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Typically the founders are building the core competencies of their businesses themselves and using Upwork to outsource programming tasks that have been commoditized, like mobile/web development or filling in the gaps once the product architecture has been built. The current funding & salary environment is not kind to non-technical founders, because the technical end of a new product now costs more than you can get in funding without a product, and because the type of ideas you can easily communicate to an outsourced dev team are the ones that have been well-commoditized over the last 8 years. (I still see a number of non-technical founders trying, but they've been struggling hard.) I do think new startups face significant headwinds now, but they're not the ones you mention. I'm not worried about FANG drones, for example - the majority of people in Silicon Valley have always been employees of big companies, and often quite self-satisfied ones (do you remember how arrogant Netscape, Sun, and Cisco were when Google was still in the garage?). Also, significant B2C startups usually come out of nowhere, from small teams that were toiling away in obscurity for years beforehand. Do you remember 2007-2010? I was part of the Web 2.0 boomlet, folded up my startup in '08, and proceeded to watch most of my peer companies die over the next 2 years. But while we were all folding up our social networks, AirBnB (founded '06, household name '11), DropBox ('07, '10), Uber ('08, '10), Instagram ('08, '12), WhatsApp ('07, '11), and Thumbtack ('07, '13) were continuing to work on their startups, many of them breaking a lot of common wisdom about what made for a successful startup. When the time was right these services exploded, but we had to go through a huge startup drought from 08-10 in the process. The factors I'm more worried about are: 1) The average American consumer not having money, which makes B2C business models other than [advertisement, pyramid scheme, extortion, selling personal data] impractical 2) Attention being so focused on politics and tribalism that consumers are too fearful to try anything new and 3) Moore's Law disappearing. I'm not terribly worried about this last one because we can still get another factor of 10-100X out of better programming languages, OSes, and frameworks, and GPUs/TPUs continue to increase in power. |