Startup Advantage

It’s not technology keeps on advancing so there are opportunities, but the thing that makes it possible is that human minds settle into fixed ways of looking at the world. That’s always been true and it’s probably always going to be true. And I think I’ve always felt that death is the greatest invention of life. I’m sure that life evolved without death at first and found that without death life didn’t work very well because it didn’t make room for the young who didn’t know how the world was you know fifty years ago, who didn’t know how the world was 20 years ago, who say it as it is today without any preconceptions, and saw and dreamed how it could be based on that. We’re not satisfied based on the accomplishments of the last 30 years but who are dissatifsfied because the current state didn’t live up to their ideas. Without death there would be very little progress.

One of the things that happens in organizations as well as in people is they settle into ways of looking at the world and become satisfied with those. And the world changes and keeps evolving, new potential arises but these people that are settled in don’t see it and that’s what gives startup companies their greatest advantage is the sedentary point of view of large companies. And in addition to that large companies usually do not have efficient communication paths from the people closest to some of these changes at the bottom of the company to the top of the company which are the people making the big decisions. And so by the time there maybe people with lower levels of these companies that see these changes coming but by the time the world ripples up to the highest levels where they can do something about it sometimes 10 years passes. Even in the case where part of the company does the right thing at the lower levels usually the upper levels screwed up somehow. I mean IBM and the personal computer business was a good example of that. So I think as long as you know humans don’t solve this human nature trait of sort of settling in to a worldview after a while there will always be opportunity for young companies as well as young people to innovate as it should be.

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