The startup gold rush of the last ten years is over. Sorry. Those hordes of ambitious entrepreneurs still stampeding to the Bay Area in the hopes of building their Minimum Viable Product, getting into Y Combinator, and growing their app into the Next Big Thing–they’re already too late. That era is behind us. It was a good run, even a legendary one, but it is over. Time for the new new thing.
Does that sound premature and apocalyptic? Maybe not. Over the last few months a slew of smart people have been sounding warning signals, identifying the half-dozen consonant factors bringing this epoch to an end: Over in The Information , the Lessins argue that “the period where tech startups can readily disrupt larger tech companies is ending for a simple reason: Today’s tech behemoths aren’t the lumbering giants of yesteryear. They are leaner and meaner and more competitive precisely because they have co-opted the same technologies startups used to attack them” and so “until there is another fundamental technology disruption, the window of opportunity for startups is limited to more traditional markets with less competitive players.”
Ev Williams expands on this : “in every maturing market, over time, value moves up the stack. The auto industry used to be filled with startups… Then it got incredibly hard and expensive to enter the game. A certain class of tech companies used to be about technology, mostly. Then they were about technology + design. Now they need to be about tech + design + marketing/distribution … I fear we are in an increasingly big-company-tilted world.”
Om Malik concurs : “The LinkedIns and Tableaus will lose much more than the giants, and the giants will continue to turn the screws, leveraging their positional, financial, and operational advantages. They will continue to win […]
