product polish could succeed, like Slack (est. 2013) and Discord (est. 2015), but it feels like most of the tech-sphere was either just working on half-hearted products towards an inevitable acqui-hire, or fervently trying to mainstream blockchain in a wishful attempt to create an entirely separate, more open ecosystem.
Yeah there are, but it's hard to know where you are in. So best just to have fun & create great stuff. If focused on making people's lives better you never really go wrong in the longterm.
The large IT companies are acting in ways that are completely against innovation and self-improvement. I expect them to freeze-up like the old giant corporations that they are.
But the change only started after the US decided to change its free-money-for-rich-people policy, and that was last year.
Well, a startup (ish…) is threatening Google, and VC money is much much tighter. So I’d say the Silicon Valley era is officially over. I hope y’all enjoyed it! I for one am a bit excited to see what’s the next big consumer idea to capture the zeitgeist.
I am looking forward to software devs being affordable to industries outside of martech and SaaS encumbents.
I think boutique software producs built in house for non-software businesses could provide immense automation and innovation to small/medium businesses. Not everything needs to be a SaaS, highly boutique software could cater for exactly one business and be a really holistic advantage.
Realistically, even if it started to happen, the giants would simply swallow it whole, as they've done very effectively in recent times.
Long gone are the times where a small Google could disrupt a field and debunk everything around it.
OpenAI is half owned by Microsoft already. Without those resources they wouldn't be able to realistically compete against Google. So saying they are a "small startup" for me doesn't compute.
In my view this is a bit of wishful thinking. Today we have so many giants with monopolies that realistically competing in their space can only be done with huge amounts of investment. The one resource that has been dried up recently.
OpenAI. In my eyes, Google’s power is entirely in a) assets, b) an army of geniuses, and c) a brand that lets it maintain ubiquitous monopoly status over search ads. Google does a lot of other cute stuff, and they desperately want another revenue stream, but the simple truth is that the entire core of the company’s whole operation is search ads. Display ads are on the way out due to privacy concerns, and OpenAI has damaged both b and c.
I think that c might be inverted. It's the economic power/performance of their search ads that let them maintain a brand rather than the other way around.
To clarify: I think the reason Google control search is that the public likes Google, so there's no political will to enforce the law. It's starting to crack now with the "google search is bad now" narrative, along with the classic "google is spying on me" -- together, they've emboldened Biden's justice department enough to bring multiple suits.
I think Google's attitude of free products (Gmail, Google Maps, Android, and Chrome especially) has won it insane amounts of goodwill, and that's all that's keeping them at the top. Having worked at Google, I find it incredibly hard to believe that they have any sort of fundamental technical advantage when it comes to building a search engine. I didn't work on search and obviously didn't look for the secret sauce, so that assessment is based on company culture and attitude alone.
The last thing Slack had was an extreme focus on polish. As a chat system, it's hardly functional and far less so than irc which came before. Slack managed to sell chat to big corporations, that was its innovation.
2013 was a great time to join in the fray, I think the clarifying point is that you are working on the machine, you are not embodying the success or failure of the machines of that time.
