From what I’ve seen in Startups both during the 90s and more recently, the spirit in them changed from “solve a cool problem” in the 90s to “find a way to make lots of money for founders” after the Net Crash and more often than not the chosen way to make money was sell the company to investors rather than actually selling anything to customers, so the tech just needed to look like “the next big money maker” in order to get said investor money and “tech” messaging became dominated by investor hype.
The almost pure-grifer incentives and spirit I saw become dominant in Startups from the 00s now seems to pervade the whole Tech industry.
Pretty much. The industry was for ‘those nerds’ in the days, then dot-com came and holy shit, money to be made, but for a time, let the nerds cook because the investor class had no idea and kind of knew they had no idea.
Then the crash put the investor class firmly at the wheel and the industry has been significantly distorted since then, motivation wise.
Clearly good things have happened, but there’s always this anti-user angle at play now.
From what I’ve seen in Startups both during the 90s and more recently, the spirit in them changed from “solve a cool problem” in the 90s to “find a way to make lots of money for founders” after the Net Crash and more often than not the chosen way to make money was sell the company to investors rather than actually selling anything to customers, so the tech just needed to look like “the next big money maker” in order to get said investor money and “tech” messaging became dominated by investor hype.
The almost pure-grifer incentives and spirit I saw become dominant in Startups from the 00s now seems to pervade the whole Tech industry.
Pretty much. The industry was for ‘those nerds’ in the days, then dot-com came and holy shit, money to be made, but for a time, let the nerds cook because the investor class had no idea and kind of knew they had no idea.
Then the crash put the investor class firmly at the wheel and the industry has been significantly distorted since then, motivation wise.
Clearly good things have happened, but there’s always this anti-user angle at play now.