[grellas]

The difference between the ancient way of working a lifetime for a salary, perks and a gold watch on retirement and the new one of building a breakout company in tech lies in a wholly changed business environment by which super-talented founders with a business sense can draw on a depth of knowledge/expertise (typically gained from work experience in a demanding tech environment) to conceive of a solid business model to profitably disrupt existing enterprises and thereafter apply grit, good sense, unbelievable perseverance, and basic street smarts to execute on that model via a startup world that affords amazing access to capital, an ultra-connected network of technically savvy persons with whom one can potentially ally, and a huge reservoir of resources by which founders can educate themselves to learn, grow, and develop.

One might sum this up by saying "Silicon Valley" but it really is most anywhere in the modern world where any modicum of freedom prevails, though Silicon Valley still offers unique advantages in my view.

The odds of failing are still stunningly high and those who make it to success are often bloodied by the process but the door is open today in a way it never has been before.

Another way of saying this is that, in the founder/investor partnering that is typically necessary to succeed, no arrangement was even possible for all but a rare few in mom/dad's ancient days, a reasonable arrangement that skewed heavily toward investors was possible just 20 years ago, and an even more reasonable one with founders and investors in near parity (when the founders are strong) is readily achievable today.

I actually don't believe that the story told in this blog post conveys a typical situation but what I have just said does so based on my having worked in depth in this world since the mid-1980s.

[abtinf]

> The difference between the ancient way of working a lifetime for a salary, perks and a gold watch on retirement and the new one of building a breakout company in tech lies in a wholly changed business environment by which super-talented founders with a business sense can draw on a depth of knowledge/expertise (typically gained from work experience in a demanding tech environment) to conceive of a solid business model to profitably disrupt existing enterprises and thereafter apply grit, good sense, unbelievable perseverance, and basic street smarts to execute on that model via a startup world that affords amazing access to capital, an ultra-connected network of technically savvy persons with whom one can potentially ally, and a huge reservoir of resources by which founders can educate themselves to learn, grow, and develop.

The length and structure of this sentence obfuscates its meaning.

[vonseel]

After several minutes I was able to read it in full... and lots of reading and back-tracing.

He says our business model is "wholly-changed" and now founders need to be super-talented and a long list of other things in order to succeed in the modern world.

I would argue that founders have always needed incredible smarts and a good product/market fit to succeed. I don't think anyone would claim that the "titans" of industry (think Rockefeller, John Jacob Astor) didn't have street smarts, grit, and perseverance.

> affords amazing access to capital, an ultra-connected network of technically savvy persons with whom one can potentially ally, and a huge reservoir of resources by which founders can educate themselves to learn, grow, and develop

For sure, there's more resources (cheaply) available than ever before.

IMO, this should all add up to make it easier to start a business and succeed. Maybe that's what he wanted to say.

[ojbyrne]

I assumed it was satire.

[newnewpdro]

That's putting it nicely.

[bspn]

It would also crush all-comers in a game of buzzword bingo!

[barry-cotter]

> The difference between the ancient way of working a lifetime for a salary, perks and a gold watch on retirement

That system existed for at most 40 years, probably less. It lasted from the beginning of the post WW2 boom to the oil crash in 1973. It lingered on in companies built up during that era and the expectations and cultures built up then but it was surely dead by 1990. To call a system that barely lasted the working life of one human ancient is a bit much, no?

[robotresearcher]

Governments and the church have supported that career structure for hundreds, maybe thousands of years. For example, military officers take salary, perks and retirement.

Also large, long lived companies like the 17th century East India Company employed tens of thousands of people, many for decades.

China also has centuries old companies and civil service institutions.

Neither entrepreneurs nor megacorps are recent inventions.

[barry-cotter]

True but hardly relevant to the great majority of people throughout history. The modern civil service is a copy of the Chinese Imperial model but outside the Sinosphetr that started in what the ~1800’s? In China throughout the vast majority of its history you had well under one professional, career civil servant per 1,000 of population. The professionalised military is also a creature of the European Wars of Religion at the earliest. Officers didn’t get pensions, they got the opportunity to loot and if they survived and were lucky they got land. Converting officers from nobles or mercenary captains who brought their own men and equipped them to military civil servants was a long drawn out process.

Parastatal companies like the EIC or VOC were products of societies that had just barely mastered professional rather than personal administration. They were also very unusual. Setting them up took special acts of the legislature and vanishingly small portions of the population served in them, or any similar organisation.

Professional bureaucratic organisations outside the state were absolutely in place by the Renaissance, like Florentine banking houses but they were small.

Entrepreneurs and mega corps are not recent inventions but mega corps not intimately entwines with the state are. In what Francis Fukuyama calls a closed access order they’re impossible and open access orders are at most two centuries old. See his book, Origins of Political Order.

The efflorescence of megacorps, outside the state, that could believably promise a lifetime career with the security of the civil service was a time limited thing.

[robotresearcher]

Well, if you'd said "was efflorescent for 40 years" and not "existed for 40 years", I wouldn't have had any beef :)

[C1sc0cat]

No the modern western civil services are not a copy of the Chinese system - it was developed to replace nepotism and fraud.

[barry-cotter]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_service

> The origins of the British civil service are better known. During the eighteenth century a number of Englishmen wrote in praise of the Chinese examination system, some of them going so far as to urge the adoption for England of something similar. The first concrete step in this direction was taken by the British East India Company in 1806.

> Thomas Taylor Meadows, Britain's consul in Guangzhou, China argued in his Desultory Notes on the Government and People of China, published in 1847, that "the long duration of the Chinese empire is solely and altogether owing to the good government which consists in the advancement of men of talent and merit only," and that the British must reform their civil service by making the institution meritocratic.

> Influenced by the Chinese imperial examinations, the Northcote–Trevelyan Report of 1854 made four principal recommendations: that recruitment should be on the basis of merit determined through competitive examination, that candidates should have a solid general education to enable inter-departmental transfers, that recruits should be graded into a hierarchy and that promotion should be through achievement, rather than "preferment, patronage or purchase"

[C1sc0cat]

Interesting I never knew that. I thought it came from the reforms post restoration in particular the Royal Navy.

Downside is it prioritises a classical education and the cult of the amateur chap who did a PPE but doesn't have any serious domain knowledge (Jen from the IT crowd)

[clarkevans]

This is the winner-take-all economic system that we have constructed for ourselves. It's not a law of nature.

[barry-cotter]

Winner take all systems occur anywhere that there are large differences in quality of performers and the top performers can serve many consumers (almost) as easily as serving as small numbers.

Before recorded music the very best professional musician probably made five times as much as the one who was just barely able to reliably get work.

There’s an entire economics literature on these systems.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tournament_theory

> Tournament theory is the theory in personnel economics used to describe certain situations where wage differences are based not on marginal productivity but instead upon relative differences between the individuals.

Where this doesn’t apply you get Baumol’s Cost Disease.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol%27s_cost_disease

> Baumol's cost disease (or the Baumol effect) is the rise of salaries in jobs that have experienced no or low increase of labor productivity, in response to rising salaries in other jobs that have experienced higher (low or no) labor productivity growth.

> The rise of wages in jobs without productivity gains is from the requirement to compete for employees with jobs that have experienced gains and so can naturally pay higher salaries, ...

[BurningFrog]

"Winner-take-all" is an end result, not an explanation.

The explanation, or part of it, is a unified interconnected world market where even a tiny idea, well executed, can be incredibly well rewarded, since it scales across the economy of most of humanity.

Nobody really "constructed" it. It emerged.

[TimJYoung]

Of course it was constructed. Aliens didn't just drop it from the heavens - the US specifically released the internet to the public and commercial interests, whereas previously it was limited to academic interests. Once commerce was up and running on the internet, it was simply a matter of companies getting big quickly and inserting themselves as middlemen between customers and producers/distributors. The fact that most of these companies eschewed profits for many, many years in favor of growth makes it self-evident that they understood that capturing the majority of the network (winner-take-all) was the primary goal.

[jtolmar]

"People will come up with reasons the system they live under is the laws of nature," probably is a law of (human) nature, though.

[dilyevsky]

Actually it kinda is (power law and all). Whether or not we should choose to adhere to it is another question.