Time, compressed
A quick note: I didn’t send anything out last week, but I have lots of stuff to share so expect another short message later this week!
A couple years ago, I slugged through the 1,000+ pages of 1Q84. In the novel, the protagonist enters a parallel existence (1?84), where everything appears to be identical to her life in 1984 except for a few very minor details. For example, in 1984, policemen carried revolvers, while in 1Q84, they carried automatic weapons. She spends the remaining 995 pages investigating these differences and figuring out a way to get back to 1984.
I remember the first part of the novel very vividly. When she noticed the new weapons in 1Q84, she asked everyone she met when this change was made. She ran to the library to check the news reels (this is pre-Google days) to see if she had missed an important announcement. Of course, she never found any evidence of this change because in 1Q84, officers always carried automatic weapons. What she felt — this feeling of “how did I miss such a big thing?” — is what I felt this week, only, I wasn’t looking up revolvers, I was looking up Softbank’s stock price.
If you are even somewhat adjacent to news lately, you’ve probably heard that Softbank is not doing so hot. There’s the WeWork thing, the Wag thing, the Zume thing, the Oyo thing, and the Brandless thing. Lately, Softbank has been piling up more L’s than a Lululemon store in Santa Monica. Yet, Softbank’s stock price is up 27% in the past 3 months.
What gives? How is it that the news we read is not connected to the real world? Here’s another example. I’ve been reading about our impending recession throughout 2019 with searches for “recession” peaking around August last year.
Yet, despite recession fears, dueling tariffs, and the coronavirus, the stock market keeps going up and up. In fact, if you had sold your stocks in August when the recession fears was at its zenith, you would have missed out on more than 10% in market gains from the past 6 months.
This is all to say — if you rely solely on news for information, you are likely to have a distorted view of the world.
Right now, a similar thing is happening in tech. Externally, things are not looking so great. There are inflated private valuations, recent IPOs that tanked, and the whole Iowa caucus thing that almost ruined our democracy. Still, I would argue that there’s never been a better time to join a tech startup.
I feel weird defending startups. My dad, a chef, has never had to defend Chinese food. But tech has such an outsized impact on our lives today that when I talk to people outside San Francisco, I want to explain why I am working at a startup and why they should too. Many people I talk to misunderstand how it all works. Usually, they mention the money (which is true), the ping-pong tables (who has these anymore?), or the lax, no dress-code culture (which everyone else should adopt). But, these are not why startups exist, and not why people should risk their careers working at them.
The most valuable thing in life is time. Startups, simply, is time, compressed. Startups compress time in two ways — by reducing time to market (thereby accelerating benefits to consumers), and by reducing your time to learnings.
First, time to market.
Sure, over the course of several decades, Blockbuster might have figured out how to put videos online, build a $5.5 billion dollar subscription business, and become the biggest studio in the world, but it took Netflix’s emergence to kick things into high gear. Now, a new streaming service is launched (seemingly) every week. Blockbuster charged $4.99 for a 3 day rental. You can stream Netflix for $9 a month. Tech has created so much consumer surplus over the past decade that some economists attribute historically low inflation rates to the popularity of Amazon.
Let’s say you don’t care about impact to society (and to be fair, tech monopolies, like all monopolies, are destructive forces), you should still join a startup for personal reasons.
Generally, there are 2 ways to manage a career — the slow and steady way of working diligently over many years, compounding gains slowly, and the startup way of building up and destroying your career many times over the course of your life. The slow and steady way is tried and true, and many awesome professionals like lawyers and physicians operate in this manner to great success. It’s a cliche, but startups are like rocket ships and not the good SpaceX ones either; they are more like the Soviet ones with the pigs that never came back to Earth. The default is a crash.
But, startups also offer the fastest path to responsibilities (and thus, learnings). Some jobs require years of interning before doing “something real”. What if, after many years, you realize that you don’t actually like doing that thing? At startups, you know quickly. Yesterday, I integrated FullStory into our product. To do so, I had to get access to Google Tag Manager and put a code snippet on our production site. Should I have gotten admin access to something I don’t understand? Should I be adding tracking code to our site without telling anyone? Should I be signing up for a free trial without knowing if we have budget to pay for it? My hands started sweating. I got confused a few times. I almost asked a developer for help. Ultimately, everything was up and running smoothly within 30 minutes, and I learned a ton.
I am not writing this to tell you what to do. I believe both paths are valid, and in general, I think we spend too much time convincing ourselves that the other side is wrong. I merely want to assert that we are not yet at “peak tech” (despite the bad news), and that there are still lots of cool tech startups working on meaningful things.
Hope you find this to be inspiring! Incidentally, if you are curious about 1Q84, I recommend Kafka on the Shore instead. It’s shorter and there are more cats.