Why is silicon valley saturated with small ideas and big ideas getting rarer?
The valley seems to be obsessed with small ideas like photo sharing and messaging apps. There was a time when life sciences and technology that fundamentally changed the society ruled here.
That time seems to be long gone, for the worse.
A big part of it is that VCs gravitate towards these smaller ideas themselves. Why do you think that is the case?
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I am not clear on the info that follows a question and how it connects to the question, can you please restate to clarify? – Webbie 10 years ago
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Not sure what happened, that's not what I posted. Seems to be a bug. – Walter More 10 years ago
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@Walter It is indeed a bug that is being fixed as we speak. Resulted from a minor update earlier today. Will be fixed in a few minutes (no need to update your question -- what you entered earlier will start displaying again). – Nishank Khanna 10 years ago
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@Walter It's been fixed. Sorry about that mix-up. – Nishank Khanna 10 years ago
2 Answers
I am not a Silicon Valley insider, but I think there are multiple factors:
1. It's crowded - more entrepreneurs and more startups in general resulted in a lot of consumer-oriented products and services, so the big ideas seem rare due to simple statistics. This isn't necessarily bad because the needs of niche markets are being addressed too.
2. Books like Rework tell us to scratch our own itch and so first-time founders look for familiar problems to solve, which results in a lot of me-too products - project management and collaboration tools, consumer apps, etc.
3. It seems to me life sciences space is being disrupted with technology these days - new innovative approaches to automated testing at scale promise to drop the cost of a setup of a typical research lab. Also, lean methodologies are making their way into research process as well, so I would expect some exciting developments in the field in the near future.
4. There is a lot happening in energy sector that we don't hear about, but a lot of big ideas are being funded and tested (and fail) at huge scale. I feel like the focus of investors shifted from previous decade, that was all about internet related technologies, towards energy industry in the current decade.
A relevant read from HBR - Reversing the Decline in Big Ideas
Steve Blank hit the nail on its head in his post: Why Facebook is Killing Silicon Valley
If investors have a choice of investing in a blockbuster cancer drug that will pay them nothing for fifteen years or a social media application that can go big in a few years, which do you think they're going to pick?
