Dear Tech: Now What?

there are plenty of ambitious startups in energy, healthcare, and education, areas that sorely need innovation. But fascinating technology startups, companies who want to allow regular people to do new stuff in their daily lives? Few and far between. Take a look at Paul Graham’s ideas for frighteningly ambitious startups. Now take a look at the last 30 or so startups on Techcrunch. Where are the people thinking big? What I see is people filling ever-smaller niches in this “ecosystem” or that “ecosystem.”

via The Jig Is Up: Time to Get Past Facebook and Invent a New Future – Alexis Madrigal – Technology – The Atlantic.

There’s a lesson to be learned here that can be applied to a lot of other endeavors. If you find yourself sitting down to work on something, ask yourself this: am I just creating what amounts to “talk radio” (as Om Malik put it) — something to fill in a niche? Or are you stepping back as far as you can and looking to build something that simply isn’t there at all in any form?

We need more technology companies that are technology companies, not just glorified sales or advertising systems. We also need more creative work done, in this space and elsewhere, by people who come from vastly dissimilar walks of life and can bring to the table a broader sense of what’s not out there and what needs to be done. The alternative is a thousand micro-clones of Facebook, when one of those was bad enough as it is.

  • Steven Savage

    I saw this and thought I’d be the first to get it posted.  Go figure.

    Living in Silicon Valley this hits pretty hard for me.  I DO see a lot of amazing stuff but, yes, there is a LOT of the same-old gather-data-sell-company routine out here.  It’s weird, frustrating, and strange.

    Some of this is the flipside to the dot-bomb recovery.  There’s a huge technical infrastructure, lots of great services, and lower barrier to entry because of all the things established running up to – and recovering from – the dot-bomb.  So it IS easier to start something, but . . . we don’t see as much.

    Part of that is, even sadder, it doesn’t get attention.  I walk or drive  through Palo Alto or Redwood Shores or any other area and see amazing stuff . . . that doesn’t make the news.

    • http://www.genjipress.com/ Serdar (GenjiPress)

      One of the items on Paul Graham’s list is “a new search engine”. Let’s expand that. Search was what came along and replaced almost all of the systematized attempts to index knowledge up until that point. What could we use to one-up search? Surely there’s a better way to find information than by typing some keywords, sifting through things that are blatant marketing pitches and ending up on a site that might not even be curated regularly. Isn’t there?