Here’s a long read on Peter Thiel’s brilliant scheme to pull brilliant young people out of boring old university and get them to take risks! with skin in the game! on the big technologies of the future. And what have they delivered? The short answer would be the square root of fuck-all. The slightly longer answer would be that they’ve produced a string of utterly trivial and unoriginal startups. In fact, it recalls nothing more than the heyday of Rocket Ventures in Berlin, cranking out slightly localised clones of Facebook, Soundcloud etc one after the other. But now, rather than the periphery copying the core, the clones are coming from inside the Valley.
In Boston, Grace Xiao, 20, is working on Kynplex, a social networking software for scientific innovations and Brian Truong, 23, is building software that replaces ads with questions for online publishers. In Durham, North Carolina, Ivonna Dumanyan, 22, is building wearable sensors for athletes. In Los Angeles, Anthony Zhang, 21, is building an on-demand food delivery app for college kids.
OK so, the first of those is a copy of Mendeley which itself is a copy of that web browser extension all the academics I know used to swear by and kept asking me if I might re-implement. The next is yet another ads company in the crashing online ad market. The next is a clone, too, and the one after that is a clone of Deliveroo, which itself is a clone of a clone. The piece’s protagonist is in ad-tech, too, and there’s even a Theranos clone in there. Apparently they’re going to get it right this time – pinky promise.
What gets me about this is the utter absence of anything like innovation or originality or indeed technology. It turns out that if you maximise the consequences of failure, people adopt solutions that they know will work for the most restricted possible definition of “work” – in this case, off-the-peg VC-friendly clone startups with minimal technology content, plus massive investment in privilege. Conformity is precisely what Thiel created, and precisely what he should have expected.
And, to be honest, what we should have expected from him. His success was built on having enough privilege to dick around until he lucked into Facebook, and on getting on the defence contracting gravy-train with Palantir. His graduates are quite clear that this is their plan, too. You stick it out through the hazing process and then you’re on the inside.
There was a look he shot me then, a look I’d come to recognize. It was the look that said, you don’t get it. Maybe his idea wouldn’t work, he said, and his company would fail. That happened. But there would be a half-dozen more ideas that he’d reach for, and after that, a half-dozen more. Each idea was just practice for realizing the next idea. And thanks to Thiel, he’d know the people — funders, engineers, advisors — that could best help him translate those ideas into companies. Yes, he could go back to Stanford any time. But why would he ever turn away from the thing that he’d started to build, which was not a company, but a network — and start all over again? This network, he contended, was far more valuable than any he could build in college — even at Stanford.
But I think it’s worth harping on the point that this isn’t the creation of an elite of technologists, but just the creation of an elite. This is not innovation and it has nothing to do with technology as such. It is just as dull and as grey as any small-town chamber of commerce. As a result, we can denounce it with confidence that we’re not losing anything but yet another cockroach startup trying to get you to turn off your ad blocker.
Reminds me a bit of the Media Lab. What of use did that really produce? ‘Demo or die’ is not unlike ‘follow Facebook and flip’ – what you get is shallow – of course with the Media Lab you do the grunt work for your professor and get a Ph. D. (I assume). But that, too, is more to do with the elite (interconnected elite – remember Negroponte as tech-industry rockstar) than technology.
[As I may have said before, on one of my very rare forays to a tech meetup I met someone who said (and I have no reason to doubt him) was using some funding from some Welsh government / quango thing to do ‘Facebook but in Welsh’ – it does superficially look as though the upper-middle-class 20 Ollies of Oxford are getting more of their fair share of Quank money]
With hindsight, NN should have been a warning of the dawning Age of the Chancer.
Yep. When I was at the Media Lab he was in full “Arthur Daley” mode. Made Farage look like a straight player.
You did the Media Lab? Huh.
“What of use did that really produce? ”
To be fair, that’s pretty standard for graduate school labs. The Media Lab just has much, much better PR than, say, a neurobiology lab doing research on visual attention. They aren’t actually VC incubators though they might like to play that role on occasion when possible.
The one Media Lab alumnus I’m most familiar with did 3D graphics at the Media Lab, and then went to work on animation tools at Pixar, where he’s been for 20-some years.
As I ploughed through that very long and very uncritical piece, the thought did cross my mind that Alex’s take on this had better be good. Fortunately it was.
I actually thought it was quite critical. It’s subtle, but there are other options as well as Thompsonian blogging.
“OK so, the first of those is a copy of Mendeley which itself is a copy of that web browser extension all the academics I know used to swear by and kept asking me if I might re-implement. The next is yet another ads company in the crashing online ad market. The next is a clone, too, and the one after that is a clone of Deliveroo, which itself is a clone of a clone. The piece’s protagonist is in ad-tech, too, and there’s even a Theranos clone in there. Apparently they’re going to get it right this time – pinky promise.”
Clones of clones eh. Sounds like the derivatives market and seems to work in much the same way.
Alex, do you remember one of the underlying causes of the banking colapse? It was that the way to avoid being fired from your bonus culture job was to do the same as all your colleagues. Thus if it went good you all got a bonus, if it went bad “well that was the market” so nobody got fired… So all reward no risk.
These clones of clones of copies of flattery sincere or not is just the same thing but in a younger mans clothes.
The simple fact is rather than inovate their way out of a problem they do the tired old resort of failed managment optomize it… A failure is a faliure no matter how efficient you make it. The trick is to get “to big to fail” by “burn rate” or similar then keep going on leverage till even a blind turkey can see what’s comming. Investors will always throw tones of money at not a new tale but a twisy on a newish tale, it’s why we have “bubbles” that do burst and take pensions with them. As the old saying goes “It’s not only the cheese the second mouse gets”…
Nice to see you here!