<story><title>Jerry Neumann: Resignation Letter</title><url>https://reactionwheel.net/2024/09/resignation-letter.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>gwern</author><text>&amp;gt; So why quit? Three reasons. First, I’ve felt for a few years now that the startups I’m seeing don’t seem so much like progress as just shopkeeping. This isn’t a dig: there’s money to be made razoring a thin slice off a huge market, and there’s certainly less risk in that than there is building a market from scratch. But it’s just not that interesting. The excitement I had as a 14-year old in 1979 trying to understand everything there was to know about computers, because this was something that could radically improve people’s lives, I just don’t get anymore. And not because people’s lives, the people who have access to the tech, aren’t better, I think they are (although this, of course, has not been as unalloyed as I imagined as a 14-year old.) But because I think the tech is no longer improving lives, it’s just maintaining the current status quo. It just feels, I don’t know, done.&lt;p&gt;This is remarkable to me because I would say that right now is one of the most exciting times to invest ever. We are in one of the new platforms: VC hasn&amp;#x27;t been so interesting to me since ~2013, when cryptocurrency offered a whole new greenfield, or 2008, when the iPhone changed everything for mobile, or ~1998, when the WWW began to mature enough to allow greenfield everything. (With an honorable mention to VR - still the new platform of the future...) Just think about LLMs and programming! Programming hasn&amp;#x27;t been about to change this much, this fundamentally, since the invention of networks or timesharing, perhaps. How can you look at this and write it all off as &amp;#x27;shopkeeping&amp;#x27; with no &amp;#x27;building a market from scratch&amp;#x27; and &amp;#x27;just not that interesting&amp;#x27;?&lt;p&gt;I think maybe the real reason is the next one: they&amp;#x27;re just older, and no longer have the gumption and energy to try to dive into the Shiny New Thing, and it&amp;#x27;s time to hang up their hat and call it a day, leaving it to the next generation.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Earw0rm</author><text>I&amp;#x27;ll give you 1998 (although it really started to pick up momentum a couple of years earlier - that was just the point on the exponential curve where it began to get noticed).&lt;p&gt;And I&amp;#x27;ll give you 2008, although while it&amp;#x27;s partly about the hardware, it&amp;#x27;s also about the pervasive and universal internet, the end of online as a separate &amp;quot;place&amp;quot; and just becoming part of the fabric of day-to-day life.&lt;p&gt;2013 and crypto, though? Sure, it&amp;#x27;s made a few (or maybe not so few) people very rich. In terms of day-to-day functionality though, NFTs were empty hype, and the only vaguely useful activity I&amp;#x27;ve seen it used for was probably illegal (circumventing blocks in the global financial system) even if not necessarily immoral.</text></comment>
<story><title>Jerry Neumann: Resignation Letter</title><url>https://reactionwheel.net/2024/09/resignation-letter.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>gwern</author><text>&amp;gt; So why quit? Three reasons. First, I’ve felt for a few years now that the startups I’m seeing don’t seem so much like progress as just shopkeeping. This isn’t a dig: there’s money to be made razoring a thin slice off a huge market, and there’s certainly less risk in that than there is building a market from scratch. But it’s just not that interesting. The excitement I had as a 14-year old in 1979 trying to understand everything there was to know about computers, because this was something that could radically improve people’s lives, I just don’t get anymore. And not because people’s lives, the people who have access to the tech, aren’t better, I think they are (although this, of course, has not been as unalloyed as I imagined as a 14-year old.) But because I think the tech is no longer improving lives, it’s just maintaining the current status quo. It just feels, I don’t know, done.&lt;p&gt;This is remarkable to me because I would say that right now is one of the most exciting times to invest ever. We are in one of the new platforms: VC hasn&amp;#x27;t been so interesting to me since ~2013, when cryptocurrency offered a whole new greenfield, or 2008, when the iPhone changed everything for mobile, or ~1998, when the WWW began to mature enough to allow greenfield everything. (With an honorable mention to VR - still the new platform of the future...) Just think about LLMs and programming! Programming hasn&amp;#x27;t been about to change this much, this fundamentally, since the invention of networks or timesharing, perhaps. How can you look at this and write it all off as &amp;#x27;shopkeeping&amp;#x27; with no &amp;#x27;building a market from scratch&amp;#x27; and &amp;#x27;just not that interesting&amp;#x27;?&lt;p&gt;I think maybe the real reason is the next one: they&amp;#x27;re just older, and no longer have the gumption and energy to try to dive into the Shiny New Thing, and it&amp;#x27;s time to hang up their hat and call it a day, leaving it to the next generation.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>programjames</author><text>But most of the AI startups &lt;i&gt;are&lt;/i&gt; just razoring a thin slice off a huge market. They&amp;#x27;re making robo-receptionists for the doctor&amp;#x27;s office, or integrating LLMs into your IDE. Very few are building new markets from scratch, like photonic neural networks or brain-computer interfaces.</text></comment>