Technology, Heal Thyself and … - Secrets of OPM | Substack

My former a16z partner Chris Dixon wrote a now-famous post talking about how the next big things in technology often start out being dismissed as “toys” – they look silly, immature relative to the current state of the art, are limited in utility, and full of security concerns or other bugs. Chris was writing about why market incumbents often get surprised – and ultimately lapped or completely wiped out – by innovations in technology (often developed by much smaller and earlier-stage technology startups). The cardinal mistake, according to Chris, is to over-train on the limitations of the technology today – it’s too slow, it’s buggy, it lacks enterprise security features or application integration capabilities, it consumes too much energy, compute power, etc. I could go on. For example, when the telephone first arrived in the late 1870s, it could carry a voice call a very short distance (about a mile or two). Western Union, then the dominant communications company in America, passed on the chance to buy it. Its customers were businesses and railroads, and the phone didn’t seem useful to either. By the standards of the day, the telephone was perceived as a toy.