Venkatesh Rao ☀️
@vgr
Heh, I seem to have hit a bit of a nerve with my comments on hustleporn and positivity here last night To add to my take, the thing that bothers me is how like 2015 it seems, like we've learned nothing in the interim. By contrast, in previous tech cycles, it felt like archetypes evolved a bit each time.
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Venkatesh Rao ☀️
@vgr
Entrepreneurs fit the Shaw quote: "“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” But each generation tends to attract a slightly different species of "unreasonable person"
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Venkatesh Rao ☀️
@vgr
I think entrepreneurs can be thought of as "vintages" adapted to their times. The 1994, 2000, 2007, and 2014 vintages were all subtly different vintages of unreasonable, and in each case evolution was towards greater sophistication and gamesmanship. The 2021 vintage feels too close to 2014 and maladapted to its time.
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Venkatesh Rao ☀️
@vgr
Social media and VC blogging created a kind of weird "tribe" out of entrepreneurs that really shouldn't exist. Especially not a tribe that goes around calling itself "contrarian" and "individualist" and "heretic" with single-voiced collective homogeneity. I think tribal homogeneity is a bad thing for entrepreneurship.
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Venkatesh Rao ☀️
@vgr
I suspect why the evolutionary vigor of entrepreneurs as a clade has flagged is precisely this tribalization in the early 2010s. I wrote a 3-parter back in 2011 or so called Entrepreneurs are the New Labor that some entrepreneurs really loved and some VCs really hated. But that labor-like homogenization was the start
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Venkatesh Rao ☀️
@vgr
Interesting entrepreneurs tend to not flock together so much. That's a wantapreneur tendency, and wantapreneurs as a class didn't really exist until social media made it very cheap for them to exist -- signaling entrepreneurial activities proved more lucrative than actually pursuing them.
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