This angry ramble came into being a year and one month ago. As I procrastinated whether to publish anything, I forgot about this draft until now. The beauty of not publishing your writing in a reactive manner is that it can teach you what you really stand for. Are you still comfortable publishing what your yesterday's self wrote? Then, you either didn't learn much over time, or you hold your beliefs firmly. I want to believe that this quick post comes out a year later as a result of the latter.
In her NYT article addressing Apple's revisited earnings, Kara Swisher writes:
This is a big issue not only for Apple but also for all of tech. There is not a major trend that you can grab onto right now that will carry everyone forward. The last cool set of companies — Uber, Airbnb, Pinterest and, yes, Tinder — were created many years ago, and I cannot think of another group that is even close to as promising.
[...]
Where is that next spark that will light us all up?
Wait, did Uber, Airbnb, Tinder and Pinterest light us ALL up?
Sure, these companies are cool; sure, they created accumulatively trillions-worth of financial value; and sure they've delivered value to their customers by changing the ways urbanites approach transport, dating, travel and inspiration... But if the future of the technology industry and "us" (a vague and indecisive way of addressing a collective) depends on the next set of companies extracting value by creating convenience by a button - we're screwed.
The spark that we need business leaders to respond to is the quick sand we're in: extractive capitalism is fostering climate breakdown, inequality and a worrisome decline of democracy globally. Perpetuating the convenience lifestyle which has helped get us here won't fix things. Thinking of the world as an aggregations of isolated worlds won't help us fix things.
Does the world need this now? Answering this honestly should be the guiding light for everyone starting a startup today. That's where the spark is.
Comment of 2020: A year later, I think that I better understand what Kara wanted to say. However, I still believe that a new Apple product won't make the world a better place—they already got us there, and are now only adding to the wasteland (think AirPods) on the plateau of giantism. It's the generations of people who worked for Apple, who cut their teeth at Uber and other high-growth startups who have a chance to transfer their skills into societally-beneficial projects. One of my favorite examples of this kind of skill transfer is Jack Kelly, previously a research engineer at DeepMind, who co-founded Open Climate Fix in 2019 to apply machine learning to tackling climate change.
Sure, these companies are cool; sure, they created accumulatively trillions-worth of financial value; and sure they've delivered value to their customers by changing the ways urbanites approach transport, dating, travel and inspiration... But if the future of the technology industry and "us" (a vague and indecisive way of addressing a collective) depends on the next set of companies extracting value by creating convenience by a button - we're screwed.
The spark that we need business leaders to respond to is the quick sand we're in: extractive capitalism is fostering climate breakdown, inequality and a worrisome decline of democracy globally. Perpetuating the convenience lifestyle which has helped get us here won't fix things. Thinking of the world as an aggregations of isolated worlds won't help us fix things.
Does the world need this now? Answering this honestly should be the guiding light for everyone starting a startup today. That's where the spark is.
Comment of 2020: A year later, I think that I better understand what Kara wanted to say. However, I still believe that a new Apple product won't make the world a better place—they already got us there, and are now only adding to the wasteland (think AirPods) on the plateau of giantism. It's the generations of people who worked for Apple, who cut their teeth at Uber and other high-growth startups who have a chance to transfer their skills into societally-beneficial projects. One of my favorite examples of this kind of skill transfer is Jack Kelly, previously a research engineer at DeepMind, who co-founded Open Climate Fix in 2019 to apply machine learning to tackling climate change.
No comments:
Post a Comment