This post has been revised and split into two posts. I recommend reading those.
- Maximizing the Efficiency of the Startup Ecosystem
- Why Maximizing the Efficiency of the Startup Ecosystem Is Essential for Society’s Transition to an Information Economy
When people hear what I’m working on they often ask me, “Why don’t you just start a more traditional tech startup?”
I don’t want to because that’s not where my deeper interests lie. My interests are a step back, looking at the startup ecosystem as a whole. I believe the tech industry is the most innovative industry on the planet, and that is one reason why I’m interested in getting my hands dirty and learning as much as possible about and how and why it works, but being the most innovative industry on the planet gives it bigger implications…
While we should never trivialize the impact of the entrepreneur, from a wider perspective, solving ecosystem level problems has more impact than any B2B or B2C startup could, because while products make a big impact, I don’t think they deserve as much credit for changing the world as the underlying system that enabled the product to come to life. Given the right conditions and incentives, the existence of certain products can become almost inevitable. Whereas finding efficiencies in the larger ecosystem in which startups exist can create systemic impact, empowering more people, unlocking new pockets of potential wealth and allowing market forces to go work to bring them about.
(Aside: I don’t want to do a B2B or B2C startup but it’s possible the path I’m going down leads to me creating a S2S company; a startup for startups, which is fundamentally a different breed and therefore deserves a different letter. Startups are not large corporations because they solve new problems instead of milking old ones, and they aren’t small businesses because they create scalable impact.)
Furthermore, I believe the importance of the opportunities that arise from an increasingly efficient startup ecosystem extends beyond the tech ecosystem itself, to the future of innovation in an information economy. And the organizational principles of the startup ecosystem, as well as the operating principles of the information economy that the startup ecosystem has given birth to, will ripple across emerging industries in sectors diverse as social change, health, biotech, molecular manufacturing and government, as soon as these industries begin their transition into the information age.
It’s important to see the information age as the latest epochal shift of organized society. The world has progressed through tribal, agrarian and industrial societies and now we are on the cusp of transitioning to an information society. And because the tech industry is pioneering the movement toward the information economy, many of the organizational principles being discovered will be universal to this entire age.
