“After a few months, it became apparent to both of us (Marc Andreessen) that AOL saw itself as more of a media company than a technology company.”

Following that, Ben and Marc moved to found Loudcloud the first cloud computing business, as detailed in his book The Hard Thing About Hard Things.

Startups are hunted by a specter, it is that of wasted resources, with more than 90% of startups failing during the first two years, the only possible outcome of this is time & wasted resources. We’ve led to believe in myths such as disruptive innovation & failing fast, this, however, has not to be the case. Just imagine the fate of a species with a survivor rate as low, they’ll be doomed pretty quickly.

As with every manifesto, this is a clash between two classes. The inability to communicate effectively between technical and non-technical people brings waste in terms of time and money. Solutions have been proposed, in particular, YCombinator has a great framework to assess a product’s viability: build a product people want, do things that do not scale, talk early and often to your users & make a profit as soon as possible.

Photo by Sandy Millar on Unsplash

This is not enough, the technical problem has not yet been framed less solved. Technology is fragmented, and at the core of the issue to communicate effectively lies the inability to prove different solutions. Because of vague concepts as “estimates”, “technical debt”, “scalability” etc. We’ve lost the possibility to evaluate and assess how best to achieve a product’s goal.

One of the most common requests I’ve received in my career is to build Admin or back-office portals, the amount of effort destined to this side-requirement for me is troublesome. Instead of spending time working on the core aspect of the business, where startups can bring the most value, we end up building interfaces to databases in a particular technology again & again.

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