Basically, it all harks back to WWII and unlimited government spending on electronics (and related) R&D - financed based mostly on never before seen amounts of government debt. SV and all its firms stand on foundations laid by (very) big and (very) generous government.
Investors ant at least statistical certainty, meaning while they of course account for most of their venture companies to fail they want to at least be certain for them all as a group. They won't finance a "business" that is just experimental with no advance idea what the whole thing is even about. Because such basic research isn't a business.
I once worked for a startup that was eventually sold for a few hundred million (no I did not benefit from that). We got funded (by the tens of millions) - by Silicon Valley venture capital - because we were #2 in a market where the #1 just had an incredible IPO. We did exactly the same as the #1, and #1 also didn't actually do anything innovative, just a different version of what had already been in this world for decades, technology not all that superior to existing things, the changes were in the business model mostly. "Predictable" innovation.
Here's an example:
Imagine someone would try to get venture capital for a human-computer interface right into the brain. I'm taking about something out of a sci-fi movie, not based on the extremely basic steps we've thus far taken. Would they get funding? Never. It's tens of billions of investment and it's completely uncertain if it would take 10 or 100 years. This isn't a well-defined research project, this is very broad.
Now imagine a serious threat to the United States - war, and not just one of those little ones abroad. Would the US government fund such a crazy idea? Sure, just like they've done many times. They will throw (non-existing) billions at this and at many other crazy ideas without asking for potential monetary return.
While an investor wants a statistical chance that the overall portfolio has a positive monetary return, the government (at war) wants a statistical chance for a positive result - non-financial, not caring, actually expecting, that costs will by far exceed returns. If the stuff created in such an effort eventually creates businesses that's nice but not even part of the motivation. When they paid for the Manhattan project, the Norden bomb sight, or electronics and computing R&D they didn't stop to think about if that would ever create a financial return.
An interesting article, but I would say this is one that is better showcased to, say, a primary school audience rather than the HN crowd perhaps? The writing style and concepts were a little too simplistic and lacked the depth I would expect from the publications I normally see linked on here.
Note: But even for a younger audience, I would do some serious editing of the text (e.g. misuse of "concurred" instead of "conquered" etc.) before publication.
I noticed the simplistic language used too. But I found it refreshing as the author is able to cite more external material while keeping the reader's (or at least, my) attention to the core message. No distracting jargon or flowery language were employed. But it could also be how my simple mind functions too..
Heh, that quite stood out to me, partly, not because it is so wrong but because it is so right. The part about "The menace to our people of vehicles of this type hurtling through our streets and along our roads and poisoning the atmosphere would call for prompt legislative action" seems like such contemporary issues I would have been amazed if someone would have foretold their importance back then.
The vast majority of products that people don't understand and believe to be useless are in fact useless.
The first time I used Google I knew it was amazing and never used altavista again. When Facebook came to my campus it spread like wildfire.
These stories are quite interesting but at the same time what are they suggesting? An investor wants you to spend your whole life chasing a dream because they don't care if it fails and get paid if it succeeds. If you love doing something, do it regardless of what people think. But don't let an investor convince you to waste years working on something that nobody wants because that is what all successful entrepreneurs do. In a few cases it works out but the vast majority of the time it doesn't.
I think you are missing the point, as the author states the same thing halfway in:
Things that are instantly adored are usually just slight variations over existing products.
It's not that every huge shift is also accompanied by a lengthy doldrums. Uu chose clear outliers-and yes while VC is predicated on outliers this post is actually a counter balance to what VC mostly decide on which is traction. So I'm not so cynical about this post because it's not saying " do what sales" and all the other typical VC tropes which are more in line with what you describe. Most successful entrepreneurs do something incremental so I think your analysis is wrong there as well.
The only problem I see with this post is that more than likely, they don't actually invest on this ethos so it's giving entrepreneurs with vision a false hope.
> Things that are instantly adored are usually just slight variations over existing products.
But that doesn't apply to Google. Although there were many, many search engines when Google first appeared, none worked like it -- in fact, none worked, at all.
Google worked from day 1 and everyone who used it, saw it very clearly.
On a technical level that might be true, but to the average user I think the edge google had over its competitors was that its product was vastly superior. How they built better search results was a matter of implementation, while the end product didn't stray far fom the public idea of a search engine.
The point is people understood what Google was from the get-go, because they had used similar products to serve their needs before.
On the other hand, the invention of the internet was not immediately popular because it was so different that people couldn't relate it to their prior experiences.
What was different about Google eventually made it popular, but it also got a lot of people to avoid them over the lack of control of the query. It was not nearly as clear cut initially.
Google was initially much better on simple queries, but not competitive with "expert" users who knew how to use Altavista's query operators properly, or who were familiar with metasearch engines when looking for very specific material.
Google succeeded because they were similar enough that it was easy to try them, but met resistance because they were different enough that for a portion of the user base it was not clear that the advantages they had on simple queries was worth it.
The superiority of their approach first became "universally" clear as the number of pages exploded and tweaking your queries became an exercise in frustration, coupled with the explosion of users not familiar with how to compose a more specific query.
I know a lot of people - myself included - who took a long time to switch to Google from the first time we tried it because other search engines worked better for us at the time.
This too is a common pattern: Early adopters get so caught up in specifics of early products that when an evolution of the concept arrives that has profound impact on usability, it gets met with a shrug or dismissed because it doesn't fit into the usage patterns those early adopters have learnt in order to overcome the limitations of earlier products.
Often something will look like a step back for the expert users making up the bulk of users of its predecessors (because you either become an expert user, or give up), and first gains traction by expanding the market to users for whom the features who look like flaws to the former group is what makes the product usable to them at all.
E.g. I remember early PDA adopters being dismissive of the iPhone on-screen keyboard, because it was "pointless": Grafitti worked so much better on a small screen.... for those of us who had spent a couple of years or more learning how to write fast with it. For everyone else, the iPhone keyboard made it usable in ways Palm devices weren't.
Oh yes, sort of like the Internet was an obvious instant hit! IIRC the Internet/web/etc slow cooked in a Crockpot for several decades before it became commercially viable. Somebody please correct me if I am missing something.
A lot of the adoption curve comes from the economics too. The same thing 10 times cheaper is a revolution itself.
We had 3D printers in the 80s, but 3D printers starting becoming a lot cheaper only in the past ~5 years.
1870 PV cells were a pretty piss poor energy source, the real revolution happened in the last 10 years when they started to become an economic competitor.
> We had 3D printers in the 80s, but 3D printers starting becoming a lot cheaper only in the past ~5 years.
Unfortunately, SLA-based printers mostly suck and, unlike most software things, can't actually evolve to get better due to material constraints.
However, now that the SLS patents have expired, we're starting to see useful 3D printers at useful price points. Being able to print a robust plastic (nylon) and not having to worry about creating supports for narrow parts are big deals. Of course, SLS is a little less hobbyist friendly because of the powder handling.
I think the article is complaining too much... True, it takes 30 years for an idea to grow to something useful, but that is not because nobody cares (or think you are nuts) - the idea just hasn't gotten to a final, usable form. Carter can put solar cells on the Whitehouse, but to no use. The cells will, compared to today's solar cells, hardly generate any power and cost way too much. Same for the car, the personal computer, the mobile phone and the plane: there was simply no market and no use for the average Joe to actually buy it...
Pretty much. It seems more like someone complaining that their VC driven, get rich quick, startup scheme petered out before they could cash in. And is looking for external scapegoats rather than asking if the scheme really had a chance in the first place.
That's right. The main reason for the drop in 3D printer prices is a key patent expiring in 2009. That's when the revolution began for those not already in manufacturing.
It's true that innovation process used to take a long time. See the story of the telegraph for example, which was clearly a breakthrough, but took half a century to be adopted (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Victorian_Internet).
They were sending images by telegraph in the 1860s but it didn't catch on. Admittedly the ye olde faxes had to be specially prepared, it couldn't reproduce a printed image directly. But still, amazing how long it took images to routinely travel electronically.
What I don't understand about the telegraph, is why it never evolved further. Surely a primitive machine could tap out morse code (or something like it), and decode it, much faster than a human operator? And surely there was demand for this, given the very high costs of sending telegraphs. So high they were inaccessible to the average person.
And then once you have a machine that can do this, well you can start to consider routing, and telegraphing straight into homes, and having telegraph services that store information that can be access remotely...
It took until the telephone to reach the average person's home. And telephones are much more sophisticated than just sending blips over a wire. They had much higher bandwidth. And there was much greater complexity involved in wiring up everyone's house, then a crude automated routing telegraph machine would require, I think.
It did evolve quite a bit. There were machines to automatically encode/decode messages. You could even plug a keyboard to it. Some people (Morse himself) had such a device at home.
Routing was a thing, but there were some limitations of how many communications could happen at the same time on the same wire (Baud was the one who actually worked on that), making scaling difficult.
The important thing to understand is at the end of the century, as bandwidth, infrastructure scaling, reliability were all getting better, the phone happened, as a logical next step. The telegraph never made is as a personal device because the infrastructure and the science of the telegraph reached a point where phones were possible.
Morse for original mechanism, Baud for scaling, Bell to use voice instead of beeps.
I don't disagree with the thesis of the article for inventions that were destined to be successful but I think it exhibits a strong sense of surviorship bias in predicting anything contemporary to be in the same league. I think transformative inventions like airplanes or index funds can by definition only be defined in retrospect and the odds that anything contemporary can be predicted to turn out the same way are slim. I wonder what a good order of magnitude would be for failed inventions vs successful ones, maybe 10000:1?
The 7 step process shows us how the majority of people are "dumb". And by dumb, I mean they lack the creative ability to look forward and imagine how a technology can change the world.
Those of us who are not suffering that disability should not feel guilty for our capabilities, but we should recognize that we are intellectually superior, because we should be ruling the world from every corner, not them. Sadly, many of them are the ones running governments and giant corporations.
All men may be created equal, but through different educational and parental environments, all men do not arrive at adulthood as equals.
The article's subtle implication that we are all changing the world but it'll take time for that change to be realized is truly arrogant and delusional.
Finally validates that my ideas that everyone has been saying are terrible, confusing and useless are infact world changing just as I have thought they are.
I don't like his Vanguard example. He's pointing to exponential growth and saying that for two hand-picked points, it appears as if nothing had changed.
That's sort of how exponential growth works. The growth in the most recent period makes all the other growth before it look trivial. I bet if he could zoom in on the '75 to '95 period he could plot the arrows in the same place and draw the same conclusion.
This is one reason I dislike the silicon valley and sf culture of "innovation". A lot of it is a variation on a well-known theme and the model is predicated on unsustainable hypergrowth followed by surviving until acquisition. Basically chasing fads and trends instead of doing anything truly innovative because the venture model can't follow through something that requires a decade of incubation.
What opened my eyes to where the true innovative roots of SV were planted was a lecture from the Computer History Museum in Mountain View (CA): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTC_RxWN_xo
Similarly, antibiotics languished until WW2 because it a right pain to mass produce. But with the war came effectively bottomless budgets, and so the needed R&D for mass production was bootstrapped.
The article is certainly interesting but it has the same trait as too many pop science books: it relies on selective anecdotal evidence to support their specific point.
I have a problem with this. I don't know if is ignorance by me or what is it. But AFAIK, most "truths" on diferent sciences are based purely on statistic evidence of a sample. Let's suppose that they do an study on why people cheat. They pick 100 random people on an university and do whatever they have to do to test them. Let's say 90 out of 100 cheat because they get bored. Then these scientist draw a conclusion and say "people cheat because they get bored". That's a very broad term.. and again, afaik is the same with other studies.
Is this just one way to do it or is it what every scientist do? How can you possibly englobe everybody to a cause for certain trait based on studying 100,1000, or even 100,000? I can't get my mind atound this.
I have a problem with this. I don't know if is ignorance by me or what is it. But AFAIK, most "truths" on diferent sciences are based purely on statistic evidence of a sample. Let's suppose that they do an study on why people cheat. They pick 100 random people on an university and do whatever they have to do to test them. Let's say 90 out of 100 cheat because they get bored. Then these scientist draw a conclusion and say "people cheat because they get bored". That's a very broad term.. and again, afaik is the same with other studies.
Is this just one way to do it or is it what every scientist do? How can you possibly englobe everybody to a cause for certain trait based on studying 100,1000, or even 100,000? I can't get my mind atound this.
>> no mention of the men who concurred (sic) the sky for the first time in human history.
Maybe that was the problem. They weren't the first to conquer the sky. People had been flying in hot air balloons for 120 years by that point. By 1903, getting people up into the sky was old-hat. Sure, they did it in a different way, but what they demonstrated was--strictly speaking--inferior to the technology that was already available. If you wanted to get up into the clouds in 1903, you weren't going to use a Wright Brothers machine that would only let you skip along the ground for a few minutes at a time, you'd use a hot air balloon and stick around for a while. Can people really be blamed for missing the fact that heavier-than-air flight would be able to travel much faster and farther than balloons?
The Wrights' first flight didn't change the world. Nor did photovoltaic cells in 1876; nor did 3D printing in 1989. And none of these inventions could change the world at the time, because they were little more than proofs of principle: They showed that something was possible, but they were not in fact usable.
Photovoltaic cells aren't becoming popular now because people are suddenly realizing that they exist; they're becoming popular because the technology has reached the point where the cells are cheap enough and efficient enough to be practical. The same goes for 3D printing, and the same went for the Wrights' aircraft: They received plenty of attention once they moved from the realm of curiosities to being useful inventions.
The title of this article should be "when you don't change the world and no one notices".
That may be one factor, but it seems like there's new technology for 3d printing announced every few months; I'm sure there is innovation happening and it's not just people sitting on their hands and waiting for the patents to expire.
Again i am not intimately familiar with 3d printing technology, but the timing of at least some of those announcements might be due to expiration of relevant patents, rather than the invention of new technology.
> It happened with the index fund – easily the most important financial innovation of the last half-century. John Bogle launched the first index fund in 1975. No one paid much attention to for next two decades.
That's in part because everyone was googly-eyed over managed funds thanks to Peter Lynch's 29% average annual return for the Magellan Fund from '77 to '90. Index funds didn't beat that dude.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 235 ms ] threadRC Planes and helicopter POV footage was great to enjoy on YouTube, but the learning curve was so immense that it kept the mainstream market away.
For true innovation to happen, what we need are brave investors.
> When innovation is measured generationally, results shouldn’t be measured quarterly.
Basically, it all harks back to WWII and unlimited government spending on electronics (and related) R&D - financed based mostly on never before seen amounts of government debt. SV and all its firms stand on foundations laid by (very) big and (very) generous government.
Investors ant at least statistical certainty, meaning while they of course account for most of their venture companies to fail they want to at least be certain for them all as a group. They won't finance a "business" that is just experimental with no advance idea what the whole thing is even about. Because such basic research isn't a business.
I once worked for a startup that was eventually sold for a few hundred million (no I did not benefit from that). We got funded (by the tens of millions) - by Silicon Valley venture capital - because we were #2 in a market where the #1 just had an incredible IPO. We did exactly the same as the #1, and #1 also didn't actually do anything innovative, just a different version of what had already been in this world for decades, technology not all that superior to existing things, the changes were in the business model mostly. "Predictable" innovation.
Here's an example:
Imagine someone would try to get venture capital for a human-computer interface right into the brain. I'm taking about something out of a sci-fi movie, not based on the extremely basic steps we've thus far taken. Would they get funding? Never. It's tens of billions of investment and it's completely uncertain if it would take 10 or 100 years. This isn't a well-defined research project, this is very broad.
Now imagine a serious threat to the United States - war, and not just one of those little ones abroad. Would the US government fund such a crazy idea? Sure, just like they've done many times. They will throw (non-existing) billions at this and at many other crazy ideas without asking for potential monetary return.
While an investor wants a statistical chance that the overall portfolio has a positive monetary return, the government (at war) wants a statistical chance for a positive result - non-financial, not caring, actually expecting, that costs will by far exceed returns. If the stuff created in such an effort eventually creates businesses that's nice but not even part of the motivation. When they paid for the Manhattan project, the Norden bomb sight, or electronics and computing R&D they didn't stop to think about if that would ever create a financial return.
Note: But even for a younger audience, I would do some serious editing of the text (e.g. misuse of "concurred" instead of "conquered" etc.) before publication.
This quote is a well-known hoax: http://www.snopes.com/history/document/horseless.asp
The first time I used Google I knew it was amazing and never used altavista again. When Facebook came to my campus it spread like wildfire.
These stories are quite interesting but at the same time what are they suggesting? An investor wants you to spend your whole life chasing a dream because they don't care if it fails and get paid if it succeeds. If you love doing something, do it regardless of what people think. But don't let an investor convince you to waste years working on something that nobody wants because that is what all successful entrepreneurs do. In a few cases it works out but the vast majority of the time it doesn't.
Things that are instantly adored are usually just slight variations over existing products.
It's not that every huge shift is also accompanied by a lengthy doldrums. Uu chose clear outliers-and yes while VC is predicated on outliers this post is actually a counter balance to what VC mostly decide on which is traction. So I'm not so cynical about this post because it's not saying " do what sales" and all the other typical VC tropes which are more in line with what you describe. Most successful entrepreneurs do something incremental so I think your analysis is wrong there as well.
The only problem I see with this post is that more than likely, they don't actually invest on this ethos so it's giving entrepreneurs with vision a false hope.
But that doesn't apply to Google. Although there were many, many search engines when Google first appeared, none worked like it -- in fact, none worked, at all.
Google worked from day 1 and everyone who used it, saw it very clearly.
Google was initially much better on simple queries, but not competitive with "expert" users who knew how to use Altavista's query operators properly, or who were familiar with metasearch engines when looking for very specific material.
Google succeeded because they were similar enough that it was easy to try them, but met resistance because they were different enough that for a portion of the user base it was not clear that the advantages they had on simple queries was worth it.
The superiority of their approach first became "universally" clear as the number of pages exploded and tweaking your queries became an exercise in frustration, coupled with the explosion of users not familiar with how to compose a more specific query.
I know a lot of people - myself included - who took a long time to switch to Google from the first time we tried it because other search engines worked better for us at the time.
This too is a common pattern: Early adopters get so caught up in specifics of early products that when an evolution of the concept arrives that has profound impact on usability, it gets met with a shrug or dismissed because it doesn't fit into the usage patterns those early adopters have learnt in order to overcome the limitations of earlier products.
Often something will look like a step back for the expert users making up the bulk of users of its predecessors (because you either become an expert user, or give up), and first gains traction by expanding the market to users for whom the features who look like flaws to the former group is what makes the product usable to them at all.
E.g. I remember early PDA adopters being dismissive of the iPhone on-screen keyboard, because it was "pointless": Grafitti worked so much better on a small screen.... for those of us who had spent a couple of years or more learning how to write fast with it. For everyone else, the iPhone keyboard made it usable in ways Palm devices weren't.
I certainly switched at the time but I thought it's first results were comparable to dogpile, which was my go-to search at the time.
Or investors.
We had 3D printers in the 80s, but 3D printers starting becoming a lot cheaper only in the past ~5 years.
1870 PV cells were a pretty piss poor energy source, the real revolution happened in the last 10 years when they started to become an economic competitor.
Unfortunately, SLA-based printers mostly suck and, unlike most software things, can't actually evolve to get better due to material constraints.
However, now that the SLS patents have expired, we're starting to see useful 3D printers at useful price points. Being able to print a robust plastic (nylon) and not having to worry about creating supports for narrow parts are big deals. Of course, SLS is a little less hobbyist friendly because of the powder handling.
Nowadays, the process might take a lot lot less time than before though (http://waitbutwhy.com/2015/01/artificial-intelligence-revolu...)
And also - let's remember that it's not because something goes through the first steps of this seven-step path that it will become a breakthrough.
And then once you have a machine that can do this, well you can start to consider routing, and telegraphing straight into homes, and having telegraph services that store information that can be access remotely...
It took until the telephone to reach the average person's home. And telephones are much more sophisticated than just sending blips over a wire. They had much higher bandwidth. And there was much greater complexity involved in wiring up everyone's house, then a crude automated routing telegraph machine would require, I think.
Routing was a thing, but there were some limitations of how many communications could happen at the same time on the same wire (Baud was the one who actually worked on that), making scaling difficult.
The important thing to understand is at the end of the century, as bandwidth, infrastructure scaling, reliability were all getting better, the phone happened, as a logical next step. The telegraph never made is as a personal device because the infrastructure and the science of the telegraph reached a point where phones were possible.
Morse for original mechanism, Baud for scaling, Bell to use voice instead of beeps.
Those of us who are not suffering that disability should not feel guilty for our capabilities, but we should recognize that we are intellectually superior, because we should be ruling the world from every corner, not them. Sadly, many of them are the ones running governments and giant corporations.
All men may be created equal, but through different educational and parental environments, all men do not arrive at adulthood as equals.
That's sort of how exponential growth works. The growth in the most recent period makes all the other growth before it look trivial. I bet if he could zoom in on the '75 to '95 period he could plot the arrows in the same place and draw the same conclusion.
What's your 'watch this space'? What technologies currently in prototype stage do you think have a bright future?
TL;DW: It all harks back to WWII and unlimited government spending on electronics (and related) R&D - financed based mostly on never before seen amounts of government debt (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_United_States_p...).
Is this just one way to do it or is it what every scientist do? How can you possibly englobe everybody to a cause for certain trait based on studying 100,1000, or even 100,000? I can't get my mind atound this.
Is this just one way to do it or is it what every scientist do? How can you possibly englobe everybody to a cause for certain trait based on studying 100,1000, or even 100,000? I can't get my mind atound this.
Maybe that was the problem. They weren't the first to conquer the sky. People had been flying in hot air balloons for 120 years by that point. By 1903, getting people up into the sky was old-hat. Sure, they did it in a different way, but what they demonstrated was--strictly speaking--inferior to the technology that was already available. If you wanted to get up into the clouds in 1903, you weren't going to use a Wright Brothers machine that would only let you skip along the ground for a few minutes at a time, you'd use a hot air balloon and stick around for a while. Can people really be blamed for missing the fact that heavier-than-air flight would be able to travel much faster and farther than balloons?
Photovoltaic cells aren't becoming popular now because people are suddenly realizing that they exist; they're becoming popular because the technology has reached the point where the cells are cheap enough and efficient enough to be practical. The same goes for 3D printing, and the same went for the Wrights' aircraft: They received plenty of attention once they moved from the realm of curiosities to being useful inventions.
The title of this article should be "when you don't change the world and no one notices".
https://techcrunch.com/2016/05/15/how-expiring-patents-are-u...
That's in part because everyone was googly-eyed over managed funds thanks to Peter Lynch's 29% average annual return for the Magellan Fund from '77 to '90. Index funds didn't beat that dude.