6 ms·

And yet, only very large companies are able to make a certain class of investments in infrastructure and services — that push technology and society forward as

by devuo 9y ago

And yet, only very large companies are able to make a certain class of investments in infrastructure and services — that push technology and society forward as a whole — that small to mid companies due to lack of capacity never could, and governments due to lack of vision and political will never would.

amelius 9y ago
It depends on the perspective of what "large" means. If "large" means "rich", then you are right. However, if "large" means "comprised of many employees", then this is not necessarily true. So perhaps a first good step is to put a limit on the number of employees. This also enforces a "modular" style of working, where companies can more easily be swapped for other companies, and more reuse of "company-modules" can happen.
- resf 9y ago
  An employee cap would benefit big tech companies hugely. Tech companies would receive an even greater share of investment than they currently do, as even the largest tech companies pale in comparison to say Walmart (in terms of employment) Also no politician would ever support this.
lisper 9y ago
That's true, but it's not clear which way the causality runs. If wealth were more evenly distributed, ordinary people could pool their resources to make the same investments. They can't do that now because they have no disposable income to invest.
- virmundi 9y ago
  At that point the pool is mirroring a large corp. while it's still in the small so to speak, it has the same ends and reaction to the same stimulus
  - lisper 9y ago
    With the major difference that the ultimate decision-making power would be more widely distributed.
    - maehwasu 9y ago
      That's not necessarily a good feature.
    - virmundi 9y ago
      Maybe. Depends if they set themselves up as a co-op. They could instead essentially start as a highly focused VC. At that point the control will probably rest in the hands of the board and management.
      - lisper 9y ago
        But the investors have the power to replace the board. This is called "representative democracy" and it's widely considered, despite its flaws, a better way to govern human affairs than dictatorship or oligarchy.
        deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- jondubois 9y ago
  True, and startups seem to be where most of the innovation is happening right now. I think universities (and the Internet) do a pretty good job when it comes sharing the deep domain knowledge required to innovate.
- devuo 9y ago
  But people do in fact make their own small investments when they opt for one provider of a service or the other. For a multi billion dollar infrastructure project, your capacity to contribute with either 50K or 50$ would still amount to less than a drop in a bucket. For a massive multi billion infrastructure project to succeed it would still rely on either a state actor or a very large number of investors, or, as is the case I'm making, a large amount customers. If I opt for your company as my provider of a given service, and very large number of other people do too, we're enabling your company — via the pooling of our payments — for you to do further investments and improvements to your service.
  - lisper 9y ago
    That's true, but it misses the point. Capitalism and democracy work best when there is competition. Monopolies -- both economic and political -- generally lead to bad outcomes. When ultimate decision-making power becomes too unevenly distributed, it becomes very difficult to prevent monopolies from forming.
    - devuo 9y ago
      I agree, but then that's why we have governments and why monopolies are all but outlawed in most democratic countries.
      - bmelton 9y ago
        I don't know about other countries, but in America, being a monopoly is not at all outlawed. The criminality associable to monopoly here is when a monopoly abuses their monopoly power. If I am the only company in America that produces widget x, I have a de facto monopoly, but I am not guilty of anything until and unless I attempt to exert my monopolistic influence to prevent competitors from taking my market share. If I am a pure monopoly, then it's possible that just running a loss-leading sale could result in antitrust violations, but if I am not a monopoly, or if I am a minority provider of widget x, then loss-leading sales are a presumptively lawful activity. Edit: I believe closeparen makes this point more precisely with his post in this same topic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14528355 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14528355
- closeparen 9y ago
  VCs are agents of ordinary people who have pooled their resources to make investments, just separated by many fee-taking layers of Wall Street bureaucracy. Wall Street ultimately gets its money from American workers' retirement investments (whether personal 401k and IRA accounts, or institutional pension funds).
  - quadrangle 9y ago
    While totally true, there are systemic issues here. Any individual worker has little choice of what to do with their investments for retirement unless they get into taking tons of time and energy to be activist investors or go out of their way to avoid the path of least resistance and invest in unusual ways. Point is: it's not like workers are all supportive of the VC decisions or anything. It's the concentrated power of the people who manage all the funds that matters, and not the fact that a bunch of otherwise disconnected individual workers have put their money in. Of course, stuff like openinvest.co seem at least a good direction…
l5870uoo9y 9y ago
The capital requirements are generally low in the tech sector compared to traditional industry.
- petra 9y ago
  Not really. Search engines, Warehousing infra-structure, operating systems, compute clouds, marketing to achieve critical mass are pretty expensive.
  - FullMtlAlcoholc 9y ago
    Typically, isnt the largest expense for a tech company payroll? Companies like the big 5 may be anomalies because they operate a number of their own data centers
    - l5870uoo9y 9y ago
      To my knowledge and you are exempt for expensive industrial equipment. Now you have a sitation where Whatsapp is more worth than a big global enterprise like Sony, but haven't required nowhere near the same amount of workers or capital.
cmurf 9y ago
That's not the only way. People engage voluntarily in cooperative, yet temporary agreements, to work on projects for the benefit of the whole group. Companies join in trade groups which are somewhat similar. So possibly a new class of temporary corporation, in which corporations invest, for a specific life time and goal purpose, where they can share resources and a common goal, without any one company basically railroading local, state, or national politics. Or any one company's business being disrupted means the end of that venture.
pikzen 9y ago
Yeah. We have those tiny things called governments too. You might know them for some investments such as, the US interstate highways, space flight, the Internet. It's amazing how the collective will of the people has managed all of that without forming a very large company.
akjetma 9y ago
it's not 'lack of vision and political will' that stymies government initiatives--that's some TED talk bs. and i shudder to think that we're necessarily dependent on the benevolence and 'vision' of large companies to drive society forward.
- devuo 9y ago
  Then what does? Most of the innovation we have witnessed and enjoy in our society for the past 20-30 years has not been driven by governmental money or agencies but by private money.
  - samstave 9y ago
    Just stream of thought here: Why don't we have a "government YC" (yeah, I don't mean DARPA-like, or the other mechanisms for finding funding from the government, which requires way too much navigation f bureaucratic paper-work and hoop-jumping) - an office of the government that can allow any individual to apply for seed funding for ANY idea in ANY industry that they can see through - make the process nimble and quick. Ensure that there is infrastructure/systems to allow for accurate tracking and reporting on the spend of monies given - think an EDD card that the startup entity gets and all expenses are tracked via the transactions on the card. Integrate it with banks and other private and public sector services with credits, like compute credits from amzn/goog etc... tax services, payroll etc... And when you apply - it effectively sets-up an individual LLC in your name as the defacto entity to track your startups progress with giving you an EIN etc... Heck, this should be a simple thing to architect if everyone in the business/startup world were truly supportive of, and willing to actually be, the "innovation" unicorn they all claim to be.
  - anigbrowl 9y ago
    Go read The Dictator's Handbook.
    - devuo 9y ago
      Will do, thanks for the recommendation.
mschuster91 9y ago
> and governments due to lack of vision and political will never would Governments (US and Soviet) went to the moon. The Internet would not exist without massive military (i.e. government) sponsoring. But yes, when I am looking at our governments right now, it's hard to find something as progressive as this, except that marijuana is on the rise, Macron has a 50:50 women government and invited scientists from the US to France. The other governments seem to be racing full speed in reverse for me.
- skookumchuck 9y ago
  > The Internet would not exist without massive military (i.e. government) sponsoring. Yes, it would be called FidoNET instead.
camillomiller 9y ago
They push society forward along THEIR agenda. That agenda can be the most open, inclusive and diverse agenda ever, but it's gonna be the agenda of a corporation nonetheless. In my ideal world, you know who should be in charge of such a push? American friends, please, breathe deeply: The State should.
- TulliusCicero 9y ago
  I'm largely a social democrat, but LOL if you think the government would be even a quarter as competent as Google at pushing technology forward. Just read any description from people who've worked at both normal government IT shops (really anywhere that's not 18F or the USDS) and private industry how they feel about governmental technology culture and processes. Like okay, investing in infrastructure, like putting fiber everywhere? Sure, I'm down with that. Everything else, I think the private sector has shown itself to be plenty more capable. Let's let the government stick to its strengths, shall we? Disclaimer: I work at Google
  - anigbrowl 9y ago
    You're assuming our current goods and ills are somehow inherent. This is what happens when people don't study history.
  - 659087 9y ago
    Luckily for the government, Google's innovation in mass surveillance helps them fill in the gaps.
  - kuschku 9y ago
    > I'm largely a social democrat, but LOL if you think the government would be even a quarter as competent as Google at pushing technology forward. > Just read any description from people who've worked at both normal government IT shops (really anywhere that's not 18F or the USDS) and private industry how they feel about governmental technology culture and processes. The governments brought us MP3. (Fraunhofer is funded entirely by their own patents and the German government). The governments brought us many more technologies, standards, algorithms, etc. Alone the projects funded by the German government have brought more to the tech world than Google ever has, or ever will. Then look at the projects the US has funded. For fucks sake, the US Government gave us the Internet!
jfoutz 9y ago
Not quite sure i follow. Do you mean like self driving cars, neural networks, mapping the human genome, or perhaps the internet? I guess IC's might be a good example, but the air force was really the only buyer that could afford them. I dunno, maybe we're moving to a new model. the 20th century way seemed to be to pour massive amounts of money into research at universities, then commercialize whatever whatever happened to work out. Corporations do interesting work, but they're sooooo resistant to change, it seems like their inventions always die on the vine. Kodak digital cameras for example. Are you thinking google would be willing to risk their ad revenue for a cool new tech? Or microsoft their os/office money? or apple and phones? etc.
- polishTar 9y ago
  > Corporations do interesting work, but they're sooooo resistant to change, it seems like their inventions always die on the vine. Some do, others have been able to remain relevant for a very long time. Thankfully we have a societal mechanism to prune unproductive companies, it's called bankruptcy. > Are you thinking google would be willing to risk their ad revenue for a cool new tech? Or microsoft their os/office money? or apple and phones? etc. So far they have. Google for instance started its self driving car project in 2009, at the height of the recession. It would have been the easiest thing in the world to dismiss the project as wasteful spending when everybody else was tightening their belt.
  - jfoutz 9y ago
    24 billion in the bank (cash, cash equivalents and marketable securities), revenue up 2 billion ~10% from 2008. So brave [1] And they of course started the project by hiring the DARPA grand challenge winners. Which, yes, corporations can refine original research, but it's very rare they try something new. And if they do try something new, it's incredibly vulnerable to being defunded. Google is exceptional, kinda. I hope they'll get more milage out of their special project than bell labs did. [1] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1288776/000119312510030774/d10k.htm https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1288776/000119312510... edit And more to the point, the kodak example is key. Kodak made money selling film. Digital cameras were a direct threat to selling film. Google can do some interesting things, but if anything useful is a direct threat to ad revenue, it'll be killed.
anigbrowl 9y ago
governments due to lack of vision and political will never would Yes, remember that time General Motors sent humans to the moon?
- devuo 9y ago
  Be fair, we're no longer living in the 60's, and as we all know the impetus to reach "the stars" was driven by as much as national pride as well as show of force and muscle flexing to the rest of the world. I concur that the state has been massively important in terms of research and investment from the 50's to the 90's that enabled most of what we're enjoying today, but if the past 10-20 years are anything to go by, the paradigm has shifted from state driven innovation to private driven innovation.
  - anigbrowl 9y ago
    No. Previous post articulated a general principle which I showed to be flawed. 'Things are different now' is just moving the goalposts.
    - devuo 9y ago
      As the author of said post I disagree. Given that the original post to which I commented refers to Amazon, Google and others — entities born in mid to late 90s operating to this day — any analisys of state action vs these corporations must be done within the context of this timeframe and not before. In regards to "moving goal posts", I have not, and will not ever do such a thing, as to me a debate is not about winning anything, but clarifying points of view. If I wanted to move your own "goal posts" I would point you back 200-100 years, and talk about the Industrial Revolution, Railroad construction in the US, Telegraphs and Phones, invention of flight, among many others all but initially driven, built and financed by private money.
      - anigbrowl 9y ago
        Having been on the internet since before Linux or web browsers existed, and studied a good deal of economics and history going back to antiquity, and having grown up in a town founded 1500 years ago, you're really not telling me anything new here. I'm sorry but I disagree with your approach of making sweeping statements of economic theory but limiting them to the timeframe of a single generation. I know your original comment was not meant to be exhaustive, but I found the economic analysis superficial.

by devuo 9y ago

amelius 9y ago

It depends on the perspective of what "large" means. If "large" means "rich", then you are right. However, if "large" means "comprised of many employees", then this is not necessarily true. So perhaps a first good step is to put a limit on the number of employees. This also enforces a "modular" style of working, where companies can more easily be swapped for other companies, and more reuse of "company-modules" can happen.

resf 9y ago
An employee cap would benefit big tech companies hugely. Tech companies would receive an even greater share of investment than they currently do, as even the largest tech companies pale in comparison to say Walmart (in terms of employment) Also no politician would ever support this.

lisper 9y ago

That's true, but it's not clear which way the causality runs. If wealth were more evenly distributed, ordinary people could pool their resources to make the same investments. They can't do that now because they have no disposable income to invest.

virmundi 9y ago
At that point the pool is mirroring a large corp. while it's still in the small so to speak, it has the same ends and reaction to the same stimulus
- lisper 9y ago
  With the major difference that the ultimate decision-making power would be more widely distributed.
  - maehwasu 9y ago
    That's not necessarily a good feature.
  - virmundi 9y ago
    Maybe. Depends if they set themselves up as a co-op. They could instead essentially start as a highly focused VC. At that point the control will probably rest in the hands of the board and management.
    - lisper 9y ago
      But the investors have the power to replace the board. This is called "representative democracy" and it's widely considered, despite its flaws, a better way to govern human affairs than dictatorship or oligarchy.
      - deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
jondubois 9y ago
True, and startups seem to be where most of the innovation is happening right now. I think universities (and the Internet) do a pretty good job when it comes sharing the deep domain knowledge required to innovate.
devuo 9y ago
But people do in fact make their own small investments when they opt for one provider of a service or the other. For a multi billion dollar infrastructure project, your capacity to contribute with either 50K or 50$ would still amount to less than a drop in a bucket. For a massive multi billion infrastructure project to succeed it would still rely on either a state actor or a very large number of investors, or, as is the case I'm making, a large amount customers. If I opt for your company as my provider of a given service, and very large number of other people do too, we're enabling your company — via the pooling of our payments — for you to do further investments and improvements to your service.
- lisper 9y ago
  That's true, but it misses the point. Capitalism and democracy work best when there is competition. Monopolies -- both economic and political -- generally lead to bad outcomes. When ultimate decision-making power becomes too unevenly distributed, it becomes very difficult to prevent monopolies from forming.
  - devuo 9y ago
    I agree, but then that's why we have governments and why monopolies are all but outlawed in most democratic countries.
    - bmelton 9y ago
      I don't know about other countries, but in America, being a monopoly is not at all outlawed. The criminality associable to monopoly here is when a monopoly abuses their monopoly power. If I am the only company in America that produces widget x, I have a de facto monopoly, but I am not guilty of anything until and unless I attempt to exert my monopolistic influence to prevent competitors from taking my market share. If I am a pure monopoly, then it's possible that just running a loss-leading sale could result in antitrust violations, but if I am not a monopoly, or if I am a minority provider of widget x, then loss-leading sales are a presumptively lawful activity. Edit: I believe closeparen makes this point more precisely with his post in this same topic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14528355 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14528355
closeparen 9y ago
VCs are agents of ordinary people who have pooled their resources to make investments, just separated by many fee-taking layers of Wall Street bureaucracy. Wall Street ultimately gets its money from American workers' retirement investments (whether personal 401k and IRA accounts, or institutional pension funds).
- quadrangle 9y ago
  While totally true, there are systemic issues here. Any individual worker has little choice of what to do with their investments for retirement unless they get into taking tons of time and energy to be activist investors or go out of their way to avoid the path of least resistance and invest in unusual ways. Point is: it's not like workers are all supportive of the VC decisions or anything. It's the concentrated power of the people who manage all the funds that matters, and not the fact that a bunch of otherwise disconnected individual workers have put their money in. Of course, stuff like openinvest.co seem at least a good direction…

l5870uoo9y 9y ago

The capital requirements are generally low in the tech sector compared to traditional industry.

petra 9y ago
Not really. Search engines, Warehousing infra-structure, operating systems, compute clouds, marketing to achieve critical mass are pretty expensive.
- FullMtlAlcoholc 9y ago
  Typically, isnt the largest expense for a tech company payroll? Companies like the big 5 may be anomalies because they operate a number of their own data centers
  - l5870uoo9y 9y ago
    To my knowledge and you are exempt for expensive industrial equipment. Now you have a sitation where Whatsapp is more worth than a big global enterprise like Sony, but haven't required nowhere near the same amount of workers or capital.

cmurf 9y ago

That's not the only way. People engage voluntarily in cooperative, yet temporary agreements, to work on projects for the benefit of the whole group. Companies join in trade groups which are somewhat similar. So possibly a new class of temporary corporation, in which corporations invest, for a specific life time and goal purpose, where they can share resources and a common goal, without any one company basically railroading local, state, or national politics. Or any one company's business being disrupted means the end of that venture.

pikzen 9y ago

Yeah. We have those tiny things called governments too. You might know them for some investments such as, the US interstate highways, space flight, the Internet. It's amazing how the collective will of the people has managed all of that without forming a very large company.

akjetma 9y ago

it's not 'lack of vision and political will' that stymies government initiatives--that's some TED talk bs. and i shudder to think that we're necessarily dependent on the benevolence and 'vision' of large companies to drive society forward.

devuo 9y ago
Then what does? Most of the innovation we have witnessed and enjoy in our society for the past 20-30 years has not been driven by governmental money or agencies but by private money.
- samstave 9y ago
  Just stream of thought here: Why don't we have a "government YC" (yeah, I don't mean DARPA-like, or the other mechanisms for finding funding from the government, which requires way too much navigation f bureaucratic paper-work and hoop-jumping) - an office of the government that can allow any individual to apply for seed funding for ANY idea in ANY industry that they can see through - make the process nimble and quick. Ensure that there is infrastructure/systems to allow for accurate tracking and reporting on the spend of monies given - think an EDD card that the startup entity gets and all expenses are tracked via the transactions on the card. Integrate it with banks and other private and public sector services with credits, like compute credits from amzn/goog etc... tax services, payroll etc... And when you apply - it effectively sets-up an individual LLC in your name as the defacto entity to track your startups progress with giving you an EIN etc... Heck, this should be a simple thing to architect if everyone in the business/startup world were truly supportive of, and willing to actually be, the "innovation" unicorn they all claim to be.
- anigbrowl 9y ago
  Go read The Dictator's Handbook.
  - devuo 9y ago
    Will do, thanks for the recommendation.

mschuster91 9y ago

> and governments due to lack of vision and political will never would Governments (US and Soviet) went to the moon. The Internet would not exist without massive military (i.e. government) sponsoring. But yes, when I am looking at our governments right now, it's hard to find something as progressive as this, except that marijuana is on the rise, Macron has a 50:50 women government and invited scientists from the US to France. The other governments seem to be racing full speed in reverse for me.

skookumchuck 9y ago
> The Internet would not exist without massive military (i.e. government) sponsoring. Yes, it would be called FidoNET instead.

camillomiller 9y ago

They push society forward along THEIR agenda. That agenda can be the most open, inclusive and diverse agenda ever, but it's gonna be the agenda of a corporation nonetheless. In my ideal world, you know who should be in charge of such a push? American friends, please, breathe deeply: The State should.

TulliusCicero 9y ago
I'm largely a social democrat, but LOL if you think the government would be even a quarter as competent as Google at pushing technology forward. Just read any description from people who've worked at both normal government IT shops (really anywhere that's not 18F or the USDS) and private industry how they feel about governmental technology culture and processes. Like okay, investing in infrastructure, like putting fiber everywhere? Sure, I'm down with that. Everything else, I think the private sector has shown itself to be plenty more capable. Let's let the government stick to its strengths, shall we? Disclaimer: I work at Google
- anigbrowl 9y ago
  You're assuming our current goods and ills are somehow inherent. This is what happens when people don't study history.
- 659087 9y ago
  Luckily for the government, Google's innovation in mass surveillance helps them fill in the gaps.
- kuschku 9y ago
  > I'm largely a social democrat, but LOL if you think the government would be even a quarter as competent as Google at pushing technology forward. > Just read any description from people who've worked at both normal government IT shops (really anywhere that's not 18F or the USDS) and private industry how they feel about governmental technology culture and processes. The governments brought us MP3. (Fraunhofer is funded entirely by their own patents and the German government). The governments brought us many more technologies, standards, algorithms, etc. Alone the projects funded by the German government have brought more to the tech world than Google ever has, or ever will. Then look at the projects the US has funded. For fucks sake, the US Government gave us the Internet!

jfoutz 9y ago

Not quite sure i follow. Do you mean like self driving cars, neural networks, mapping the human genome, or perhaps the internet? I guess IC's might be a good example, but the air force was really the only buyer that could afford them. I dunno, maybe we're moving to a new model. the 20th century way seemed to be to pour massive amounts of money into research at universities, then commercialize whatever whatever happened to work out. Corporations do interesting work, but they're sooooo resistant to change, it seems like their inventions always die on the vine. Kodak digital cameras for example. Are you thinking google would be willing to risk their ad revenue for a cool new tech? Or microsoft their os/office money? or apple and phones? etc.

polishTar 9y ago
> Corporations do interesting work, but they're sooooo resistant to change, it seems like their inventions always die on the vine. Some do, others have been able to remain relevant for a very long time. Thankfully we have a societal mechanism to prune unproductive companies, it's called bankruptcy. > Are you thinking google would be willing to risk their ad revenue for a cool new tech? Or microsoft their os/office money? or apple and phones? etc. So far they have. Google for instance started its self driving car project in 2009, at the height of the recession. It would have been the easiest thing in the world to dismiss the project as wasteful spending when everybody else was tightening their belt.
- jfoutz 9y ago
  24 billion in the bank (cash, cash equivalents and marketable securities), revenue up 2 billion ~10% from 2008. So brave [1] And they of course started the project by hiring the DARPA grand challenge winners. Which, yes, corporations can refine original research, but it's very rare they try something new. And if they do try something new, it's incredibly vulnerable to being defunded. Google is exceptional, kinda. I hope they'll get more milage out of their special project than bell labs did. [1] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1288776/000119312510030774/d10k.htm https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1288776/000119312510... edit And more to the point, the kodak example is key. Kodak made money selling film. Digital cameras were a direct threat to selling film. Google can do some interesting things, but if anything useful is a direct threat to ad revenue, it'll be killed.

anigbrowl 9y ago

governments due to lack of vision and political will never would Yes, remember that time General Motors sent humans to the moon?

devuo 9y ago
Be fair, we're no longer living in the 60's, and as we all know the impetus to reach "the stars" was driven by as much as national pride as well as show of force and muscle flexing to the rest of the world. I concur that the state has been massively important in terms of research and investment from the 50's to the 90's that enabled most of what we're enjoying today, but if the past 10-20 years are anything to go by, the paradigm has shifted from state driven innovation to private driven innovation.
- anigbrowl 9y ago
  No. Previous post articulated a general principle which I showed to be flawed. 'Things are different now' is just moving the goalposts.
  - devuo 9y ago
    As the author of said post I disagree. Given that the original post to which I commented refers to Amazon, Google and others — entities born in mid to late 90s operating to this day — any analisys of state action vs these corporations must be done within the context of this timeframe and not before. In regards to "moving goal posts", I have not, and will not ever do such a thing, as to me a debate is not about winning anything, but clarifying points of view. If I wanted to move your own "goal posts" I would point you back 200-100 years, and talk about the Industrial Revolution, Railroad construction in the US, Telegraphs and Phones, invention of flight, among many others all but initially driven, built and financed by private money.
    - anigbrowl 9y ago
      Having been on the internet since before Linux or web browsers existed, and studied a good deal of economics and history going back to antiquity, and having grown up in a town founded 1500 years ago, you're really not telling me anything new here. I'm sorry but I disagree with your approach of making sweeping statements of economic theory but limiting them to the timeframe of a single generation. I know your original comment was not meant to be exhaustive, but I found the economic analysis superficial.