Look, we know the candidates for president are REALLY old. But then I realized that everyone else is, too. I was reading a book about the history of venture capital, and realized that these guys are the same guys (yes, guys) that are ruling the roost today.
Here’s a collection of posts about the old internet, starting with an answer to the question: why are the old guys still in charge?!
“Everyone is old”: Byrne Hobart on the essential mystery of “we're listening to older music, and watching older actors—in movies that are mostly revisions to existing franchises (Lord of the Rings has produced three big-budget multi-volume video franchises in my lifetime). From 2005 to 2019, the average age of CEOs at hire rose fourteen years. There must have been something really special about the class of '81 at every college.”
Why incumbents are structurally poised to win over startups: The more frightening title of this post is “Startups: the door is closing.” But here’s a European economist’s take on the battle of startups vs: incumbents: “Most industries are now under the dominion of old, established players who, after being momentarily caught off guard by Silicon Valley-style new entrants, have learned enough about the new techno-economic paradigm to reach an equilibrium, level the playing field, and subsequently regain the upper hand. Consider examples like Disney responding to Netflix, the taxi industry countering Uber, major music labels dictating terms to Spotify, hotels striking back at Airbnb, traditional banks facing off against neobanks, and even Walmart vying with Amazon. I can't identify many sectors, aside from perhaps advertising, where newcomers have decisively triumphed over incumbents.”
And the perfect chaser is the related PG post on “Superlinear returns”, which outlines why the famous just get more and more famous. It explains why the Taylor Swifts of the world, who have been at it for decades at this point and are able to continue to stay in the game, are continuing to compound their returns on their initial investment.
How Trello is Different: As we once again enter a period of reinvention in software, I look to some of these old-school “post bubble crash” thinkers who had to deal with upheaval instead of simply following the B2B SaaS playbook. This is an amazing vintage post on what it’s like to build a horizontal tool. I’m not saying it’s perfect — we used “FogBugz” at my first ever tech internship, and hey… the product was so awful that switching to Phabricator felt like a revelation. But despite all of that, Joel Spolsky remains one of the best-ever tech bloggers on the internet. I find secret gems in his posts all the time.
“Commoditize the Complement”: A second great Joel Spolsky blog post on “commoditizing the complement”: Once again: demand for a product increases when the price of its complements decreases. In general, a company’s strategic interest is going to be to get the price of their complements as low as possible. The lowest theoretically sustainable price would be the “commodity price” — the price that arises when you have a bunch of competitors offering indistinguishable goods. So: Smart companies try to commoditize their products’ complements. If you can do this, demand for your product will increase and you will be able to charge more and make more.
The Power Law: I did realize that most of the people in this book by Sebastian Mallaby on the history of venture capital are current investors and board members of every single company I’ve worked at. The book is famous for a whole host of things, but I liked the anecdote of infant John Collison offering Mike Moritz “water or milk?” while raising the Stripe series A (it reveals how Sam Altman got his stake in Stripe, too!)
Imagine if this was life working remotely. The old school Mac is beautiful!
Pete W’s favorite papers and books: Pete’s the most senior product person at Palantir and those guys are philosophical, ok. The Timeless Way of Building isn’t in this list (my fav Christopher Alexander book), but the Pattern Language book is.
But the best thing he reminded me to read was the Palantir S-1, which contains the following gem: “Most software makes companies more similar, not different. Packaged software tends to be designed to meet standardized needs. But commoditized solutions are only sufficient when keeping up with the market — that is, beta — is the goal. When it is time to generate differentiated value — that is, alpha — we believe that typical packaged software falls short. A company seeking to capitalize on its unique resources or to uncover a need unmet by its competitors requires more than software that simply conforms to well-defined best practices.”
I hate running, it’s awesome: This is unrelated to everything above, but I thought that thisp ost by my friend Karl (or as he’s known amongst the Twitterati, chiefofstuffs) was excellent. I too have been learning how to run (painfully!) with the blessed sweet voice of the Nike Run app. It is my highlight and proudest achievement every single week. The earliest stages of building a company (when you’re trapped in the idea maze) are tricky, and the satisfaction of completing a run is one of the best possible antidotes to that feeling.
Superb curation!