But startups are thriving. That doesn't suggest decreasing dynamism to me. It suggests that there are abundant gains to be had by exploiting technological progress, and the legacy economy is not availing itself of these opportunities. A thriving tech startup sector is surely key to dynamism.
I'm just some guy with an opinion. I worked in startups for 20 years. Startups are called exciting or thriving or good bets because a tiny few are successful and even fewer are trying to compete with established companies. Capital is pumped into lots of little ones regardless of the technology de-jour or market opportunity. They generally don't last. Statistically, if you were an AI startup from 6 years ago, you're long gone and you made out with what you could scrape together on the way out. Startups are thriving by feeding off dreams of grandeur, with very few happening upon the right combination of personality, capability and market enough to last for a decade. Is that thriving or thrashing? Don't confuse the velocity of gambling with the volume of opportunity.
This metric has obvious problems, but 120/134 of YC's S25 batch are AI-based [0]. 90% is, I guess, better than 98%, but woof. So, depends on what you mean by "thriving", but if diversity factors in there at all then at least YC is proving you wrong.
If you are still using sleds after the invention of the wheel, you are making a mistake. If you are innovating with pencil and paper after the development of the computer, you're making a grave error. There was no virtue in still sending faxes in 2010.
Tech has to believe this. We're all victims of the Upton Sinclair "it's difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it" thing.
A lot of tech is just straight up bad. The machine gun was bad. The nuclear bomb was bad. Social media was bad. TV was bad. Cars were bad. C++ was bad.
> If you are innovating with pencil and paper after the development of the computer, you're making a grave error.
This is a great example. Study after study shows that writing on paper helps retention and analysis vs. typing. Study after study shows reading on paper helps retention and comprehension vs. a screen.
> There was no virtue in still sending faxes in 2010.
You can send a document with an authentic signature. This might not seem like a big deal, but "wet ink" clauses prevent many pro-democracy agendas (voter registration, etc), and the good faith reason for them (the typical reason is voter suppression) is that documents are too easy to forge without signatures.
But also, were fax machines bad? Did they enable an even-more-sprawling bureaucracy? We're well past the point where "new tech = good" is even close to default true.
Even the acqui-hire route is ending, with BigCos just hiring the talent directly. I think this will be a drag on startup investment: why should I invest my capital just to build a throwaway resume builder for some AI engineers where I don't even get made whole at the end of it?
I agree, except that it seems dynamism is almost restricted to digital tech. I wish tech would spread its dynamism a little better into legacy industries, and give some productivity gains/disruption to those areas.
there's been plenty of disruption in traditional industries like retail, automotive, media, communications, etc.
part of the problem is that the remaining set of industries is pretty tough to make dynamic using technology simply because the explosive market size isn't there for various reasons. if you wanted to disrupt aviation, for example, a plane takes tens of billions of dollars to bring to market, and an airline requires outlaying billions in capex on planes.
