The average uncreative techbro sees “innovation” as “find something in society that isn’t yet ruinously monetized, and find out what happens when it’s ruinously monetized.”
I was listening to an interview where VC funding came up and the business strategies of venture capitalist funded businesses were discussed. The idea was that a good VC business is able to grow to the point of being so ubiquitous that its usage within a given market is almost a given, passing up smaller scale monetization strategies along the way. So if Google was invented today, it would in all likelihood start charging $15/month for search features and fail to grow beyond moderate success, which would make it a failure in the eyes of venture capitalists. It would ultimately be killed and never be able to reach its current actual status as a global monopoly.
I think this mentality explains a lot of tech layoffs in otherwise successful companies as well as why naive enshitification is usually an overzealous pivot into disaster for VC funded companies. As far as I understood from this interview, VC companies fund so many businesses that their successes have to subsidize their failures, so mere success is never enough.
The average uncreative techbro sees “innovation” as “find something in society that isn’t yet ruinously monetized, and find out what happens when it’s ruinously monetized.”
I was listening to an interview where VC funding came up and the business strategies of venture capitalist funded businesses were discussed. The idea was that a good VC business is able to grow to the point of being so ubiquitous that its usage within a given market is almost a given, passing up smaller scale monetization strategies along the way. So if Google was invented today, it would in all likelihood start charging $15/month for search features and fail to grow beyond moderate success, which would make it a failure in the eyes of venture capitalists. It would ultimately be killed and never be able to reach its current actual status as a global monopoly.
I think this mentality explains a lot of tech layoffs in otherwise successful companies as well as why naive enshitification is usually an overzealous pivot into disaster for VC funded companies. As far as I understood from this interview, VC companies fund so many businesses that their successes have to subsidize their failures, so mere success is never enough.