Of all the pop culture beefs going on at the time of this writing (Meek vs. Drake, BoB vs. Neil deGrasse Tyson, Trump vs. Everyone), my favorite is now Tim O’Reilly vs. Paul Graham on income inequality.
When a startup doesn’t have an underlying business model that will eventually produce real revenues and profits, and the only way for its founders to get rich is to sell to another company or to investors, you have to ask yourself whether that startup is really just a financial instrument, not that dissimilar to the CDOs of the 2008 financial crisis — a way of extracting value from the economy without actually creating it.
This has always bugged me in particular. So few startups have an idea beyond "get smart people together, maybe make something, hope that selling the team ends up profitable". We need a much better word for "speculative technology-focused company funded by speculation".
