| > Ford hadn’t bothered to learn anything about botany or agronomy before embarking on his Fordlândia experiment. He didn’t trust the kinds of experts that could’ve warned him what he was getting into. In fact, he didn’t trust experts at all — he was a figure-it-out type, skeptical of fancy educations and titles. > Rubber trees had never been grown in the Amazon in the way that the Ford company was trying to grow them: in dense plantations, with trees planted in tight rows. This growing style might have worked in the Southeast Asian plantations run by the Europeans, but that’s because the bugs there hadn’t evolved to eat rubber. In Brazil, this density ended up creating an environment where the native bugs that fed on rubber trees thrived. Basically, Ford built a giant bug incubator, where close proximity helped pests and blight spread. > Strangely enough, despite all of the time and money he invested in Fordlândia, [Henry Ford] never actually went to visit it himself. He had orchestrated the whole fiasco from his home, thousands of miles away, in Michigan. This sounds like a few present-day startups, such as the one I read about here a few years ago. Someone in SF met a fellow developer, and the conversation went something like this: "You work at a startup? Neat! What does the company do?" "We're disrupting parking." "Oh, that's very cool. So you've run a parking lot or worked at one, and that's given you some better ideas on how to run it?" "No, we haven't done any of that. You have to understand, we're not interested in doing things the old way. We're disrupting parking!" |
Previous knowledge of running a parking lot is not causal with startup failure. I think a better way to be critical is the fact that they say they're "disrupting" parking lots, but can't describe the problem they're solving.