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Comment by dkyc | Hacker News Reader

I dislike the new, hyper-ambitious side of YC (also in the other new RFSs: AI, HealthCare...). Have any of the truly revolutionary inventions (like steam engine, automobile, microcomputer, internet) started out as something developed to have such an incredibly big scale, or did they merely turn out to have big implications? It's the latter, and I think it's not just a correlation, but a causation: To make something truly disruptive, it needs to be new, and it is very unlikely to come up with something that is new while at the same time aiming to solve a problem that everybody can agree on (like let's build one million jobs, let's build AI, let's fix healthcare etc). That's usually the reason government projects fail, and the reason startups succeed, and having YC now focusing on stuff with the "could-this-be-a-big-company"-shaded glasses is a 180° turn from their original heritage.

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you will be happy to hear that 90% of the companies we fund still get mocked on HN and elsewhere for "being small".

certainly agree that's usually the way to get huge. and even the "hyper-ambitious" companies we fund have to start with going after a very small market--in fact, their first products mostly sound like toys, and that's a feature not a bug.

it's a mistake to build a startup that looks like a huge government project. it's also a mistake to not think about how to be a huge company one day. in fact, i remember one of the first meetings i ever had with airbnb. i told them how i thought that this silly-seeming thing they were doing could one day change the way most people travel. i think it seemed crazy even to them at the time.

Indeed, most of the yc-funded startups still focus on building practical stuff. But isn't the airbnb example showing that it works to "not think about how to be a huge company one day"? I mean, if the size of their idea (changing the way most people travel) was not clear to them at the time, and yet they've succeeded (or are on their way to do so), it obviously worked out.

Have any of the truly revolutionary inventions (like steam engine, automobile, microcomputer, internet) started out as something developed to have such an incredibly big scale, or did they merely turn out to have big implications?

Apparently, yes. Economic historians today argue that, throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth century, Enlightment-era notions such as "useful knowledge" and the Baconian concern with the "big scale" societal impact of scientific and technological work played a crucial role in "re-focusing" Europe's intellectual capital, as Joel Mokyr puts it [1]. In the twentieth century, seminal institutions like the OSRD, Bell Labs or (the old) DARPA --which as you know were behind most of the "truly revolutionary" inventions of the century-- had quite explicit utilitarian, "hyper-ambitious" mandates in their charters as directives --see for instance the writings of Vannevar Bush [2]. The development of modern organic chemistry and pharmacology was also quite explicitly motivated by tackling big societal problems, with many X-prize style prestigious awards for novel syntheses of crucial interest. And even the development of the internal combustion engine automobile by Benz [3] was quite explicitly motivated by his obsession to make it reliable and practical enough to fully supersede horse carriages and liberate cities from the iniquities of manure, which at the time was as "big scale thinking" as it gets.

Once you expand your perspective beyond the common troupes and political biases of the past 20-30 years, things start looking a bit different.

[1] http://www.crei.cat/conferences/RandD_and_Innovation_in_the_...

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vannevar_Bush

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Benz

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