>We’ve gone through the generation of startups you can do as a dropout from high school or college, hacking a social network out of PHP scripts or assembling a computer out of parts at a local homebrew club.
None of that was really innovative, yet ended up with massive commercial success. MS-DOS was the not first PC operating system, Facebook was not the first social network on the web, Apple was not the first PC or smartphone maker.
So I don't think anything has changed there at all. You can still create a massively successful venture bringing something out to market in a way that is somewhat incrementally 'better' than what is on offer without having multiple PhDs in different fields on your founding team.
And it's pointless comparing that to the type of startup that is trying to creating something that is completely 'novel' from the intersection of 2 or more technical fields. Managing that type of complexity isn't something new either - it is fairly routine in academia to apply tools from one field to another - which is also how a lot of innovation happened historically as well as how many startups got started. Historically these type of ventures are high risk and the reason we are seeing a growing number of these is more a testament to how saturated the startup ecosystem is and how research increasingly is driven by venture capital rather than by academia and industry.
None of that was really innovative, yet ended up with massive commercial success. MS-DOS was the not first PC operating system, Facebook was not the first social network on the web, Apple was not the first PC or smartphone maker.
So I don't think anything has changed there at all. You can still create a massively successful venture bringing something out to market in a way that is somewhat incrementally 'better' than what is on offer without having multiple PhDs in different fields on your founding team.
And it's pointless comparing that to the type of startup that is trying to creating something that is completely 'novel' from the intersection of 2 or more technical fields. Managing that type of complexity isn't something new either - it is fairly routine in academia to apply tools from one field to another - which is also how a lot of innovation happened historically as well as how many startups got started. Historically these type of ventures are high risk and the reason we are seeing a growing number of these is more a testament to how saturated the startup ecosystem is and how research increasingly is driven by venture capital rather than by academia and industry.