Bustr Bensn

Disrupt, Disruption, and the Nobility of the Tech Scene

Great post, Rick. I agree with the first 2 movements, but think the 3rd (quoted below) is far from over.

To me, though, education, health care, the environment and government are probably the big ones. The ones where making a difference would truly make a difference. But the thing about those is that these dragons which we ponder battling are exponentially larger, more entrenched and powerful than Comcast, RIAA et al. Is it doable? Is it possible to topple these? Sure, probably, right? But is it possible to disrupt or topple these in the manner in which we have become accustomed? Are $50,000 angel rounds and multiple small rounds and series b, c, d, or h the way to go? Can three people and $50k disrupt 200 years of education processes, compromises, agreements, history, cruft, bloat and weight? I don’t see any reason, academically, why they couldn’t, but it also isn’t clear to me how the currently-en-vogue processes of forming a tech startup are helpful.

Read the rest.

I don’t quite understand the problem being posed in the question, “Can three people and $50k disrupt 200 years of education processes, compromises, agreements, history, cruft, bloat and weight?” How is number or age of processes, history, bloat etc at all an advantage for these industries?

Startups are EXACTLY the thing that are going to disrupt these industries. They are focused on a particular problem, have the flexibility to throw themselves at it time and time again, trial and error style, learning insanely fast, and eventually finding a solution that can scale up and replace the old powers.

Google Health failed for lots of reasons… but one of them was NOT because they were too small. They probably cared a lot less about the problem than a startup would. They already have their life line, they got bored of this problem. Because they could. But there are a ton of people who are NOT bored with this problem (and other problems like education and government), who think about it constantly, and who have scrappiness, energy, passion, and a very high tolerance of ambiguity, risk, and fear of failure.

This is how it has always happened, and how it will continue to happen. New scrappy rising powers replace old crufty powers. Technology is just accelerating the life cycle of incumbent powers. Powers will not live as long in the future, and there will be more of them. In Kevin Kelly’s words, the technium is evolving faster ways to evolve, and the changes moves in a very directed way. These old, broken, backwards industries are dinosaurs, startups are mammals, and technology is the asteroid.

That’s my religion, at least.

Source: rickwebb