[cml]

It has been a while since I read that series of articles, but the gist of it was:

-The author predicts that the business side of entrepreneurship will become increasingly commoditized, with programs like YC supplanting business school as the expected qualification for executives. The author parallels the unique skills required by railroad and steel entrepreneurs (access to funding networks, an ability to act on incomplete and indistinct market data and so on) with those of today's tech entrepreneurs and then observes how those skills became less valuable as the railroad and steel markets matured and consolidated to the point where the risk-taking entrepreneurs were no longer necessary and were replaced by dry MBA-types.

-The author predicts that the tech side will evolve into something like the guild system used by artisans prior to the industrial revolution, since engineers are still the gatekeepers to technology.

-Finally, the author predicts that both of these groups will become increasingly beholden to finance-types, albeit with the engineers having quite a lot more leverage if they can manage to establish some kind of collective bargaining platform (i.e. a guild). By nature of being individually indistinct and for the most part interchangeable in terms of skills as tech markets become less risky, business-oriented entrepreneurs are therefore the new labor in the way that manufacturing jobs were the old labor.

By the way, I thought it was a long but pretty fantastic read and would highly recommend it if you can find a few hours of free time.

[pvdm]

Thanks. Sounds like another long, but more accessible read (Manna): http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

Whole swath of middle management can be replaced with a little bit of automation and ML.