If you're a small team with limited runway, you can't simply decide to disrupt an entire industry. That's a huge undertaking, and a hopelessly vague one. What you can do is bite off a small piece of the problem, find some customers who really want to give you money, and iterate. Once you have a proven track record and solid revenues, you can aim higher.
Once upon a time, VCs didn't insist on taking baby steps, and would fund people who wanted to "revolutionize the grocery industry." That led to disasters like Webvan, and the first dotcom crash. For a good history of how Webvan bit off more than it could chew, see Four Steps to the Epiphany. For some online overviews, see:
There are complete industries built on creating zero value for the world (investment banking).
Maybe he's watched one too many Oliver Stone movies, but I don't think he understands the importance of investment banking. While SV VC's provide capital to startups on a comparatively small scale, investment banks provide capital to businesses on a much larger scale. Love 'em or hate 'em, they do provide a much needed service to our economy.
Depends on the area. Many banks act as middlemen for OTC trades that could and should be on an exchange. They purposely scuttle public exchanges because it would eliminate their lucrative fees.
I appreciate his sentiment and especially his motivation, but I'm not entirely sure everyone who is setting out to build an app must make the strict distinction between changing the world and not changing it. This borders on being an either/or fallacy - who's to say that you can't just build something for personal enjoyment and THEN watch it grow bigger and change the world?
Disruption needs to be driven from industry knowledge. Certainly technology will be the major enabler of disruption, and may be the catalyst to disruptive ideas, but it industry insiders know where to make the changes and how to achieve acceptance.
So raising your hand and offering to build the tech is not the hard part. The hard part is finding those insiders who know every detail of the industry, but do not buy into the status quo.
The argument is largely subjective. For one person, making the world a better place is achieved by spending more time with the family to raise good kids that can improve upon their parent's success and keep building.
To others, it's creating something like Paypal or Square.
To another, it's Kiva.
Lastly, as another commenter said, you need money and time. You can buy time with more money, so let's say you just need money. Apps can be used to get that money.
I agree with the sentiment here completely, but sadly, there's almost zero support for true disruption these days from Silicon Valley.
FaceCash disrupts the credit card companies and banks. Not a single VC has offered a term sheet to date. (I'm not necessarily upset about this, but it's an interesting fact.) Students would generally rather work for Facebook or Google where they can make more money in a summer. Industry conferences don't want to hear from the people working on the hardest problems; they want to hear from the people who have made the most money.
There are some real systemic problems here that, if they don't eventually get worked out, will end up keeping us locked into a steadily declining system in a number of industries.
I don't know enough details about your or Square's technology and business, but every time I see you complain about how no one supports true disruption and even the cool new startups are doing the same old thing, I remember this video by Sean Murphy on technology adoption:
It's a good video and an interesting graphical representation of the problem I hadn't seen before. It also helps explain why so many startups work on small issues rather than large ones. Thanks for sharing it!
Unfortunately, what it doesn't explain is the hidden cost that such an approach has, when repeated indefinitely, on the greater context of the Valley's infrastructure and incentive structure. Investors today simply are not rewarding risk.
No offense, Aaron, but I would be interested to know what VCs may think about you given your public opinion and battle with Facebook.
E.g. I would be very interested to know if you had been blacklisted or black-sheeped at least, given your history and vocal public statements on matters.
Personally, I am rooting for your success - I jsut really want to know what back-room whispers may be saying about you, and people like you, who dont blindly worship the facebook.
This definitely fails the HN commenting guidelines. I agree that the OP is wrong on this point, but calling him an idiot doesn't add anything to this discussion. If you felt so strongly against his point, you should illustrate why he is so wrong with your comment. Don't just insult him.
Ok, fine, the insult was not necessary, but I flagged the post for being a piece of trash that I hope never to see the like of on HN.
The OP is not deserving of a reply on the basis of this post. It is uninformed tripe that belongs on the reddit/r/teabaggers forum or some such lowly place.
How this kind of trash gets 24 points is beyond me. Who are the people upvoting this?
I will also add that the account which submitted this is only 2 hours old, obviously created just to submit this piece of crap.
If you can clarify why this post is a "piece of trash", it would help me understand how to write better articles. I already changed my post from "zero" value to "arbitrary" value to make it more clear. I also linked to the Rolling Stone article for people that want to dive deeper into the topic. And yes, I shouldn't have generalized an entire industry and refer actually to a specific piece. It's also my opinion, which a lot of people may agree/disagree with it.
Apologies for the overreaction earlier. I did react a bit insultingly. It was an irritable reaction to a "stock statement" that I associate with idiots, which wasn't really called for in this context.
The stock statement in question is the dismissal of an enormous and critical industry as "value-less".
You link to a Rolling Stones article (by Matt Taibbi, who is a controversial journalist, who panders to the pseudo-libertarian crowds on reddit) which attacks Goldman Sachs for manipulating the US Fed (a fair point), and you use that as a justification for condemning investment banking as a whole.
Investment banking is a huge collection of professions which generally assists with one primary purposes: helping companies raise money. To dismiss that as valueless is clearly wrong. Surely, if anyone understands the value of being able to raise money, it must be startup founders. Investment banking exists to enable large corporations to raise money.
Some other purposes of investment banking include: hedging against risks (via derivates, for example, which you also dismiss), providing more advanced financial instruments (fyi, options, which you use to pay your employees, are derivatives too - and they wouldn't exist if investment bankers hadn't thought them up), market research (which has provided dubious value in the past, but that is an indictment of the global mega-banks, not of the research function, which is essential), market making (essential to provide a fluid, liquid market where people can actually exit), and many others.
When I first loaded up your site, it displayed with no CSS template, and looked like a craigslist post (I did not initially check the URL), and I checked the poster, and it was created 2 hours ago for the clear purpose of submitting this story, and it had a disproportionate number of upvotes for the weak point it was making, and it also made the above generalisation which, in my mind, categorised you directly as a reddit-style "omg banking is evil" type.
That led me (wrongly) to lump you in with the "idiots". Again, I apologise for that, it was an incorrect and rash overreaction - but some of the points above still stand. Hopefully now you understand my thinking better, though.
@swombat Gotcha. That makes sense. I originally wrote the post in 20 minutes after watching "The Inside Job" so that's probably why it seems like I'm one of the "reddit-style omg banking is evil" type."
Yes, I wrote such a broad generalization, which I will definitely not include in future posts. So, thanks for the clarification. Learn something new everyday.
Will look into the CSS. Have no idea why it didn't load for you?
It strikes me as ironic that you, as a relatively established member of HN, feel the need to resort to personal insults and general snarkiness in arguing that this article does not belong on HN.
I agree with you on the quality of the article and the simplistic reasoning by the author in reply to your comment, but at least he is showing some civility, as per HN's guidelines, which cannot be said of your comments in this thread.
Funny, others are downvoting the "snip" comments as they are - if I'd deleted them (thus leaving a weird, broken-looking conversation), they couldn't! Oh well.
Once upon a time, VCs didn't insist on taking baby steps, and would fund people who wanted to "revolutionize the grocery industry." That led to disasters like Webvan, and the first dotcom crash. For a good history of how Webvan bit off more than it could chew, see Four Steps to the Epiphany. For some online overviews, see:
http://articles.sfgate.com/2001-07-12/technology/17606161_1_...
http://www.beyondvc.com/2010/10/dont-build-an-empire-overnig...
Today, you're still allowed to dream big. But you're expected to start small, and build from there.