Not the point of the article, but is anyone else annoyed by these "entrepreneur-sounding" ideas? I'm so sick of low-tech, solve-first-world-problem ideas and conflating that with entrepreneurship. If I were the VC, I'd tell them to get the fuck out, and it'd have nothing to do with Telcos.
You missed the point. The author was choosing startup ideas that compete with entrenched entities that are also potentially data-intensive. I don't think the ideas themselves were supposed to be judged, just that they fit a loose model of ideas that would be almost impossible to fund/execute without net neutrality.
He's right in the sense that all ideas were copying something out of big companies' playbook and were a hard sell to consumers who were sensitive to mobile data pricing.
What if the idea was around instant video conferencing with on-demand doctor or a lawyer? Would interested parties still be concerned about the (additional) cost of a data plan?
Would interested parties still be concerned about the (additional) cost
Yes. This is the whole point. The telcos' will extract rents from any profitable biz model. The more profitable, the larger the extracted rents will be. The net result is that, if people feel that the value they are creating will be expropriated by a third party on poor terms, those services will never make it beyond the cocktail napkin stage. And if...the founders are still optimistic and willing to let this happen...the VCs are not likely to play along...knowing what will predictably happen. As long as either of those two factors is in play, the economy ultimately will suffer in the sense that those services will "never happen" if people take that approach. Or, at least that's the argument if I understand correctly.
Yeah. I could have tried harder to come up with less frivolous ideas but I wrote this in about five minutes and I just went with the first ideas that were mobile bandwidth reliant I could come up with
I get why he dashed out some throwaway ideas to make the point. But yes, those business ideas seem so maddeningly trivial that I can't forward this on to non-industry people. I'm a giant fan of net neutrality and hate oligopolistic telcos deeply, but my first reaction to this was, "Well, anything that stops a gamified social Snapchat from seeing the light of day can't be all bad."
That's probably the biggest difference between you and VCs in the biz today. These ideas actually sound so legitimately like they could be funded today, and make mad bank while at it too. And that's all "normal" VCs care about, so there you have it.
I wouldn't even qualify this by saying "normal." VCs are hyper-capitalists. Other people give them money with the mandate to turn a profit...period. That's the whole job. Most of us "normal" tech folk get migraines looking at the silly crap that gets funded, but a VC's job really isn't about anything else, and couldn't be ethically, unless the people who pay into the fund wanted it that way.
The investors who do the stuff that I suppose one would call meaningful tend to be investing their own money or their friends' money, or it's a slice of a regular fund used in a way similar to corporate donations. Plenty of VCs do care about tech and meaningful endeavors, but that has to be secondary, unless they are playing with their own money.
There seems to be a lot of misconceptions about what the business of investment is, when it comes to venture capital, for some reason. I've spent enough time around the activity and the people that I can see what it is and the logic of it. I don't really like it, but then I don't like a lot of things in our culture.
