america isn't f****d

Legendary tech VC turned college professor, Steve Blank writes a very long and passionate blog post about why the US economy’s long-term prospects are actually quite positive, thanks to places like Silicon Valley:

The Democratization of Entrepreneurship

What’s happening is something more profound than a change in technology. What’s happening is that all the things that have been limits to startups and innovation are being removed.  At once.  Starting now.

Compressing the Product Development Cycle
In the past, the time to build a first product release was measured in months or even years as startups executed the founder’s vision of what customers wanted. This meant building every possible feature the founding team envisioned into a monolithic “release” of the product. Yet time after time, after the product shipped, startups would find that customers didn’t use or want most of the features.  The founders were simply wrong about their assumptions about customer needs. The effort that went into making all those unused features was wasted.

Today startups have begun to build products differently.  Instead of building the maximum number of features, they look to deliver a minimum feature set in the shortest period of time.  This lets them deliver a first version of the product to customers in a fraction on the time.

For products that are simply “bits” delivered over the web, a first product can be shipped in weeks rather than years.

It’s a good time to be American, smart, creative, enterprising and productive. But we already knew that.

Unsmart, uncreative, unenterprising and unproductive? Not so good. The well-paid jobs for those kind of people just aren’t there anymore. But we already knew that, too.

The cartoon above says it all…