{"id":258845,"date":"2014-08-07T13:39:00","date_gmt":"2014-08-07T18:39:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/?p=258845"},"modified":"2024-01-26T13:40:39","modified_gmt":"2024-01-26T18:40:39","slug":"making-fun-of-silicon-valley-is-easy-but-the-next-big-thing-always-looks-like-a-toy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/2014\/08\/07\/making-fun-of-silicon-valley-is-easy-but-the-next-big-thing-always-looks-like-a-toy\/","title":{"rendered":"Making fun of Silicon Valley is easy, but the next big thing always looks like a toy"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s become popular to make fun not just of the \u201cbros\u201d who run a lot of startups \u2014 the ones that Businessweek<\/em> magazine chose to parody on the cover of its latest issue<\/a> \u2014 but of the whole idea of having technology startups in the first place, since so many come up with useless things like Yo, an app that exists solely to send the single word \u201cYo\u201d to other users. But Y Combinator head Sam Altman argues that out of silliness and irrelevance, sometimes great things are made<\/a> \u2014 and anyone who has followed even the recent history of technology would have a hard time disagreeing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I confess that I\u2019ve had my own share of fun<\/a> ridiculing the idea behind Yo, as well as some recent startups such as ReservationHop, which was designed to corner the market in restaurant reservations by mass-booking them under assumed names and then selling them to the highest bidder<\/a>. But what Altman said in a blog post he wrote in response to the Businessweek<\/em> story still rings true:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n

\u201cPeople often accuse people in Silicon Valley of working on things that don\u2019t matter. Often they\u2019re right. But many very important things start out looking as if they don\u2019t matter, and so it\u2019s a very bad mistake to dismiss everything that looks trivial\u2026. Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, the Internet itself, the iPhone, and on and on and on \u2014 most people dismissed these things as incremental or trivial when they first came out.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Sometimes toys grow up into services<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019ve made the same point before about Twitter<\/a>, and how it seemed so inconsequential when it first appeared on the scene that I and many others (including our founder Om) ridiculed it as a massive waste of time. What possible purpose could there be in sending 140-character messages to people? It made no sense. After I got finished making fun of Yo, that\u2019s the first thing that occurred to me: I totally failed to see any potential in Twitter \u2014 and not just when it launched, but for at least a year after that. Who am I to judge what is worthy?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Twitter<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Chris Dixon, an entrepreneur who is now a partner at Andreessen Horowitz, pointed out in a blog post in 2010<\/a> that \u201cthe next big thing always starts out looking like a toy,\u201d which is a kind of one-sentence paraphrase of disruption guru Clay Christensen\u2019s theory from The Innovator\u2019s Dilemma<\/em>. Everything from Japanese cars to cheap disk drives started out looking like something no one in their right mind would take seriously \u2014 which is why it was so hard for their competitors to see them coming even when it should have been obvious.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Even the phone looked like a toy<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Altman pulled his list of toy-turned-big-deal examples from the fairly recent past, presumably because he knew they would resonate with more people (and perhaps because he is under 30). But there are plenty of others, including the telephone \u2014 which many believed was an irritating plaything with little or no business application, a view the telegraph industry was happy to promote \u2014 and the television, both of which were seen primarily as entertainment devices rather than things that would ultimately transform the world. As Dixon noted:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n

\u201cDisruptive technologies are dismissed as toys because when they are first launched they \u2018undershoot\u2019 user needs. The first telephone could only carry voices a mile or two. The leading telco of the time, Western Union, passed on acquiring the phone because they didn\u2019t see how it could possibly be useful to businesses and railroads \u2013 their primary customers. What they failed to anticipate was how rapidly telephone technology and infrastructure would improve.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Is Yo going to be listed in that kind of pantheon of global success stories? I\u2019m going to go out on a limb and say probably not. But most people thought Mark Zuckerberg\u2019s idea of a site where university students could post photos and personal details about themselves was a waste of time too, and Facebook recently passed IBM in market capitalization with a value of $190 billion and more than a billion users worldwide. Not bad for a toy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Thinkstock \/ Yaruta<\/a> and Shutterstock \/ Anthony Corella<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

<\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s become popular to make fun not just of the \u201cbros\u201d who run a lot of startups \u2014 the ones that Businessweek magazine chose to parody on the cover of its latest issue \u2014 but of the whole idea of having technology startups in the first place, since so many come up with useless things like Yo, an app … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Making fun of Silicon Valley is easy, but the next big thing always looks like a toy”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_crsspst_to_mathewingramblogwordpresscom":true,"mf2_syndication":[],"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[26],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-258845","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-gigaom"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/258845","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=258845"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/258845\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":258847,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/258845\/revisions\/258847"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=258845"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=258845"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=258845"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}