Reconsidering Startups - Speaker Deck

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Reconsidering Startups Alex Payne Monktoberfest, Portland, Maine October 3, 2013

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@al3x: ✖ Working at startups for 15+ years. ✖ Early employee at Twitter. ✖ Co-founder and former CTO of Simple. ✖ Currently consulting to startups. ✖ Investor in: Lucky Sort (acquired), Datadog, Sprint.ly, Rainforest ✖ Advisor to: Simperium (acquired), Geoloqi (acquired), Kodowa

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I was asked to talk about this:

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It's gonna go like this: 1. Startups then. 2. Startups today. 3. Startups tomorrow. (maybe)

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Hands up if...

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What speciﬁcally are we talking about? Silicon Valley-style startups. Mostly, venture-funded ones. High risk, high growth. Not every small business ever. Not agencies or service businesses. Not "lifestyle businesses".

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1. Startups then. 2. Startups today. 3. Startups tomorrow.

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Then

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Then

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Then

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Then

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✖ Public/private/academic partnership. ✖ Big missions, big funding (often military). ✖ Long timelines between investment and return. ✖ Press focus on mature businesses. ✖ Unorthodox corporate cultures, no existing concept of "startup culture". ✖ Not a Golden Age, but a very different one for being in the relatively recent past. Startups Then

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1. Startups then. 2. Startups today. 3. Startups tomorrow.

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Today

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Today

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Today

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Today

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Today

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Today

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Startups today ✖ Increasingly, a monoculture. Systematized. ✖ Celebrity-oriented, media-driven. ✖ Low-risk, herd mentality venture investing. ✖ Over-saturation of angels, incubators. ✖ High churn, inefﬁcient use of talent. ✖ Widespread misogyny and racism: a new old boys club. ✖ Unrealistically short capital cycles. ✖ Questionable returns as an asset class.

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The historical archetype of the Silicon Valley startup has been co- opted by predatory capitalists, offering them the stolen cover of a false utopian narrative.

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3. Startups tomorrow

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Tomorrow: ✖ Rise and impact of crowdfunding? ✖ Job creators or job destroyers? ✖ Helping or hurting education? ✖ B Corporations and other new structures? ✖ Digital currencies: new opportunities or an end-run around regulation? ✖ Breaking out of traditional centers of power, geographic and institutional. ✖ How to fund work on planet-scale problems? ✖ Are big problems suitable to what startups have become? If not, who's going to take them on?

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Questions? Thanks. – @al3x