I find this post to be a little bit uninformative. Sam is making the argument that the most successful companies are those that bridge the physical and digital world and increase a human's efficiency to complete a task. The startups that do best are those that focus on this.

This seems like a bit of a trivial statement in my mind. Is this not what most startups are trying to do? Solving an inefficiency in the world.

Before the last five years, it has been difficult for PG's definition of startups to focus on the physical world, because of our discomfort with putting parts of our physical world online. Most successful startups up until now have helped build up an infrastructure that has allowed new startups to emerge that tackle physical problems.

I.E. Uber required Apple to develop the iPhone and a lot of startups rely on Heroku and Parse as a service.

I really enjoy Sam's writing, and I was excited for a post dealing with the advent of hardware startups with the success of 3D-printing. I didn't find this post to be up to par with some of his other posts.