A Founder’s Exponential Toolset: Wright’s Law, Moore’s Law, & More
nfx.com
nfx.com
There is no kink in an exponential curve, if you think there is, obviously you don't understand exponentials.
In the real world, there are S curves, when the finite limits interact and overpower the exponential... those are the ones that determine who makes large amounts of money, and who doesn't. You need to time your ride along the curve such that your organization is firmly on top at that time, the use the resources gained to maintain a monopoly, and thus real profit.
(The one thing Econ 101 firmly implanted in my brain is that the only way to make sustainable profits in a free market is to build and defend a monopoly, otherwise you're always struggling to keep up with competitors)
Otherwise the only other thing I learned is that there is an organization of venture capitalists called NfX who have some strange ideas to peddle, and sounds like a cult.
The difference is simply ROI. Keeping up with a growing market is much easier than trying to grow at the expense of competitors in a giant stagnant market.
The author's point about kink is about opportunity. When does a technology cross a performance boundary and then the Principle of Competitive Exclusion comes into effect. That point is kinda kinky, maybe not in performance but in demand.
The OP was not pointing out that exponentials are C^infinity, they were pointing out that d/dt e^t = e^t no matter how many times you differentiate, meaning that the curve is "kinking upwards" at all orders in the same way.
But we can experience a shift - either the presentation of opportunity or fundamental reflection in some metric we can measure.
Take one example: in 2008, the largest firms in the world (by market cap) were oil companies, car firms, telcos, conglomerates and banks. By 2016, it was mostly tech companies (and even more so today).
That's so not true. One of the most fragmented sector of the economy is law and tax professionals.
It's not uncommon to hear about lawyers with a net worth 20m or more. Some up to 500m
There are many ways to skin a cat.
Another being real estate. People on here make fun of Trump because as a businessman he's "small potato", I don't know if it's political ideology but regardless of where you stand politically people here are implying that they'd pass on a 4B net worth.
Same for the European businessmen, which are perceived as small. There real-estate is even more prevalent than the US.
Seems that for HN if you are not Zuckerberg or Gates you are a nobody, with all due respect they are optimizing for the component that is visible which is entrepreneurial accomplishment and that is world class great.
The invisible component which you don't get to see is world class poor (social life and leisure).
I appreciate that you are possibly referring directly to your quoted comment about Econ 101, but on HN the reason Zuckerberg, Gates, et al are worshipped, among many others, is not because they are rich, but because they have been very successful at bringing their vision of the future to life, and having an outsized impact on society.
I suspect for many, Brian Chesky is just as well regarded as Zuck. Hell, Tim Berners-Lee probably is more respected here than anybody on the Forbes 100 list!
So did Hugh Hefner and Donald Trump but they are considered "small potato"
I was thinking in terms of fungible commodities. There are of course situations where the barriers to entry are so prohibitive that natural monopolies occur.
How can it be a monopoly? There are millions of them!
The key issue is at what point does the technology progress to a point where important things that previously weren't viable suddenly become so. The way in which the technology progresses to that point is key, but being exponential or not is not really relevant.
Things don't have to be 'exponential' to be important. Printing press, wheel being two other good examples. Square-rigged sails as well!
However, a number of aspects of our economies are not sufficiently configured to enable a kind of phase change in interactions between entities in our economies. And one of those is enabling the rapid development of a whole suite of technologies (outside traditional tech), and those technologies good well be candidates for general purpose technologies, which in turn maginifies the impacts they might have.
Completely applaud any effort to step back and examine these effects. We do need better ways of thinking about how technology interacts with economics and, I think now especially, geopolitics given current challenges.