Headline September 16, 2018/ '' 'TECHNO -STARTUPS- FUTURE' ''

'' 'TECHNO -STARTUPS- FUTURE' ''

SISYPHUS, KING OF Corinth, was condemned for all eternity to push a boulder up a hill, only to watch it roll down again..................

David Graeber, an anthropologist, thinks that many modern workers face the same fate today, forced to perform pointless tasks, or ''bullshit jobs'', as his new book calls them.

TREATING A MYSTERY : Over all these many years no student, from the world entire, rose, to the glorious reckoning of coming up with a great global idea for a startup.........

BIG, RICH and paranoid, today's tech giants are making life very, very complicated for startups.

The kill-zone operates in business software  ['enterprise in the lingo] as well, with the shadows of Microsoft, Amazon and Alphabet looming very, very large.

Amazon's cloud service,  Amazon Web Services  [AWS], has labelled many  startups as ''partners'', only to copy their functionality and offer them as a cheap or free service.

A giant pushing into a startup's territory, while controlling the platform that startup depends on for distribution, makes life very tricky. For example, Elastic, a data-management firm, lost sales after AWS launched a competitor, Elasticsearch, in 2015.

Even if giants did not copy startups outright, they can dent their prospects. Last year Amazon bought Whole Foods Market, a grocer, for $13.7 billion.

Blue Apron, a meal-delivery startup that was preparing to go public, was suddenly perceived as unappetizing, as expectations mounted that Amazon would push into the space.  This phenomenon is not limited to young firms :

Recently Facebook announced it was moving into online dating , causing the share price of MatchGroup, which went public in 2015, to plummet by 22% that very day.

*It has never been easy to make it as startup*.

Now the army of fearsome technology giants is larger, and operates in a wider range of areas, including online search, social media, digital advertising, virtual reality, messaging and communications, smartphones and home speakers, cloud computing, smart software, e-commerce and more.

This makes it challenging for startups to find space to break through and avoid being strapped on.

Today's giants are ''much more ruthless and introspective. They will eat their own children to live another day,'' according to Matt Ocko, a venture capitalist with Data Collective. And they are constantly scanning the horizon for incipient threats.

Startups used to be able to have several years' head start working on something novel without the giants noticing, says Aaron Levie of Box, a cloud and file-sharing service that has avoided the  kill-zone [it has a market value of around $3.8 billion].

But today startups can only get a six to 12 months lead before incumbents quickly, very quickly catch up, he says.

There are some exceptions., Airbnb, Uber, Slack and other ''unicorns'' have faced down competition from incumbents. But they are few in number and many startups have learned to set their sights on more achievable aims.

Entrepreneurs are ''thinking much earlier about which consolidator is going to buy them,'' says Larry Chu of Goodwin Proctor, a law firm.

The tech giants have been avid acquirers : Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Microsoft spent a combined $31.6 billion on acquisitions in 2017. This has led some startups to be less ambitious.

''Ninety per cent of the startups I see are built for sale, not for scale,'' says Ajay Royan of Mithril Capital, which invests in tech.

This can be enriching to founders, who can go on to start another firm or provide financing to peers with smart ideas. To the extent that such exits provide more capital to spur innovation, this is no bad thing.

The tech giants can help the firms they acquire grow more than they might have been able to on their own. For example, Facebook's acquisition of Instagram took out a would-be competitor, but -

It has thrived under the social-networking giant's sway by adopting the technical infrastructure, staff and know-how that Facebook had in place.

The Honor and Serving of the latest Operational Research on 'The future of Startups and Social-Networking giants continues.

With respectful dedication to the Students, Professors and Teachers of the world. See Ya all ''register'' on : wssciw.blogspot.com - The World Students Society and Twitter-!E-WOW! - the Ecosystem 2011:

''' Steeling Students'''

Good Night and God Bless

SAM Daily Times - the Voice of the Voiceless