Sure but that's not addressing his point which is most of the ideas being funded are uninteresting and aren't really moving the ball forward. Instead they're doing some kind of rent seeking.
I don't think it's rent seeking by definition to modernize a product and/or make it more accessible to people. The fact of the matter is that there is a tremendous backlog of legacy industry/infrastructure that needs to be modernized. There is plenty of opportunity in doing so to democratize access to services that are currently inaccessible to most, which is more or less the opposite of rent seeking.
You can also just not do a shitty job of modernizing an old thing, and end up creating a product like Netflix that front-end devs fawn over, learn from, and emulate. It doesn't have to be uninteresting.
Netflix was started in 1997. This conversation is about companies started a decade ago versus now. The rise post 2010 startups seems much more focused on creative interpretations of laws instead of actual innovation. The whole gig economy is a way to circumvent employment laws.
In reality, 'just new web frontends on existing industries' describes the majority of the demand for software development right now. It's not good or bad, though some of the actors and some of the businesses will be good or bad. It's not boring or interesting, though some of the applications and implementations will be boring or interesting. It just is.
>I don't think it's rent seeking by definition to modernize a product and/or make it more accessible to people. The fact of the matter is that there is a tremendous backlog of legacy industry/infrastructure that needs to be modernized
Out of all the VC money raised in 2019 how much was for this and how much was for things like Quibi, We-Work, gig economy, etc. ?
You can also just not do a shitty job of modernizing an old thing, and end up creating a product like Netflix that front-end devs fawn over, learn from, and emulate. It doesn't have to be uninteresting.