âshow businessâ â bigâŚ
Itâs one thing to mimic a system thatâs truly been shown to work once. Itâs another thing to mimic the simulacrum described in theâŚ
You missed one big factor in why SV isnât good to emulate: SV is mostly âshow businessâ â big phantom valuations for vaporware, etc. SVâs startup culture is systematically absurdly prone to being taken in by BS, compared to all the places where a âtech startupâ is just called a âsmall businessâ.
Itâs one thing to mimic a system thatâs truly been shown to work once. Itâs another thing to mimic the simulacrum described in the marketing materials of a system that, like a ponzi scheme, pulls in wave upon wave of fresh meat to dash against the rocks in order to produce the raw material used to prop up a handful of names that can be passed off as âsuccess storiesâ in later brochures. Because of the enormous amount of churn and hype, itâs often hard to tell that SV has in many ways an abnormally high failure rate, with even its successes still failing to make money; after all, real success is boring and undramatic: real success is the family laundromat on the corner thatâs been running for eighty years, not the social network for dogs that gets a six billion dollar valuation on paper because the VC had the hots for one of the presenters and then crashes six months later because nobody wanted it.
By John Ohno on October 10, 2016.
[Canonical link](https://medium.com/@enkiv2/you-missed-one-big-factor-in-why- sv-isnt-good-to-emulate-sv-is-mostly-show-business-big-2f4bb38c1c7)
Exported from Medium on September 18, 2020.